I am struggling a bit with this review, as this book was very different from my expectation. Sometimes that is a good thing... but not this time.I usually find winners of the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award excellent. This book won in 2003. For me however this is not a travel book. In this book travel is the least important element. America is just a setting, only what is seen out the train window when the author breaks eye contact with her fellow passengers, or sits alone in reflection. This book is much more a memoir, and a series of retold aspects of other peoples stories. Often the memoir and the passengers tale link, sometimes they are more random. The train, other than the description of the conditions of the smoking carriage, simply forms a part of the backdrop.For me, it doesn't help that the theme of the whole book is a glorification of smoking. Almost exclusively, the authors interaction on the train is in the smokers carriage. The author loves smoking - always has, and always will. She describes is with more passion than any other element of this book. It does nothing for me, and the continual describing of it eventually stirs disgust in me. Normally, I can ignore it - you know - up to her, doing that damage to herself in her own time, no issue to me. But it is just so central to this book...So for travel, 1 out of 5; as a memoir (and don't get me wrong, some of it is quite interesting), 3 out of 5; and for the telling of other peoples stories, 2 out of 5. Just not loving it the way many of the other reviewers seem to. Overall, that lands it at 2 stars.
Diski is a very self-absorbed writer but her reflections on her life and her interactions (and worries about her interactions) with others are well worth reading, often chiming with and elucidating one's own feelings. Her reserve breaks down when she combines the anonimity of train travel in a foreign country with the shared sin of being a smoker amongst (when she can manage it) other smokers. She builds a handsome collection of personal vignettes from her fellow travellers, usually provoking thoughts about her own complicated and unusual past, especially her childhood and teenage years. While the book scarcely qualifies as a travel book, the journey gives it both momentum and a framework onto which Diski can hang her stories.
Do You like book Stranger On A Train (2015)?
Mid 3. The author undertakes a journey to discover what it felt like to have no real destination in mind and whether true solitude was possible with no real anticipation of arriving somewhere. This self-confessed loner recounts her memorable encounters aboard a cargo ship bound for America, and then on a circuitous journey by Amtrak across the States. Yet, this is no simple travelogue, as Diski relates her experience to memoirs of her childhood and adolescence from a broken home, and confinement to a mental institution. At times, her prose is majestic, her shared experiences of the ostracised smoking community amusing, and her personal revelations gripping. Yet, the book shares the author's journey in not reaching an end-point, thereby leaving a sense of ultimate minor disappointment.
—Steve
Author Jenny Diski, for reasons best known to herself, decides to tour the circumference of America (or more or less; there s a big gap in the west coast) by train. But this isn t a travel book; it s mainly an account of the people she meets on these trains mostly in the smoking carriages, and they re mostly people the rest of us would go out of our way to avoid partly a reflection on the train service itself, where delays of up to half a day are not only not impossible but are almost expected, and, here and there, an introspective account of her early, troubled and abuse-ridden years. I would actually have preferred a travel book. My mistake.
—Hilary
