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Tuesday, Oct 14, 2008
Laurie Gough's "Kite Strings of the Southern Cross" poignantly depicts the pleasures and perils of wanderlust.
May 5, 1999 | I am sipping a cafi au lait at a sun-dappled sidewalk cafe in San Francisco, listening to the wind play the trees and children laugh in the pocket park across the street, and reading a book that feels like wanderlust incarnate. The book is "Kite Strings of the Southern Cross," by Laurie Gough, and it's a stirring song of the pleasures and possibilities -- and perils, too -- of the open road.
"Kite Strings" is notable partly because it represents a heartening departure for Travelers' Tales Inc., the company that heretofore has focused on publishing literary anthologies organized by country or theme ("Travelers' Tales: A Woman's World," for instance, or "Travelers' Tales: Japan," which I co-edited). With "Kite Strings," Travelers' Tales has embarked on a new venture to publish single-author travel books that embody the same literary excellence and adventurous spirit as their anthologies.
According to co-founder and co-editor Larry Habegger, the new series -- which the company is calling Footsteps: The Soul of Travel -- "gives us the platform to publish more and longer works from the talented writers we've discovered in producing our anthologies. We plan to publish books where writers explore their inner and outer worlds and are transformed through their experiences -- in other words, grow spiritually through travel. Future books will include new works by established writers and selected reprints of books whose time has come, again."
"Kite Strings," which was originally published in Canada last year under the title "Island of the Human Heart," is a happy vessel with which to launch this series. It's a densely sensual and poetic, multi-layered narrative centered around a young wanderer's temporary residence on the isolated and apparently idyllic Fijian island of Taveuni.
One of the almost nightly rituals of Taveuni life -- celebrated by residents and lucky visitors alike -- is to drink kava and tell stories around a campfire. Using this storytelling rite as a structural vehicle, Gough interweaves chapters about her ever-deepening life on the island with tales from her previous wanderings around the world -- in Hawaii, Bali, New Zealand, North America, Morocco, Malaysia, Australia and Italy.
Gough is an impressionable traveler, constantly falling into -- and sometimes out of -- love with the people, places and cultures she encounters. Happily, she is blessed with the traveler's essential qualities: a sense of adventure, innocence, vulnerability and passion. Whether she is stumbling on an end-
One of the greatest gifts of Gough's work is its sensual celebration of the world, as in this description of her adopted home on Taveuni, a campground called Buvu Beach: "Heaven owns real estate on Buvu Beach ... The campground is shaded by towering and twisted trees which drop down leaves large enough to hide overfed cats. Coconut palms, mango trees, ferns, and bamboo shoots jump up everywhere to join the lush green picnic of it all. But it's the flower blossoms that lure people inside. The smells they emit refuse to be shunned. Scent-drenched, the blossoms fill your nostrils, swarm the cracks of your memory until you're inhaling more than flowers. You're inhaling echoes of how the world once was."
In this way, ever attentive to the nuances of physical and philosophical sense, Gough celebrates music, mountains and motorcycles, sunsets and moonrises, fresh fruit and friendship, and the way the huge Fijian women float on the sea at daybreak, stretching out their arms and legs so that they look like fading stars, or starfish, linking the depths of the ocean to the far reaches of the sky.
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