Friday, Sep 5, 2008
This world-wanderer masterfully tracks the intricacies of the dance of East and West.
Sep 15, 1999 | I am reading at a rooftop cafe surrounded by trim wooden buildings. To my right, wind chimes tinkle in the late morning breeze; in front of me, brilliant orange and purple flowers climb a wooden lattice; around me, travelers swap tales in French and German. The waitress brings a waffle topped with fruit and a pot of English breakfast tea, and I sip and scribble and study the clouds massed on the horizon.
I began the morning in Lhasa, then traveled to Ubud and Kathmandu; just now I've entered Chiang Mai. What's this, you're thinking, magic mushrooms in that waffle?
No, I'm just riding the magic carpet of Pico Iyer's "Video Night in Kathmandu," his bright and densely woven chronicle of Asian travels in the mid-1980s.
Iyer has written five books -- including "The Lady and the Monk," his crystalline account of a year in Japan; the novel "Cuba and the Night"; and two collections of essays and articles, "Falling Off the Map" and "Tropical Classical." All of them astonish, delight and inform. But today I am rereading "Video Night," Iyer's first book, because the perceptions are so extraordinarily fresh -- and because they remind me, on this gray, breezy, autumnal morning, of the September day 22 years ago when I landed, heart in my throat, in Asia for the first time.
Iyer's magical mystery tour de force begins in Bali, then roams through Tibet, Nepal, China, the Philippines, Burma, Hong Kong, India, Thailand and Japan. Asia in the mid-1980s was not so different from the Asia I visited in the late 1970s, and so reading these essays is like roaming that world all over again -- heedless, unfettered, without map or plan but just a desire to see and to live anew. By the time of Iyer's travels, the process of cultural crossbreeding had accelerated, to be sure, but his words bring vividly back to me the Asia I was discovering: a place of prayer flags and dusty squares, monks and mendicants, temples and brothels, epiphanies and perplexities, banana pancake breakfasts and Lonely Planet nights.
Iyer's portraits of these places offer much to admire and emulate. He approaches the world with a fresh heart and wide open eyes. He looks closely and doesn't simply describe what he sees, but constantly analyzes it, trying to understand what things mean and where they fit in the puzzle of the whole. As a traveler, I especially love his openness, gentleness, kindness and vulnerability. As a writer, I love the precision and music of his prose and his witty, insight-compacting turns of phrase. As a fellow pilgrim, I love his relentless attempts to understand his experiences and encounters and his constant questioning of his own assertions and explanations, his ongoing quest for some deeper truth.
Most of all, I love how Iyer hones in on the nuances of cultural interaction. As a child of Indian parents raised in the United States and schooled in England, Iyer is no doubt especially attuned to the way cultures interact. With extraordinary empathy and insight, he limns how cultures collide, carom and cohabit on the road -- how a dance of dreams, desires and preconceptions ensues every time a visitor and a local meet. A brave new world is being shaped in all these intercultural encounters, Iyer knows, and better than any other writer I have read, he portrays the intricately intersecting influences of this world -- neither wholly East nor wholly West but something wholly new.
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