Edition: U.S. / Global


Published: December 7, 2003
(Page 2 of 2)

He meets the heroes struggling to preserve the speech that (in most cases) they grew up with -- men and women who play the role in his book that the international representatives of Doctors Without Borders do in other current travel literature. But Abley is also aware that heroism can turn into fanaticism. He ferrets out the reasons (not always as obvious as you might think) that language is central to the identities of these emergency rescuers, and he tracks their strategies -- some potent, some depressingly ineffectual -- for getting foundering languages back up on their feet.

Much of the travel literature that crossed my desk dealt with places most of us aren't that eager to visit. The 2003 edition of THE BEST AMERICAN TRAVEL WRITING (Houghton Mifflin, paper, $13) is edited this year by Ian Frazier (the series editor is Jason Wilson) according to methods that Frazier, in his introduction, calls ''feckless and informal'' but that impressed me as canny and strategic. The collection includes essays on Afghanistan (Scott Carrier's and Andrew Solomon's different takes on the aftermath of the war), the Congo Republic (Peter Canby sweating through the jungle with a tick lodged inside his nose), the Arctic (Lawrence Millman stranded in the cold) and Wilmington, Del. (Hank Stuever dogging the credit-card industry that's devouring him, and millions of others). Though there's lighter-hearted writing too (Rebecca Barry and her father on a steam-train tour of Cuba, Steven Rinella happily jigging for squid in Seattle), a thunderhead of ecological doom lowers over most of the volume.

The final entry, on Southern California's poisoned Salton Sea, is emblematic. The nightmarishly polluted New River feeds into the Salton Sea from its source in Mexico, and William T. Vollmann got the deranged idea of navigating the river on an inflatable raft. He found himself afloat on water of ''a rich neon lime'' and walloped with ''whiffs of sewage and carrion. . . . From the shore came a sickening sweet stench of rotting animals, and I soon had a sore throat and my eyes began to sting.'' Though Vollmann's exploit may seem pathological, he brings home the horror of the place, one of many horrors in this finely written collection.

Vollmann and Frazier, Morris and Matthiessen are old pros, but travel literature has always served an additional purpose: it gives young writers a subject when they're not yet sure what their own subject is going to be. Hence Robert Tewdwr Moss's CLEOPATRA'S WEDDING PRESENT: Travels Through Syria (University of Wisconsin, $24.95). Tewdwr Moss was a promising literary journalist on the London scene, and his portrait of Syria is multihued and intensely romantic -- all the more romantic in retrospect, because he was murdered on Aug. 24, 1996, the day after he finished writing his book. He was just 34.

But romantic doesn't mean blinkered. The poverty and decay of the country repel him, and the paranoid police state of Hafez al-Assad disgusts him. The food bores him. The men, though -- the young men captivate him. His affair with a Palestinian ex-commando (''detached, savage, brooding, burned out'') doesn't take up many pages, but it forms the emotional core of the book. Dark and good-looking, Tewdwr Moss was an enterprising cruiser, with the cruiser's equal parts of recklessness and coldness: game for the opportunity and ready to extricate himself as soon as prudence dictated. That's also the definition of the professional traveler. But Tewdwr Moss is cold only around the edges. His affection for Syria and the Syrians isn't feigned, and he did enough homework to assemble an absorbing and entertaining, if insubstantial, portrait of the land.

Insubstantial, at least, compared with another new book that has its roots in the same ambitious-young-writer-looking-for-a-subject impulse. Tom Bissell spent seven months in the mid-1990's as a Peace Corps volunteer in Uzbekistan before suffering a minor nervous breakdown and bolting. But Uzbekistan had gotten under his skin, and when he came to write CHASING THE SEA (Pantheon, $24.95), he steeped himself in scholarship about Central Asia. His Peace Corps training had even left him with serviceable Uzbek, though on most of his return trip, in 2001, he traveled with a translator, who becomes a major character in his story. Bissell's book, like Tewdwr Moss's, is the record of a trip that lasted only a few weeks, yet it's written with such panache and laden with so much information that it rises to real seriousness.

The book is packed with asides on Uzbek history (Genghis Khan, Tamerlane) and politics (the loathsome authoritarian rule of Islam Karimov) -- if anything, it's a bit too packed. The place where Bissell's reach most exceeds his grasp is in evaluating his readers' patience: though the writing never flags, my attention did. And while the book moves along as deftly as a novel, it ends with a long, bleak coda on the Aral Sea ecological catastrophe that leaves the major characters behind. This material is gripping and upsetting, but I suspect it could have been shaped to better effect -- not that I have any notion how. And I have to be careful, since Bissell's combination of crack-up wit, wild ambition and preposterous youth -- he isn't 30 yet -- makes it tempting to chip away at his achievement. But his book easily withstands nitpicking. If ''Chasing the Sea'' isn't quite brilliant, it's obvious that something he writes is going to be.

Bissell notes that ''the Peace Corps attracts more larval writers than any postbaccalaureate option save for our infinite master of fine arts programs.'' Sarah Erdman, the author of NINE HILLS TO NAMBONKAHA: Two Years in the Heart of an African Village (Holt, $23), was another Peace Corps volunteer, but, unlike Tewdwr Moss and Bissell, she spent a sustained chunk of time in the place she's writing about. If her book is more earnest, less coruscating, less eager to K.O. the reader than theirs, it's wonderful in a way that theirs can't touch.

The chronicle of a young woman determined to bring better health education and care to an Ivory Coast village that doesn't even have electricity is potentially deadly, but Erdman's irrepressibility lofts you along. She had her work cut out for her in a town where lingering animism (layered atop Islam) presented her with a continuing hurdle: if you believe that disease is the work of malignant spirits, you might not pay much attention to exhortations about improving your household sanitation. But Erdman was working with people who truly wanted to lift themselves up, and the basis of her rapport with them is evident: she liked them, and they liked her.

Nambonkaha isn't my idea of a vacation spot, but when Erdman asks herself, at the end, ''Why am I leaving? Why do you trade in happiness for uncertainty? What makes you give up a good thing?'' it never occurred to me that she might be pursuing a literary effect with those questions. I envied her happiness.

Craig Seligman's ''Sontag and Kael'' will be published in May.