#1. Neither Here Nor There: Travels in Europe by Bill Bryson 3 Stars
2012: What the hell was I doing in Lichtenstein reading about a guy in Lichtenstein?
The obvious question is why the hell did I go to Lichtenstein. People in Lichtenstein asked me that one. They’d find out that my 14 year old daughter and I were working our way through the least glamorous cities in Europe and a look of concern would come over them. Then they’d ask, ‘Did you not know about Paris? Paris is way nicer than it is here. Why not go there?’
It was a fair question but the one I keep asking myself eleven years later is about the book I read on that trip. In Neither Here Nor There, Bill Bryson does go to Paris but also to cities like Hammerfest and Gothenburg, and yes, the country of Liechtenstein, though I don’t know which cities in Lichtenstein because, well, there really aren’t any.
Neither Here Nor There isn’t a guidebook. There are no suggestions about things to do in Liechtenstein because, again, there aren’t any. The book isn’t especially entertaining either. It’s the sort of thing that generates absent minded smiles along with an awareness that the writing could be filed under the heading of ‘humor’ without ever producing actual laughter.*
*Books where cranky old white guys complained a lot really were in style for a while. Writers like Art Buchwald, Andy Rooney and Bryson made a living portraying themselves as frustrated voices of sanity in a world that would be so much better if everyone just listened to them. It’s hard not to suspect they all would have been less popular had they been born a bit later.
So, what the hell was I doing in Lichtenstein reading about a guy who went to Lichtenstein?
The answer, I think, is that I wanted a glass to pour all the water in. There’s a line in a song from Stephen Sondheim’s Into The Woods: ‘if life were only moments/Then you’d never know you’d had one.’ A life of ‘only moments’ is like pouring water onto a table instead of a glass. It’s still water but it lacks form and meaning. I read this book while I was living it because I wanted my trip to form a narrative.
Traveling with your kid when they’ve started not being a kid anymore makes you see the ways in which you’re both telling the same story differently. Raising my kids was the most important thing I ever did. But being raised by my wife and I was just the overture before the show for my kids. Our goofy trip was just the thing my daughter did on her way to a cool Summer activity with her peers. Narrative is a way I try to bridge those gaps. Every book molds moments into story. And no one wants that more than the father of a 14 year old girl who is beginning her own separate story, apart from him. I didn’t want a bunch of moments. I wanted a story about my daughter, with definition, meaning and, if at all possible, please God, a moral about how we’d never grow apart or forget this special time.
What I wanted was to look back fondly on our trip while it was still happening. I didn’t read Bryson’s book because I wanted to know what he went through, I read it because I wanted to know what I was going through. Sometimes the reason I read is that I’m hoping to turn my life into fiction.