Wanderlust by Elisabeth Eaves

Wanlderlust is Elisabeth Eaves’s travel memoir that spans her teenage years to her late twenties. She first becomes obsessed by travel after a boyfriend saves up and travels the world with no commitments. Jealous, she begins planning to do something similar. Through study abroad, an internship with the State Department and her own travels, Eaves honestly details what it is like to travel alone as a woman. Unfortunately, Eaves’s memoir left me confused and uncomfortable, frustrated and disappointed, when I really wanted to enjoy this memoir.

I respect Elisabeth Eaves’s honesty, but I’m flabbergasted as to why every trip she takes is either because of a man or results in a man. She talks about finding herself, but all she finds is another man to sleep with, or perhaps, fall in love with. Why is this the particular structure she chose for her story? Did it really have to be that way? You can’t tell me that she couldn’t have described her travels outside of the context of getting, losing or lusting after a man. To top it all off, she described other women so disdainfully. And maybe it wouldn’t bother me so much if Eaves weren’t such a good writer. I wanted to keep reading Wanderlust, because it is written beautifully, but I found myself angry and even offended at her descriptions.

There were times when Eaves really examined what it is like to be a girl traveling alone and that is when I truly appreciated her. “I craved total freedom, and I envied the boys because I thought they could have it. But there was a way in which, as a girl, I could act free but never quite get there in my head. However many expectations I escaped and constraints I threw off, there would always be that nagging caution at the back of my mind that said I’d better lock the door, ” she explains. That is what I wanted, acknowledge what it is like to be a girl traveling alone, but to go beyond that, to write about what it is like to be Elisabeth Eaves traveling alone. Instead, I came across understanding little about her and the places she visited and more about how many men she slept with. I want to make clear that my problem is not with how many men she slept with or the fact that she slept with men, but that it became central to her memoir, apart from her travels. The subtitle of her book is “A Love Affair with Five Continents”, but the reality becomes “Love Affairs in Five Continents”.

When Eaves abandons this pretense, and writes just about travel or just about where she is or about how she is feeling, I loved her best. I can almost overlook the rest just for those pure moments of excellent travel writing. I understand exactly what Ash is saying in her own review of this novel, the fact that Eaves acknowledges her faults, acknowledges what she does with this book, almost makes it easier to read. At the same time, though, I just don’t understand the structure. Once again, I find myself wondering if this is a fault of how the book is marketed. It’s billed as a travel memoir and travel writing, but is it really? Or is it a memoir of love, relationships and travel. If it had been sold to me as that, I very well may have enjoyed this.

Giveaway: If your interested in finding out for yourself if you could connect with Eaves and her storytelling style, I have one copy of Wanderlust to give away. All you have to do is leave a comment on this post. I’ll announce the winner in one week! 

Thanks to TLC Book Tours for providing me with a copy of this book to review. You can find out more about the tour here. 

State of Wonder by Ann Patchett

I remember reading Bel Canto in college and falling in love. Reading that book was like entering another world and I wish I had been recording my thoughts on books then. All I have is a dreamy memory of being completely enchanted and miserably sad when the book ended. For whatever reason, I haven’t revisited Patchett until now. There were many things about State of Wonder that reminded me of reading Bel Canto, but I did not close the covers of this novel feeling wholly satisfied.

Marina Singh is a pharmacologist working for Vogel, a pharmaceutical company whose biggest project is a new fertility drug that Marina’s former professor, Dr. Swenson, is developing in the Amazon. Marina’s coworker, Anders Eckman, went to Brazil to find Dr. Swenson and get an update on her progress before his untimely death by fever. Marina, plagued by Mrs. Eckman’s insistence that he is not dead, and by her boss and lover Dr. Fox’s order, goes to Brazil and tries to find out what exactly happened to her friend.

Patchett is a brilliant writer. Her prose is rich and I could probably open State of Wonder and find a beautiful sentence on any page. She has this way of writing that I just adore. It’s slightly detached, as if the narrator is above everything that is happening, not necessarily omniscient, but not part of everything either. I realize that that description is less than satisfactory, but sometimes it’s hard to pin down exactly why I love Ann Patchett so much. It’s an almost unconditional love, that even when I see problems in a story, I still love it.

And State of Wonder is like that. Oh, there are problems here. It is not a perfect book, not in the way I felt Bel Canto was a nearly perfect book. I struggled suspending my disbelief at some of the events, but fortunately, never at the science. There is a delightful science fiction element here, where the tribe Dr. Swenson is studying can bear children well into their 70s, because of the bark of a tree they chew. I don’t know a lot about the science of fertility, but the fact is that I believed everything that was happening in this novel. I believed in every single character, in their actions, in their voice, in their movements. I believed everything, until the ending unraveled it all.

Patchett has been known to give a happy ending, especially one that comes about from coincidence, but the problem here is not necessarily that there is a happy ending, despite the fact that it is laced with tragedy, but that we aren’t given any time to sit with that ending. It comes so abruptly, when I felt we were just really starting to get to the heart of Marina, her struggle, her beliefs. It was the kind of book where I’m looking at the amount of pages left and wondering how on earth the author is going to wrap it all up in so few pages. And the answer is, well, quickly. I could have read another 100 pages, I wanted to read another 100 pages. I wanted more, not necessarily more explanation or more reasoning, but more time to sit with the coincidences and to believe them. Because though I believed almost every moment of this novel, I did not believe the most crucial coincidence of this entire story.

But does that really matter? In the end, this is still a book that I can describe to you with the word love.  Ann Patchett is a  writer than can totally and completely transport me into another world, another mind. She can set a story in the Amazon, without relying on stereotypes or sensationalism. With Patchett’s stories, I feel everything her characters feel. She writes beautiful, lyrical prose that often reads like poetry. With all of that, an ending that I’m not entirely satisfied with seems like a small complaint.

So go read this!: now | tomorrow | next week | next month | next year | when you’ve read everything else

Thank you TLC BOOK TOURS for sending me this book to review. For more information on the tour and subsequent tour stops, click here.

Thoughts Without Cigarettes by Oscar Hijuelos

Though I’ve never read any of Oscar Hijuelos’s fiction (not for lack of wanting to… I’ve always been interested in Hijuelos, it just hasn’t happened yet), I was deeply intrigued by his memoir Thoughts Without Cigarettes.  Hijuelos moved to the United States when he was just a young boy and Thoughts Without Cigarettes chronicles his life from before his birth, when his parents met, to his struggle for success as an adult and fiction writer. Though I have never read any of Hijuelos’s fiction, it’s clear to see through this memoir how fabulous of a writer he is. Some of my very favorite parts were in the beginning when he was talking about his visit to Cuba as a young boy. He gets across that dreamy reality that is a childhood memory so well.

A lot of times it feels as though you are reading fiction or even poetry, Hijuelos just has a talent for describing every day things with beautiful language that makes it seem unreal or better than reality. That’s not a complaint or a bad thing at all, in fact I love reading memoirs like this. Like I said in my post about Breaking Up with God, everyone has a story to tell, it’s just about how well you tell it. Hijuelos has a pretty remarkable story and he tells it brilliantly. When Hijuelos moves on from telling the story of his childhood this dreamy quality disappears a little bit, but rightfully so.

My biggest complaint is that this book is long, probably longer than a memoir needs to be and there certainly were parts that interested me more than others. It’s a difficult book to get into because the amount of detail, but I recommend picking up this book for an interesting story about finding your place in between two cultures, writing, and family.

Thanks to TLC Book Tours for sending me a copy of this book to review! 

Tomatoland by Barry Estabrook

I got Tomatoland for one simple reason: I really like tomatoes. It’s one of the few things that I can thank my former stepmother for, other than providing me with two awesome sisters. If I wanted a snack, she would always slice up some tomatoes and sprinkle them with pepper and salt, sometimes with a little mayonnaise. She introduced me to tomatoes on grilled cheese, nothing short of a revelation for little 8 year old me. My wonderful Italian mom showed me what a tomato can do cooked, my step-mother what it could do raw. It was a beautiful childhood of tomato bliss.

But with every passing year, I’m getting pickier and pickier about which tomatoes I eat. The more I think about it, the mealier and more tasteless the tomatoes that you buy in the supermarket are. I’d almost stopped buying them altogether before I read Tomatoland. Tomatoland convinced me even more that the tomatoes from the grocery store, especially the ones available in the winter, are just not worth it.

Taste is the obvious reason. Every single one of us can go to the supermarket and tell the difference between a tomato grown locally and in the summer versus one grown in Florida in the winter. Estabrook makes clear that that is because the organization that regulates the tomatoes that come out of Florida regulate for every single aspect of a tomato – color, shape, texture, blemishes – except taste.

The second problem with tomatoes grown in the winter is that, if they are not grown in a hot house, they are grown in Florida or California. The problem with growing tomatoes in Florida is that it just happens to be one of the worst places in the world to grow tomatoes. In order to do so successfully, Florida tomato growers rely heavily on dangerous pesticides and chemicals to fight off pests and diseases and to put nutrition in the soil, which is actually just sand.

And now we get to the heart of Tomatoland, the mistreatment of migrant workers, especially concerning pesticide use, on tomato farms. This was not necessarily the turn that I expected Tomatoland to take, but I was so happy that it did. This is an important cause and an important topic that everyone needs to know about. When you purchase a tomato, you are making a choice. Are you going to support the abuse and slavery of the people who pick those tomatoes? Some of the things that Estabrook talks about will horrify you, from babies being born with deformities because of their parents’ exposure to pesticides to examples of modern day slavery.

A lot of work has been done in the last 10 years to make the life of migrant workers country-wide, but especially in Florida, better. And it’s a start, but big agriculture in the United States isn’t going to listen to us unless we make them. Tomatoland highlighted the best and worst of what’s happening in Florida so that anyone who reads the book can make an informed decision about where and how they get there tomatoes.

Estabrook does a good job balancing the political with the scientific. He interviews people on both sides of the debate and shows big agriculture in a fair light in my opinion. Not a good one, but a fair one. He shows what they have done horribly wrong and what they are doing, however reluctantly, to improve it. Things are getting better in the tomato industry, but it is all because of groups of people who were well-informed and willing to take a stand. The only shortcoming of this book is that I wish Estabrook had ended with a clearer sense of what still needs to be done. I would have rather had a final chapter that projected the future for tomatoes and the industry, as well as the future for migrant workers in the US.

I truly didn’t expect to be as enthralled with Tomatoland as I was, but I found it to be an engaging and well-written piece of non-fiction that has the power to change the way people view their tomatoes. Hopefully it will convince people that the best place to get tomatoes is their own back yard.

So go read this!: now | tomorrow | next week | next month | next year | when you’ve read everything else

Desperado Penguin also has a review about Tomatoland. Do you? Link to it in the comments and I’ll add it here.

I received Tomatoland for review from NetGalley. 

Spain! – The First Few Days

Remember that time I went to Spain? And I promised I’d tell you all about it? Well… 8 months later, here I am!

I went to Spain last October to make my Spanish better. I sort of made my Spanish better, but mostly I learned how to travel alone in a foreign country.

Here’s the thing the first lesson I learned about traveling by yourself: if you miss your bus, there is no one to tell you what to do. The plan was to catch a connecting flight out of JFK to Madrid, arrive with three hours of down time before the bus left. This is what happened: outrageous rain storms in New York caused me to get rerouted to Atlanta, where I sat around for, get this, exactly three hours. I got to Madrid and missed my bus by ten minutes. At that point I was exhausted, I had gotten sick on the plane and hadn’t slept much, I just sat in the middle of the airport and cried. I’m sure that if I had been in the US, I would have been arrested. After a couple well-meaning people attempted to help me only to have me blabber at them in something that resembled Spanish, I pulled myself together and purchased a train ticket. Then went to the train station, with all my stuff, and sat in the train station for five hours. I left my home town at 10 in the morning. I arrived in Granada at 10 PM the next day. It was… intense, I think is the right word for it.

The second thing I learned about traveling by yourself: people will love to tell you that you are too 1) young 2) female 3) young and female to be traveling alone. I met this Syrian couple on their honeymoon. The husband told me multiple times that I needed a chaperon and that I was brave (possibly the word he really wanted to say was stupid). When we arrived in Granada, he decided to get my (very heavy) suitcase down from the overhead. I warned him about its heaviness and his response was a withering look and my new favorite catchphrase, “Honey, that is why we have the muscles!” He then proceeded to carry my suitcase over his head and onto the train platform. It made missing my bus and taking the train entirely worth it.

That night I slept well and woke up feeling much less exhausted and actually fairly acclimated to the time change. I also learned how very lucky I was. The day after I arrived in Spain was the day of the national strike. No cabs, buses, trains, or restaurants were open that day, except for a few. I would have been stuck in Madrid, even if I hadn’t missed my bus, if I had left only one day later.

Fortunately all I had planned for the day was meeting my host family. So I walked around Granada for a while and watched the marches. It was very peaceful, since it was a nationally planned strike. The economy right now in Spain is not good, which is true in many parts of the world, including here, but things are much worse in Spain. The protests have gotten much bigger than this strike. The national strike seemed like it was mostly older people, at least in Granada. Now the protests are filled with young people who can’t get jobs. It was an interesting thing to witness.

After watching the strike, I went to the university where I would be taking classes to meet my home stay family. So this was a little odd. Before I left, they never told me who my family would be. This is because when I arrived, they scrolled through a list and called a random person.  They told her, “We have an American for you!” and I went on my way to her apartment. She didn’t know I was coming until 30 minutes before I showed up! It was weird. But she is retired and her only job is to take care of foreign students. It was also weird that she didn’t let me do anything for her. She did my laundry, made my bed, made me 3 meals a day. I realize that I was paying her to do these things (well, I paid the school and the school paid her), but I never really got used to it. María also had her 4 year old granddaughter living with her, named Lucía. Lucía and I watched a lot of Bob Esponja and Dora la Exploradora.

I spent the next day or so just exploring the city before school started. Our schedule was delayed by a couple days because of the strike, so I had some extra exploring time. One of my favorite places to go in Granada were the Moroccan shops. You would turn a corner and suddenly be in a completely different world. The alleys were draped with scarves to keep out the heat (it’s still very warm in Granada in early October) and everything is vibrant and colorful. The alleys smell like incense and you hear a lot more English and Arabic. Even though each stall sells basically the same kitschy stuff, some of my favorite souvenirs from Granada are from these Moroccan sections.

Granada is famous for its blue and white pottery, like the tiles in the middle picture. They also have this poem printed everywhere and on everything:

“Dale limosna mujer,
que no hay en la vida nada
como la pena de ser
ciego en Granada.” – Francisco Asís de Icaza

Give him alms, woman,
for in this life there is nothing
like the pain of being
blind in Granada.

My other favorite observation on that first day: the streets are lined with orange and lime trees! This was amazing. You can’t eat them because they are not edible. They’re too small and bitter, but when they trim the trees the whole city smells like citrus. I took the longest walk ever that day. It was nice, because the rest of the time Granada smells like diesel fuel.

And on that note, I think that’s enough for now!