Sun After Dark: Flights Into the Foreign Paperback – April 12, 2005

As usual, Iyer takes me to places I would have never visited without him. This collection of essays takes the reader from California to Japan to Angor Wat to Bolivia-- I'm always surprised by the places Iyer has been to, and his easy way of sharing his thoughts about them. This is a great armchair traveler book. You might not have time/energery/money to visit all these places, but Iyer's descriptions are so vivid that he does all the work for you--you just have to go along for the ride.

Pico is always good

The titular star In Sun After Dark comes from Albert Camus, who wrote that he was born "halfway between poverty and the sun." The quote serves as a touchstone and a frame through which to view a disparate collection of essays, the common theme of which aspires to be the search for hope in even the darkest corners of the world."We travel most ...when we stumble, and we stumble most when we come to a place of poverty and need...."In this latest volume of travel reminiscences, British-born Indian Pico Iyer claims to take the reader on a walk through the dark side, essays on visits to some of the world's lost and forgotten countries, from Cambodia, to Yemen, Bolivia and Haiti. And when Iyer sticks to the theme, his writing shines."...luxury, for some of us, is measured by the things we can do without."Unfortunately, it seems either Iyer or the publisher decided to pad out the book with several pieces only marginally related to the theme, and so besides a memorable Kafkaesque journey through Yemen (that will have anyone who has lived on the Arabian peninsula laughing), we also get entirely forgettable book reviews, unrelated (if interesting) visits with Leonard Cohen and the Dalai Lama, and an insightful discourse on jet lag."...space and time open up as soon as you take leave of the simples ways in which you define yourself."I took this book on a recent journey to Vietnam and despite its uneven content it was a mostly rewarding companion. I suspect many readers interested in travel or in Pico Iyer should find in it something of value, if only small passages like the ones I have quoted here, and with which I end."One virtue of grandparents, of seasons, or deer who come down from the hills, is that they remind us that we don't know everything, and can't make the world up entirely from scratch; much of it - most of it - is beyond our reach, even beyond our reckoning."

If you want a straightforward travelogue or love "package tour" travel, you probably haven't read Iyer's previous books and should skip this one. The later chapters dragged more than the rest of the book, hence, 4 stars. At its best, the book captures the essence of travel as experience--the unavoidable confrontations with self, as well as the opportunities to transcend the mundane, familiar kinds of existence. Iyer spends extended periods in Asia and South America, with stops in the US and Europe. He also relates the experience of going so many places and losing track of place, as well as time. He reflects on change and how our conciousness recognizes it. Like many travelers, he meets interesting people in often unlikely places. He led me to take a deeper look at the Dali Lama and to view Leonard Cohen in a different way. I'd forgotten that Cohen was not only an overrated writer/performer ("Suzanne" was one of the most covered songs of my adolescence and easily one of the most annoying), but also a self-indulgent, mindscrewing, misogynistic jerk. But he appears to have met his match in a Buddhist tecaher and a discipline that takes a deep focus on oneself to the point of getting beyond indulgent self-absorption. The Dali Lama comes across as a well-traveled soul--moving over time, as well as place and culture. Iyer understands the rootlessness, the quest for experience, and the losses that such a life imposes. For people who love adventure and appreciate the adversity of travel, it's a great book.

Pico Iyer's work generally alternates between fiction and collections of essays, and my personal preference is for the latter. You will find these little jewels scattered in magazines ranging from "National Geographic" to the Buddhist magazine "Tricycle". In his best pieces, he can approach the condensed perfection of Orwell.There is not a bad essay in this collection, but two of them particularly stand out. At the beginning of the book is an account of a week spent at a meditation retreat with the singer/poet Leonard Cohen. If you're used to the vapid hagiographies in music magazines, this piece is a drink of cool water. It quotes from Cohen's songs, acknowledges the brilliance of his work, gives an unblinking account of his contradictory personality and details his day-to-day life, all in twenty pages. The effect is that of a camera zooming in from a mile above the Mount Baldy Zen Center all the way down to a wart on Cohen's face, and then slowly pulling back again. You'll have to read the piece yourself, preferably while playing "Waiting for the Miracle" in the background.The other extraordinary piece is "Nightwalking", which describes the surreal experience of jet lag, something the author endures for at least eight weeks of every year. I read it while on an extended air-trip (San Francisco-Hong Kong-Bangalore-Singapore-Seoul-SF in a week) and cannot recall anything on paper describing as accurately an experience I was undergoing at that moment. The walking blankly along thoroughfares at two in the morning, the absurd spasms of emotion, the faces out of Hopper paintings - he has etched a precise portrait here.His gift for metaphor unmatched. Here is a sentence about the British influence: "The..Empire..stands accused of importing straight lines and right angles to a land of curves, of making the forces of Eternity obey a railway timetable."How can one resist such lapidary prose?