"Perhaps the greatest travel book, the most unpredictable of all," Andrés Neuman suggests in the closing paragraphs of How to Travel Without Seeing: Dispatches from the New Latin America, "would be written by someone who doesn't go anywhere and simply imagines possible movements. Facing a window that seems like a platform, the author would lift his head and feel the rush of the horizon." It's a line that operates as both valedictory and epigraph. How to Travel Without Seeing, after all, is a travel book by an author who is ambivalent about travel . . . or, at least, about travel's theoretical rewards. "These days," he insists, "we go places without moving. Sedentary nomads, we can learn about a place and travel there in an instant. Nevertheless, or perhaps consequently, we stay at home, rooted in front of the screen."The New York Times in 2014, shortly after his novel Talking to Ourselves appeared in English. That book, too, opens with a journey, although it is a journey of a very different sort. "Each novel," he has said, "should refute the previous one" — which explains the shifts from book to book. And yet, this also provokes (for American readers, anyway) one more layer of dislocation, since of Neuman's eighteen books, only four have been published in the United States.Traveler of the Century, the first book of his to be translated into English, is a 600-plus-page picaresque, unfolding along the boundary of Saxony and Prussia, in an imagined Europe that blends history and allegory. The Things We Don't Do gathers thirty-four stories, many of them microfictions, including four "bonus tracks," or dodecalogues, which string together a series of aphorisms in an extended commentary on the storyteller's art. "The extreme freedom of a book of short stories," he writes there, "derives from the possibility of starting from zero each time. To demand unity from it is like padlocking the laboratory." A similar argument might be made about all his books. Talking to Ourselves is a prime example, a novel so riveting that no sooner had I finished than I started reading it again. Comprising three alternating first-person narratives — a ten-year-old boy, his terminally ill father, and his mother, who plays her mourning out by way of sexual conflagration — it describes a family unraveling, one misunderstanding or betrayal at a time. For Neuman, though, the only betrayals that matter are those we visit upon ourselves. "From then on," the mother tells us, in the wake of her first dalliance, "everything that happened, how can I put it? acted like an antidote. Every word, every gesture conspired to block my path and prevent my escape." She is referring both to the relationship and to her family: a situation in which there are no rules, no codes of behavior, just a set of specific circumstances that determine their response.How to Travel Without Seeing, which makes a point of sticking to the surfaces. "[E]verything is possible because nothing happens," he writes, articulating such a point-of-view. The idea, in other words, is to deconstruct what it means to travel — not to immerse in other landscapes so much as to express the self as it moves through these places, by turns alien and contained. Thus, even as we follow Neuman from Argentina to Uruguay to Chile, Peru to Ecuador to Venezuela, what we learn about these locations is glancing, indirect. In La Paz, he discovers a poem graffitied by the feminist collective Mujeres Creando: "After making your dinner / and making your bed / I lost the desire / to make love to you." In Guatemala City, he comes across the Kafka bar, named, a waitress tells him, for "a Swedish writer the owner likes a lot." The ironies and inconsistencies only heighten the experience, for in a globalized world, everything is up for grabs. Neuman quotes the Argentine poet Santiago Sylvester:, "Whatever is not a window is a mirror." The statement is worth keeping in mind. As How to Travel Without Seeing progresses, it increasingly functions on these terms, as a set of vignettes, reflections, shards of memory or observation that add up in the only way such fragments can, as an approximation of consciousness.the Americas, in which the border is first and foremost a psychological, or an emotional, dividing line. "To travel the world today," he writes from Lima, "is to witness the same debates in different languages and dialects." It's an impression that echoes throughout the book. In San Juan, the Spanish-speaking capital of an unincorporated U.S. territory, he riffs on the evolution of language: "Puerto Rican bilingualism sometimes works like Google Translate, copying words and syntactic structures from English. When I arrive, they announce that the airport is under construction — bajo construcción rather than en obra . In the hotel, they explain to me that Wi-Fi is complimentary — complementario rather than gratis . . . The Spanish they speak here is simultaneously familiar and strange, under construction and complimentary. If the language needs something, it takes it. And it no longer knows where it's coming from." Neuman is describing a condition all of us recognize, that odd feeling of statelessness bestowed by contemporary travel, in which "movement itself was the last of our concerns." Late in the book, while flying from El Salvador to Costa Rica, he offers a telling anecdote. "From the window of the plane," he recalls, "I see the dark green squares of the fields, the blue dent of a lake among the folds of the mountain range. With a mixture of knowingness and emotion, I think: It looks like Google Earth! This is the way things are. This is the way our eyes work. Birds-eye images on screens don't evoke the feeling of being on planes. For us, it's the reverse: planes are like screens."How to Travel Without Seeing is full of references to the politics and culture of the countries he visits, although the most ubiquitous signifiers are the effects of a region-wide flu epidemic and the death of Michael Jackson, which occurs as Neuman embarks. In any case, his offhand, aphoristic structure flattens out reaction, rendering each impression as just another momentary idea. What ties them together is that nothing ties them together — there is no master narrative. There is only the self, moving through a world of mass migration and entertainments, inauthentic and authentic at the same time, as travel always is.How to Travel Without Seeing less a book about travel than about boundaries, a succession of airports and border guards. The experiences it describes are liminal, occupying the interstices between departing and arriving, being there and being gone. "Before I leave," Neuman writes, "a friend tells me, 'If you publish the notes you're writing, at some point you'll have to present them in every city that appears in the book.' " Double image, double mirror. The tension sits at the center of Neuman's work. "I imagine myself," he continues, "presenting the book in every place that appears in it and writing, at the same time, a journal about that second trip, which could be presented again, city by city, and so on to infinity. Once you start on a journey you can never quite end it."David L. Ulin is the author, most recently, of Sidewalking: Coming to Terms with Los Angeles. A 2015 Guggenheim Fellow, he spent ten years as book editor and book critic of the Los Angeles Times.
Reviewer: David L. Ulin
The Barnes & Noble Review
08/08/2016
The buoyant Neuman (The Things We Don't Do , 2015, etc.) takes readers on a phantasmagoric journey through Latin America . . . a virtuoso demonstration of writing on the fly. After winning one of the Spanish-speaking world’s most lauded awards, the Premio Alfaguara, Neuman was sent on a massive 19-country tour that took him from his home in Argentina to far-flung appearances across Latin America. The writing is clever, light, and self-aware in a way that most travelogues are not . . . The translation by Lawrence is spot-on . . . Neuman is present in the moment and highly observant, catching little details that might have escaped other writers . . . To read this book produces an electrically fleeting feeling, but it seems that for the author, that’s kind of the point. 'The feeling of having left something someplace,' he writes toward the end. 'That we leave something everywhere we go, in addition to taking something with us.' A dizzying, evanescent snapshot of Latin America in all its grime and glory.”— Kirkus
“Curious, delightful . . . Neuman is hot property in contemporary Latin American literary circles. A former winner of Spain’s prestigious Alfaguara Prize and the National Critics Prize, he is tipped (by Roberto Bolaño, no less) to be one of a select ‘handful’ to take up where the ‘boom’ generation of Márquez, Cortázar, Fuentes and Borges left off . . . This is not a conventional travel book by any means . . . So forget the lyricism of Patrick Leigh Fermor, the historic sweeps of V.S. Naipaul or the episodic comedy of Bill Bryson. How to Travel Without Seeing is , in essence, a collection of journal jottings: the author’s notebooks transcribed in a rush; fragments of thought; overheard conversations; advertisement slogans; television snippets; stray lines of poetry. An honest reflection of most contemporary travel experiences, in other words . . . Yet the book works. This is partly thanks to Neuman’s eye for the absurd and ironic—Colombia’s Televisión Española, for example, ‘scrupulously selects’ the very worst of Spanish TV to disseminate abroad. More important still is his gift for the succinct. Places and people are captured in a single, spot-on phrase. Lima is the ‘club among clubs’; the estuary bay of San Juan flows gently to the sea ‘like someone falling asleep before drowning’. Aphorism, a literary device now hijacked by the Twitterati, is used to powerful effect here . . . Despite the miles he covers, he relishes remaining still, because his great passion is reading. He wolfs down books with an enthusiasm that most tourists reserve for sangria and sun-scorched sex. The result reads like the very best kind of bibliophile TripAdvisor.”—Oliver Balch, The Spectator
“As Neuman moves on his journey, he transforms the most ordinary places in the world—airports, hotels and way stations—into shrines or temples dedicated to travel . . . In the book, he offers readers interesting snapshots of people and places while traveling on a book tour after winning the prestigious Alfaguara literary award in 2009 . . . Filled with intimate reflections, the book describes more the feeling of being in transit and the changing perspective of the traveler than the actual destinations on Neuman's itinerary. And this mobility connects readers with the excitement of travel and reminds them of how being in transit could make people feel like outsiders and insiders.”—Arturo Conde, NBC Latino
“In this series of easily digestible travelogue entries, Neuman (The Things We Don’t Do ) reflects on various Latin American cities and the way we travel now . . . rather offering than a traditional travelogue, Neuman presents bite-size, on-the-go reflections on everything including politics, films, other writers, and the vagaries of customs declaration forms . . . He hilariously describes the environment of his hotel in Caracas as 'oil-rich Stanley Kubrick' . . . Neuman’s book offers an untraditional but valuable perspective on globalization and the character of nations.”— Publishers Weekly
“For his novel, Traveler of the Century (2009), Neuman received the prestigious Premio Alfaguara, awarded to outstanding works of Spanish-language literature. The prize includes a public-speaking tour, and Neuman took the opportunity to compose a travelogue that is anything but ordinary, combining wry observations, deadpan aphorisms, and literary commentary. From Asuncio´n to Panama, Neuman bounces all over South and Central America, recording amusing moments... and cataloging the writers he reads along the way, including Borges and Bolan~o but also lesser-known, contemporary upstarts, like Pola Oloixarac, Mo´nica Vela´squez, and Daniel Alarco´n . . . The hopscotch narrative, unique insights, and unapologetic bibliophilia make this book perfect for travelers as well as readers bound to home for the time being, looking for an escape." —Diego Báez , Booklist
“Argentinean-Spanish wunderkind Andrés Neuman speeds through the new Latin America in How to Travel without Seeing .”— Vanity Fair Hot Type
09/15/2016
