The Blind Masseuse: A Traveler's Memoir from Costa Rica to Cambodia

by Alden Jones

Overview

Through personal journeys both interior and across the globe, Alden Jones investigates what motivates us to travel abroad in search of the unfamiliar.

By way of explorations to Costa Rica, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Cuba, Burma, Cambodia, Egypt, and around the world on a ship, Jones chronicles her experience as a young American traveler while pondering her role as an outsider in the cultures she temporarily inhabits. Her wanderlust fuels a strong, high-adventure story and, much in the vein of classic travel literature, Jones's picaresque tale of personal evolution informs her own transitions, rites of passage, and understandings of her place as a citizen of the world. With sharp insight and stylish prose, Jones asks: Is there a right or wrong way to travel? The Blind Masseuse concludes that there is, but that it's not always black and white.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780299295707
Publisher:	University of Wisconsin Press
Publication date:	11/15/2013
Edition description:	1
Pages:	192
Product dimensions:	5.70(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Alden Jones has lived, worked, and traveled in over forty countries, including as a WorldTeach volunteer in Costa Rica, a program director in Cuba, and a professor on Semester at Sea. Her work has appeared in AGNI, Time Out New York, Post Road, The Barcelona Review, The Iowa Review, Prairie Schooner, Gulf Coast, and The Best American Travel Writing. She lives in Boston.

Read an Excerpt

I discovered that I liked the blur in the photographs. I liked the haze. They made the images of Burma dreamy, surreal, which is how it was to me. I liked that the filter was the tourist's shield. I could even say I'd done it on purpose: the work reflects the tourist's view of Burma. The countryside looked easy and peaceful to us. Herders and workers lived their daily lives outside our fast-moving machine. What we saw and remembered did not reflect the true Burmese experience, lives lived suffering memories of torture, a sister raped, a son stolen. No. I saw willows.—excerpt from The Blind Masseuse
© The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System. All rights reserved.

Table of Contents

Preface: The Charm of the Unfamiliar                                   
Lard Is Good for You (Costa Rica)                           
A Normal American Life (New York)                                   
Coke Is It (Bolivia)                            
The Blind Masseur (Costa Rica)                               
One Side of the Story (Nicaragua)                             
The Answer Was No (Cuba)                         
This Is Not a Cruise (Around the World)                             
How to Be a Tourist (Cambodia)                              
The Burmese Dreams Series (Burma)                        
I Know What You Did in Egypt: A Letter to Gustave Flaubert (Egypt)                             
Afterword                              
 
Bibliographical Note                          Acknowledgments

Editorial Reviews

11/25/2013
Jones's memoir captures snapshots of her travels to Egypt, Cuba, Cambodia, and more, but the secret foundation of the book is memoir—it's much more about a young woman growing into herself than about the places she's seen. "…I was completely in my body and my life in a way that felt rare and very good," she writes about her first trip to Costa Rica, and that sentiment is woven throughout the book. Jones seeks to capture her impressions of new places and, more to her interest, how she was viewed by natives of each place and changed by her experiences as a stranger in foreign country. Partly this self-interest is due to the structure of the book. Readers arrive at a new place in each chapter and see it through Jones's eyes, allowing for insightful views of several places, especially Cuba and Bolivia, where her interacts with local people make for interesting reading. But with each new chapter, Jones leaves the last place she visited behind, making the only throughline herself. Though Jones is sincerely engaged with surroundings throughout, many readers will wish the narrative stayed longer in one place enabling a larger scope. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly

"Smart, witty, and well traveled, Alden Jones has given us a beautifully written book that honors the wandering spirit in all of us. Take this journey with her and return newly alive to the pleasure of moving through the world."—Ana Menéndez, author of Adios, Happy Homeland!


"Alden Jones is something of a 'Prodigal Daughter,' and she has come home from her long travels to tell us the stories from her own life and education. We both delight and learn from her wisdom and her tales of nine places in the world."—Brian Bouldrey, author of Honorable Bandit: A Walk across Corsica


"Alden Jones's refreshing humor, young perspective, and informed cultural awareness make The Blind Masseuse stand out from other travel memoirs. This is a smart and entertaining read."—Lucy Bledsoe, author of The Big Bang Symphony


"Jones takes us straight to the heart and to the resonating pulse of exotic pin dots most of us never have the nerve to explore. In writing both lyric and colloquial, she captures the voices that emerge in each landscape and setting. Her journeys are examined with a growing self-knowledge and a delicious sense of humor. The Blind Masseuse is an expedition into the interior life of a smart, engaging American woman who makes us feel at home no matter how far from home she takes us."—Maria Flook, author of Invisible Eden


"Jones celebrates the impulse to wander and recognizes the value in savoring vagabondage for the gift it ultimately is. An engaging travel memoir. "—Kirkus Reviews


“Unlike most travel memoirs, The Blind Masseuse is thoughtful and literate, leaving you with much to think about.”—A Traveler’s Library



“A thoughtful meditation on the conflicting roles of a traveler.”—Shelf Awareness



“It’s smart and thoughtful, but also Jones is cackle-for-days hilarious and the book is a page-turner from second one, when she’s out walking in the dark in her village and bumps into a cow. Please, everyone, read this book!”—Huffington Post

From the Publisher

2013-10-05
A peripatetic teacher and writer's reflections on a life spent seeking exotic experiences abroad and pondering the question: "[I]s there a right way and a wrong way to travel?" Jones' love of the foreign began when she studied Spanish in the fifth grade. At first, acquiring a second language was little more than a game, but by the time she was in college, the author realized that speaking Spanish facilitated travel experiences that made her feel "so alive [that she] almost felt high." Her post-collegiate quest for the drug of exoticism took her to rural Costa Rica, where she worked for WorldTeach and learned to live on "lard and coffee." The experience whetted her appetite for the unfamiliar to the point where she could not tolerate "a normal American life" grounded in routine. Her wanderings then took her to Bolivia. Faced with strong anti-American sentiment, Jones learned to own who and what she was "with eyes wide open" and a bottle of Coke in her hand. She returned to Costa Rica, where she helped build a school. After teaching in the United States, she traveled to Nicaragua, where she got heavily involved in the lives of the people she encountered. Work as a summer tour guide for American students in Cuba showed her that she took her freedom to wander for granted. Later stints as a Semester at Sea instructor taught her the impossibility of escaping what she was: a committed, though now temporarily settled, traveler with a touristic tendency to romanticize otherness. Rather than moralize about the right and wrong ways to travel, however, Jones celebrates the impulse to wander and recognizes the value in savoring vagabondage for the gift it ultimately is. An engaging travel memoir.

Kirkus Reviews