Falling Off The Map - Hardcover

Iyer, Pico

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0394280091 ISBN 13: 9780394280097

Publisher: Knopf Canada, 1993

Synopsis

Showing the same sympathy and eye for the absurd that made VIDEO NIGHT IN KATHMANDU such a delight, Pico Iyer now turns to places that most of us would make a point of avoiding. Places like Paraguay, Iceland, North Korea, Cuba, Vietnam and Bhutan. "Lonely places," Iyer calls them, "the places that don't fit in," places that in their psychic or geographic or political isolation become even stranger and more remote as time goes on, more possessed by claustrophobia and loony comedy. "Immensely a funny, stimulating, eminently humane work." (Kirkus Reviews)

About this title

About the Author

Pico Iyer has written nonfiction books on globalism, Japan, the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, and forgotten places, and novels on Revolutionary Cuba and Islamic mysticism. He regularly writes about literature for The New York Review of Books; about travel for the Financial Times; and about global culture and the news for Time, The New York Times, and magazines around the world.

From Kirkus Reviews

As he did in The Lady and the Monk (1991) and Video Night in Kathmandu (1988), Iyer again turns his attention to the quirky and the quixotic, this time in what he calls ``the et ceteras in the list of nations.'' Included in these ``lonely places'' are Iceland, Paraguay, Vietnam, Argentina, and Australia. Iyer confesses early on to a lifelong attraction to regions that in ``their very remoteness'' take on an ``air of haunted glamour.'' He doesn't necessarily mean geographically distant, though Bhutan and Patagonia are among his destinations. Rather, it's the psychological and economic isolation of these areas- -occasioned by, for example, lack of tourism and international investment--that intrigues the author. Iyer depicts with wonder and affection the varied idiosyncracies he encounters, studding his narrative with colorful, off-beat facts--e.g., that, by law, one evening each year the members of the Icelandic Parliament must speak in rhyme. Throughout, Iyer displays a winning, self- deprecatory humor. When a Cuban doctor asks him to touch his nose with his eyes closed, the author jokes, ``Luckily, it is a big target: I pass with flying colors.'' Iyer's also aware of the dichotomies that exist within the countries he visits. Vietnam, despite decades of war, is ``one of the gentlest and most peaceful countries I have ever seen.'' His comments on that nation's eagerness to enter the world economic market are revelatory and unexpected: ``It is impossible not to feel that Saigon, with its Ca-Li-Pho-Nia Ham-Bu-Go stores and its karaoke bars, its Chiclets and water ski clubs, its private Mercedeses and hustlers and `Atlanta Placons' baseball caps--Saigon, with its rogue economy--is the image of the country's future.'' Economically written yet immensely resonant: a funny, stimulating, eminently humane work, charming and instructive. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Edition details

• Publisher: Knopf Canada
• Publication date: 1993
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0394280091
• ISBN 13: 9780394280097
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1