Whereabouts: Notes on being a foreigner

Book by Reid, Alastair

A Scottish-born writer based in the Dominican Republic here brings together seven of his pieces that originally appeared in the New Yorker, remarkable stories about his experiences in Spain, Latin America, Scotland and New York. The subject matter ranges from the lives and works of Borges, Neruda, Gracia Marquez and Jimenez, to learning a foreign language, to the differences between living in a home of one's own and living in the houses of other people. Reid also discusses his reasons for choosing to live under the Spanish dictatorship, toward which he had a strong antipathy. "Being in Spain always felt much more like belonging to a conspiracy against the regime than like condoning it." The best known of these essays is "Digging Up Scotland," a long account of the author's return in 1980 to St. Andrew's on the North Sea with his son Jasper and friends to find a box they had buried in 1971.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Made up largely of former New Yorker pieces, this is primarily a book about living in foreign places as opposed to traveling in them. Out of place is one considerable section on Latin American literature. Reid, who has lived as a foreigner in Manhattan, continental Europe, the Caribbean, and South America, writes philosophically and exquisitely about living in other people's houses and in other people's lands. His "Notes from a Spanish Village," although evocative and excellent, might make Spain seem a bit too precious to some. Despite the globetrotting and foreign adventure, the warmest and most colorful description is from his native Scotland: Scottish hearths in a southern seaside town and in an inland border (on England) village. This is a very personal book for the more sophisticated reader of essays on literature or travel and description. Roger W. Fromm, Bloomsburg Univ. of Pennsylvania Lib.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.