Honorable Bandit: A Walk across Corsica

by Brian Bouldrey

Brian Bouldrey traveled to the island of Corsica, with its wine-dark Mediterranean waters, powdered-sugar beach sand, sumptuous cuisine, and fine wine. And then he walked away from all of them.
     Bouldrey strapped on a backpack and walked across Napoleon's native land with the same spirit many choose to dance or to celebrate, to mourn, to think, to avoid thinking, to recall, to ignore, to escape, and to arrive.
     This wonderfully textured account of a two-week ramble along a famous Corsican hiking trail with his German friend Petra (she was good at the downhills while he was better at the uphills) offers readers a journal that is a launching point for thoughts on cultural differences, friendship, physical challenge, personal challenge, and getting very, very lost. Part travelogue, part memoir, and part lampoon, this book offers readers an impressionistic view of a little talked about yet stunningly beautiful landscape.

Best Books for General Audiences, selected by the American Association of School Librarians and the Public Library Association

 

Runner-up, Best Travel Book, National Association of Travel Journalists

Genres: Travel, Nonfiction

296 pages, Hardcover

First published September 12, 2007

About the author

Brian Bouldrey, is the author of the nonfiction books Honorable Bandit: A Walk Across Corsica (University of Wisconsin Press, September, 2007), Monster: Adventures in American Machismo (Council Oak Books), and T he Autobiography Box (Chronicle Books); three novels, The Genius of Desire (Ballantine), Love, the Magician (Harrington Park), and The Boom Economy (University of Wisconsin Press ; and editor of several anthologies. He is recipient of Fellowships from Yaddo and Eastern Frontier Society, and the Joseph Henry Jackson Award from the San Francisco Foundation, a Lambda Literary Award, and the Western Regional Magazine Award. Teaches fiction and creative nonfiction at Northwestern University and Lesley College MFA Program for Writers.

Reviews

[YZ · Rating 5 out of 5]

Have you ever pointed your finger and laughed uproariously at someone while respecting him or her deeply at the same time? Reading "Honorable Bandit" made me feel like doing that to Brian Bouldrey.

This is not just a genre-defiant book; it is also a tone-defiant book. You can't call it a funny book (although it is), or a philosophical book (although it is), or a sad book... you get the point. How else is a nonfiction book supposed to behave? To be true to the truth is to be genre- and tone-defiant when you are writing about Life.

Anyways. It's about walking across the ambiguously French Corsica/Corse with a friend. It's also about figuring out why walking is needed, and if there is something to run away from.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

At the outset, I'll get off my chest thast that the author's self-loathing anti-Americanism was a real turn off ... however, he dropped that by the middle of the book. Otherwise, it was a really nice read. The serious parts weren't overwhelmingly so (although I'm always sad whenever the subject of the unwanted Magilla Gorilla arises), while the rest was pretty funny, without ever seeming contrived. I laughed out loud in public when the "peeg" made its appearance.

[Jose Sbuck · Rating 4 out of 5]

A travelogue that turns into miscellaneous musings. The author, Brian Bouldrey, takes a long walk across Corsica. There is a famous Grand Route 20 that crosses the rocky island from coast to coast. Mr Bouldrey is an experienced traveller who embodies the attitude that it's about the journey, not the destination. He advocates travelling on foot and taking your time. There are some echoes of Wandering, Herman Hesse's ethos.

The main drawback for me is the vastness of unedited ideas. Reading the novel is like talking to my American friends: they are full of wit and anecdote, but never quiet and focused. I would have appreciated a more focused approach rather than the ADHD-like presentation of new ideas.

But there are gems among the many ideas:

youth being that period when one actually fixes bumper stickers to bumpers and buttons to backpacks. That period when one confuses solemnity with profundity, prefers drama to intimacy, and mistakes brutality for honesty.

Walking is meditative - for some. I can sympathise with the author's despair when the same stupid song keeps repeating in your head and your thoughts go round in circles. Walking away from your thoughts is not as easy as Soren Kierkegaard makes it sound.

you’re not running away from anything by walking. You think a lot. You think too much. It’s just you, and your thoughts, and if it’s not your thoughts, it’s "I know an old lady who swallowed a fly." If it’s not too strenuous a type of walk, you tend to think. About failures back home, shortcomings, unfinished business. People prefer not to think. They prefer the strenuous walk. Those who show the weakness of thinking are humiliated, or humiliatable, because thoughts are a threat. The solution is meditation, ritual, walking as prayer, which is what it settles into after a while.

Recommended for anyone interested in long walks or in Corsica.

[Elizabeth · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this book immensely. Wit and humor, introspection...it has everything I love in a book, and information, too! I just returned from hiking in Corsica, not on the GR 20, so the sights were familiar, the names and the places known. Bouldrey's writing is fresh and funny, his vocabulary amazing - especially when he is making up words or playing with them. Loved it.

[Jessica · Rating 2 out of 5]

More place and less person, please.

[Abby · Rating 4 out of 5]

I said it afore and I'll say it again: I'M SO BIASED.

I don't really know what it's like to read a very personal book by someone you know. Actually wait, no, that's the point of this: this is a very personal book by someone I know, and it incorporates all of the witty, touching, thoughtful, dog-loving, word-loving, French-hating wonderful things I know about him, and I feel like I know him better now. The book immediately takes place in the years that I knew him best (and in flashback covers much more), in a strange, post-9/11, early-aughts place where we all kind of hated our national identity but didn't know what or how else to be (or: I was in college, so rather than engaging with the national dialogue, I focused on ME ME ME, but more on that later). It felt both familiar and nostalgic to read about that time in a voice I'm so familiar with. Also, because the author was my writing professor for three years, it made me think, "Is this why I write so many asides? Is Brian the reason I can't tell a story without throwing in all of the side stories that got me here?" but I think may he just fanned my existing instinct. It never occurred to me to write differently.

So here's the thing: if you're interested in Corsica, don't read this book. It's not ABOUT Corsica (Mom). And its Corsicanry, I think (SORRY BRIAN), is its only failing. At the beginning of the bibliography, he sort of apologizes that the book did not become AS historically- and travel-minded as originally intended. I, of course, wish it were even less so than it is. The unsuccessful parts are the parts about Corsica itself, I felt. Yes, it's important that our conflicted narrator is covering conflicted ground on conflicted ground, but, eh. The best parts are three sections called "Why I Walk," meanderings through personal history, etymology, and general life events that got the author where he is. The second best parts are the observations and interactions with other walkers, gite-keepers, and the like.

And I have to wonder, did I love the "Why I Walks" and the gite-keepers and the dog stories because I know Brian, because I knew snippets of his life and this filled in blanks, and because I can see him eyeballing the locals? And this, of course of course of course, made me self-conscious that because I feel like I write very similarly, only people I know find my writing engaging or entertaining, which are the only two things I'm ever trying to be. So I just don't know.

Either way, this book is a joy to read, and I know you don't have to know Brian to laugh out loud at some of his descriptions and preoccupations. I drew it out for months, read it between fluffy novels, always backing up a bit and then plowing forward, and I didn't really want it to end. But Corsica is an island, so it does.

[Yasmin · Rating 5 out of 5]

"In what may be the most eloquent section in the book, Bouldrey describes a nighttime performance by a group of singers. The song “is of love, or dying of it, or revenge because it went wrong because, well, this is Corsica.” It ends as noisy revelers enter. Rather than fume endlessly about the intrusion, Bouldrey wisely leaves the scene where it is, and comments on his own ambivalence about wanting to preserve the memory forever. There are, after all two kinds of travelers. Those who destroy what they seek and those who worry endlessly that they might destroy what they seek."
My full review is at:
http://www.yasminnair.net/content/bri...

[missy jean · Rating 5 out of 5]

Funny. Funny, funny. But also unexpectedly tender and heady with life, with enough earth-love to satisfy me.