White Sands: Experiences from the Outside World

by Geoff Dyer

Episodic, wide-ranging, funny, and smart, this exploration of why we travel marks a return to the subject of Dyer's most successful book, Yoga for People Who Can't Be Bothered to Do It , albeit with the wisdom of age. From viewing a lightning field in the Mexican desert by night, to chasing Gauguin's ghost in French Polynesia, from falling in love with a tour guide in the Forbidden City of Beijing to tracking down the house of a childhood idol in L.A., Dyer pursues all permutations of the peak experience. His trademark style blends travel writing, essay, criticism, and fiction, with a smart and cantankerous wit that is unmatched. Like Alain De Botton's On Travel and Rebecca Solnit's A Field Guide to Getting Lost , this is a book for armchair travelers and slacker philosophers everywhere.

Genres: Travel, Nonfiction, Essays, Memoir, Short Stories, Biography, Journalism

256 pages, Paperback

First published May 3, 2016

About the author

Geoff Dyer was born in Cheltenham, England, in 1958. He was educated at the local Grammar School and Corpus Christi College, Oxford. He is the author of four novels: Paris Trance, The Search, The Colour of Memory, and, most recently, Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi; a critical study of John Berger, Ways of Telling; five genre-defying titles: But Beautiful (winner of a 1992 Somerset Maugham Prize, short-listed for the Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize), The Missing of the Somme, Out of Sheer Rage (a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award), Yoga For People Who Can’t Be Bothered To Do It (winner of the 2004 W. H. Smith Best Travel Book Award), and The Ongoing Moment (winner of the ICP Infinity Award for Writing on Photography), and Zona (about Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Stalker). His collection of essays, Otherwise Known as the Human Condition, won a National Book Critics Circle Award in 2012. He is also the editor of John Berger: Selected Essays and co-editor, with Margaret Sartor, of What Was True: The Photographs and Notebooks of William Gedney. A new book, Another Great Day at Sea, about life aboard the USS George H W Bush has just been published by Pantheon.
In 2003 he was a recipient of a Lannan Literary Fellowship; in 2005 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature; in 2006 he received the E. M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; in 2009 he was the recipient of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Best Comic Novel and the GQ Writer of the Year Award (for Jeff in Venice Death in Varanasi). His books have been translated into twenty-four languages. His website is geoffdyer.com

Reviews

[Cláudia Azevedo · Rating 1 out of 5]

Geoff Dyer desagradou-me profundamente pelo cinismo com que critica tudo e mais alguma coisa, a começar pelos locais que visita, as gentes que lá habitam e os seus costumes. Parece incrível que se escreva um livro para dizer apenas mal da "casa" dos outros, assim como me parece estranho que não se retire lições e ensinamentos benéficos até das más experiências.

[Matt Quann · Rating 2 out of 5]

I have a really hard time giving up books I've started, but White Sands has me pulling the plug with 40 pages left to go. I always feel guilty abandoning a book, especially now that there is so little left to read, and yet I have to admit that there's better stuff on my shelves beckoning to me while I sit here (mostly) not enjoying this book. I've come to the point in my reading that I can tell when an author has failed to win me over and getting to the finish line is nothing more than an exercise in masochism. So, reluctantly, I've decided to call it quits a bit early and offer my thoughts on rest of the book that I read.

Dyer wrote this book, I think, to try and implore the reader to travel. In that aspect, he never happened to stir in me the desire to move anywhere other than off the couch to do small chores just to put off the reading. Dyer is so relentlessly negative in his writing (or at least that's how I perceived his writing) that I never felt the urge to see the world he was explaining. This is due in no small part to the author's tendency to write pretentiously about art, writing, and the places in which he travels.

It would be tedious for me to write and tedious for you to read about the various subject matter Dyer tries to tie in to his travelogue. Suffice to say, you should be educated in Dyer's interests if you have any hope of knowing what he's going on about. This makes for tedious reading where I would often catch myself zoning out and not processing pages at a time. It also detracts from a book about travel when so much of this is about specific book relies on some secondary high-art background. It wouldn't even be so bad if Dyer took the time to explain to his audience about this art, but alas, he assumes the reader knows his Adorno and plows forward.

But this gets the two stars from me for two stories, which I thought were the most humble and best written of the bunch. Forbidden City is a tale of a tour guide at the eponymous attraction with whom Dyer becomes infatuated. He leaves the reader in suspense as to whether the two contact one another and does some fine philosophical musing about the romantic moments where we fail to act and always ponder, "What if?" The second story, the titular White Sands, makes the case for most relevant and compelling story in the book, or at least what I read of it. Dyer and his wife pick up a hitchhiker only to come upon a sign reading, "Don't pick up hitchhikers, this is an area surrounded by prisons." What follows is both poignant and hilarious.

Here's the thing though: I'm not willing to sift through 40 more pages and two more essays in the hope that these last two are outliers in a sea of mediocrity. This might be a book for someone else, but it certainly isn't for me and I'm happy to ditch it and move on to something else.

[Bettie · Rating 3 out of 5]

BOTW

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07h6fmf

Description: Many people love the books of Geoff Dyer (and author William Boyd calls him 'a true original'); be they novels, ruminations or travel essays. White Sands is his latest travel book and today he writes about his new home in Los Angeles and makes a pilgrimage to visit the house of an intellectual hero. With characteristic wit and a keen eye for detail, he writes beautifully about place and always acknowledges that travel can be as much about disappointment as it is about elation and discovery. In White Sands he makes a series of pilgrimages like this one and then wonders why they don't quite live up to their reputation.

Read by Alex Jennings who recently played Alan Bennett in The Lady in the Van and Willy Wonka in the musical version of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

Pilgrimage - Adorno

Space in Time and Time in Space - The Spiral Jetty in Utah and The Lightning Field in New Mexico





Northern Dark

The Hitchhiker - gypsum sand

Beginning

[M. Sarki · Rating 3 out of 5]

Definitely not his best work, but still better than most when it comes to essays. The thing about Dyer that generally makes him irresistible is he puts his own self in his work, his personality, his thoughts and ideas. But this collection was missing, for the most part, Geoff Dyer. Not until the last two essays does the Brit show up in the way I am accustomed to. The second to last essay about the history and his visiting The Watts Towers in Los Angeles was one of his best he has written, and then the last essay regarding a frightening stroke he suffered from recently was not only educational, but heartfelt and possibly life-changing for anyone who reads it. Based on these two essays alone this is a book worth reading.

[Mosco · Rating 4 out of 5]

premessa importante: NON è un libro di viaggio.
Ci ho messo un po' a capirlo, e all'inizio mi piaceva pochissimo. Poi, compreso che i viaggi sono solo un espediente per parlare di altro, l'ho trovato brillante, intelligente, colto, autoironico, britannico.

L'unico fastidio: rendermi conto del pozzo della mia ignoranza. Più di una volta ho dovuto far ricorso a wikipedia o a google images per capire di cosa si stesse parlando (voi lo sapete per esempio chi era Sabato Rodia? Senza googlare eh! Ditemi di no per favore!). Pesantina parte del capitolo relativo ad Adorno, il resto da piacevole a interessante.

[Stephen P(who no longer can participate due to illness) · Rating 5 out of 5]

His visits to Tahiti, China, the Northern Lights, archeological sites of wonder is to-experience. Experience himself reacting to the site. So that in the end he hopes to find himself through this experience of his experiences. Thus he winds up where he started but before was not aware.

The villain though at times is the experience being diluted by tourism and commercialism, the corrosive passing of time. Yet sometimes the experience of having no experience or at least not knowing it is weighted with meaning.

Dyer remains in danger of his style, his quickened ability to write, his wry wit, overtaking his message of a self emerging, yet the unexpected finding of mortality awakening as truth awakens.

“People will continue to come to this beach. More photographs will be taken. A memorial to the dead couple will possibly be built or their names carved on the rock. Even if neither happens, some visitors to this spot will be conscious that something has happened here, will be familiar with the story of the murder. And even if that knowledge fades, This spot will still exude a faint charge of uncomprehended-possbily unnoticed-meaning. How long will that charge hold? What will remain of it two hundred years hence?”

Dyer is patient despite his natural desire to explore and plumb surfaces. This book is a well choreographed and articulated quest. An internal quest aided by the obsessive pull of travel and visitation. The outer experience is a passageways to the cave where the inner self resides.

Once in sync with his style I felt as I did when my romance with literature first bloomed. I couldn’t get enough of Auster, Delillo, McCarthy, Byatt, their voices. The book despite its light weight was difficult to put down but then easy to lift back up again. I have that younger year excitement of a new author, which I didn’t know if I might ever feel again.

I’m thankful to Geoff Dyer, this GR Author, for his rekindling and his literary skills, his desire to know, to experience in order to discover. So, now its to M. Sarki, my GR leader to so many vital reads, to find what’s next. Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling With D.H. Lawrence? Zona? With my free hand, on my iPad I’m ordering both from my bookseller as we speak.

[Christine Zibas · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book of incredibly written travel essays (and some other meditations thrown in there) deal with the essential question: Why do we travel? Some other, perhaps even more appropriate questions also arise as a result of traveling: How did we get here? And why did we come? That one, most often asked when things fall apart (see Dyer's essay on traveling in the middle of winter to Norway to see the Northern Lights).

Just one of so many quotes I've underlined in this book was the following, which approximates a summation of the book's overall theme -- Why are we here?

"We are here to wait at Hiva Oa Airport [in Tahiti] in the drenching humidity and to feel definitively what we have felt before, albeit only fleetingly: that we are glad we came even though we spent so much of our time wishing we hadn't....We are here to go somewhere else."

Dyer shares equally the ups and downs of the travel experience and combines it with the cultural riches (art, jazz, philosophy, and more) that characterize a well-lived life. His observations are keen, his writing sublime. Thrown into the mix is often a sly joke as well. Travel reflects the traveler, much as a coutnry reflect its people. That we feel the need as travelers to journey to a strange land to find ourselves is but part of the paradox that makes it magical.

[Nixi92 · Rating 4 out of 5]

Piccoli frammenti di vita, di viaggi, di amori. L'amore più grande, però, è quello per la conoscenza: bellissime le pagine su Adorno e le opere d'arte che accompagnano i brevi articoli raccolti. La visione del mondo attraverso gli occhi dell'autore è elegante, divertente, ma non priva di problemi. Il "racconto" che mi ha colpito di più è proprio quello che dà il titolo alla raccolta: Sabbie bianche. A metà tra la fiction e la non-fiction, veniamo catapultati in un thriller-road-movie sulle note di Riders on The Storm.

Riders on the storm

Consigliato.

[Paul · Rating 3 out of 5]

In this series of ten essays, Geoff Dyer explores the reasons why we travel using examples from the excursions that he makes. He travels to China to see the Forbidden City in Beijing where he starts to become besotted with his guide there. From his home-town of Los Angeles, he makes a pilgrimage to visit the residence of TW Adorno and the art that is the Watts Towers. There is a trip to Mexico to visit the art installation of Walter De Maria called The Lightning Field and the amazing Spiral Jetty draws him to Utah. A trip north to see the aurora borealis with his wife and she is with him again in New Mexico after visiting White Sands where they collect a hitchhiker and then see a sign advising against it…

A trip that has lots of activity for him would be boring, as we see when he goes to French Polynesia to trace the ghosts of Gauguin and it falls a little flat. But it is the journeys that don’t work that gives him scope to explore the inner recesses of his mind and to explore the reasons behind us travelling. Is it for the experiences or the desire to tell people what we have done? Slightly surreal at times, it is really well written in some of the essays, he is very perceptive and his bone-dry wit makes this book amusing quite often. Some of it is fictionalised, and it does feel embellished at times, almost as though he is responding to the desire to convince people that he had great time. You can travel in the mind as much as in the physical world, but his final essay is about a profound life changing event that he has. Some great parts; others less so, but interesting nonetheless.

[Courtney · Rating 1 out of 5]

Wow, I really hate this. The book is prefaced with the fact that some of this is non-fiction and some is fiction, but the author / narrator / whatever comes off as the world's most insufferable asshole. Not only does he complain left and right about far-away places that most people don't have the privilege of visiting, he injects it with fatphobic and racist bullshit that makes you want to throw the book across the room. Admittedly, I'm not familiar with Geoff Dyer's work prior so I don't know if there's something obvious I'm missing about him entirely, but this was terrible.

[Mark · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hilarious. Insightful. Masterful. Fun. I could go on... it's just a great read.

[JennyB · Rating 2 out of 5]

I picked this up because I’d read a very funny, wry essay Geoff Dyer had written about not having – and never wanting – children. Of course I expected White Sands would be different: it’s travel writing. But hey, I love travel, so I thought there was a good chance I’d love travel writing by this clever, self-aware Brit. Turns out, I didn’t, perhaps not least because this isn’t travel writing, not really. Much of the time, it’s about how Dyer is not having a good time in the locations to which he travels. The locales become backdrop for Dyer’s essays about himself, and that only really works in the last essay of the book.

Before that, Dyer grouses about Polynesia, where instead of caring too much about his stated topic – Gauguin – he’s extremely concerned about his own heat rash, and his lack of enjoyment while visiting a tropical paradise, boo hoo. Despite the whining tone of this essay – and often hereafter in the book -- Dyer manages to come up with astute observations, which readers (or at least this reader) could really connect to, such as his notion of not enjoying oneself during a trip, but at the end being glad of having gone. Oh jeez, yes, I thought, I’ve totally experienced that.

I liked his pieces about Land Art, when he visits the Spiral Jetty in the Great Salt Lake, and the Lightning Field in New Mexico. Land art is an interesting concept, and the American Southwest is a place where there’s space for such grandiose undertakings. I had not heard of either of these places, and I’d love to see them. This, it seems to me, is what travel writing is really for: inspiring your own fantasies for travel. Plus, it’s interesting to read about the reaction of a foreigner to the Southwest, an irresistibly bewitching area, unique in the universe.

So Dyer gets it right, in some ways: relatable observations, little known topics, and interesting locations. But he also gets it wrong. Often. Like when he spends a section bitching about how cold and dark it is when he fails to see the Northern Lights in Scandinavia, I mostly want to smack him. I am similarly left cold when he fails to talk about Beijing, and instead talks about his desire to hook up with some woman he meets in Beijing. I was convinced the White Sands chapter would be the worst, given the fact that it is absolutely not about White Sands. Oh sure, there are a few cursory sentences about what is surely one of the most beautiful, surreal and inaccessible places on earth, but mainly, this chapter is about the poor judgement of picking up a hitchhiker who may or may not have escaped from a nearby detention facility. Astonishingly, this isn’t even the worst chapter, though. That accolade goes to the one about Pilgrimages. Here is Dyer as his most tedious and obscurantist, bloviating with supercilious smugness about his discovery of some justly-forgotten philosopher named Adorno. He then proceeds to ruin the piece about Watts Towers by digressing into more obscurantist nonsense about jazz musicians. Jazz, and chess, are the sine qua non topics for inspiring rhapsodic enthusiasm in devotees, and killing boredom in benighted uninitiates such as myself.

Dyer goes out on a high note, redeeming himself with his last chapter. This (non-travel) chapter might even be the best one in this book of (non-travel) writing: in it, Dyer displays humor, vulnerability and humanity in equal measure, and after reading it, I kind of get why people read him in the first place.

[Anthony Crupi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dyer’s a bit of a pill in his fussy, English way, and his initial eagerness to pluck himself up by the roots and thrust himself into alien environments is almost always a prelude to sustained passages of spirited whinging. (Flustered and querulous, like a duck who’s been awakened in the middle of a really cool dream about wet bread, it’s as if he’s forever unaware that there is no exact antonym in the language for “disappointment.”) But bearing witness as Dyer’s enthusiasms atrophy into a sort of shuffling peevishness is half the fun, and his ongoing analysis of how the world ineffably fails to meet his expectations is both enlightening and hilarious. He’s nothing if not self-aware. On the trail of the huffy, olid Paul Gauguin in Tahiti, Dyer notes, “The devastating scale and frequency of my disappointment” — there’s that word again — “was proof of how much I still expected and wanted from the world.” He’s trying, world … at least meet him halfway.
tl;dr A funny, and at times moving, companion to his more antic 2003 volume, Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It, and a must-read for Dyer enthusiasts.

[Laura · Rating 3 out of 5]

From BBc Radio 4 - Book of the Week:
Many people love the books of Geoff Dyer (and author William Boyd calls him 'a true original'); be they novels, ruminations or travel essays. White Sands is his latest travel book and today he writes about his new home in Los Angeles and makes a pilgrimage to visit the house of an intellectual hero. With characteristic wit and a keen eye for detail, he writes beautifully about place and always acknowledges that travel can be as much about disappointment as it is about elation and discovery. In White Sands he makes a series of pilgrimages like this one and then wonders why they don't quite live up to their reputation.

Read by Alex Jennings who recently played Alan Bennett in The Lady in the Van and Willy Wonka in the musical version of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

Abridged by Katrin Williams
Produced by Julian Wilkinson.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07h6fmf

[Chris Roberts · Rating 1 out of 5]

Alternate titles to this thing.

"Plastic Emotions and Devotions"

"You're Alright, I'm Alright - Let's Hug"

"The Book of Trite"

"Hope is a Four Letter Word"

"A Traveler's Guide to Generic Inspiration"

"The Smiley Face Collection"

"Happy Dance Your Life, Just Try!"

"Nobody Likes the Sad Clown"

"The Hackneyed Days"

"Joy isn't Just a Woman's Name!"

"Yay! We're Not Insane, the World Is!"

Chris Roberts

[Colin · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think it’s pretty clear that the better essays here are about things Dyer is comfortable with and interested in, like the Watts Towers essay that includes a bunch of writing about Don Cherry, Ornette Coleman, Mingus, and Charlie Haden. This essay was fun and made me want to give Dyer’s book But Beautiful a go, given that it’s about jazz, which he seems to fancy. As others have said, I don’t think this is a very strong book as a whole, and a lot of the essays are heavy with complaint (or total boredom) which can be an insightful tool, except it isn’t here, for the most part. Dyer’s English self-awareness would be unbearable if he were self-flagellating or self-correcting, pulling out his apologetic moralist whip. Thank god he isn’t, but some people will definitely just think he’s a dickhead. Going on about fat Tahitians like he does…He’s a weird brand of thorny. My main take away is that he’s actually really good at explicating photographs, and I would read a book like that if he ever wanted to write it.

[Paul Wilner · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Travel and travellers are two things I loathe - and yet, her I am, all set to tell the story of my expeditions.'' - Claude Levi-Strauss, "Triste Tropiques.''
I agree. Travel writing is generally a category I make a point of avoiding; even thinking about it makes me feel tired.
On the other hand, Dyer is one of my favorite writers. He does not disappoint here; principally because he's not really writing about "destinations' but about his own ongoing attempt to come to grips - sometimes hilariously - with the manifestations and consequences of his obsessions, fears and even delights (although the essay on the latter, a visit to the "Electric Fields'' art installation is not as successful, methinks, as the title essay, with its noir narrative or the final piece, in which Dyer comes to grips with a personal health crisis with characteristic British offhandedness, that gives it even further force.
The dude abideth.

[Owen Curtsinger · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some pretty comical recounts of travels spent on an assortment of odd pilgrimages: to Tahiti to search for Gauguin, to the Watts Towers in L.A. to further appreciate a Don Cherry album cover, to Svalbard to see the Northern Lights. We know right away that Dyer isn't necessarily going to find what he's looking for, but by joining him on his farces we find some wonderful moments of insight about what it means to travel and search and wonder and never find quite what we expect. Is it worth it for Dyer to travel and constantly be disappointed, his expectation averted? Probably. Is it worth your time to read? Probably!

[Valérie Boisclair · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5/5 : il en manquait de peu pour un 4, mais les longueurs au 3/4 du livre et le namedrop m’ont un peu ralentie dans ma lecture.

Ceci étant dit, Geoff Dyer a une plume remplie d’humour et d’images. L’objet de ses interrogations me parlait beaucoup : Pourquoi aller ailleurs? Pourquoi avoir besoin de voir de ses yeux vus un paysage, une oeuvre, un lieu? «Quelle différence entre voir une chose et ne pas la voir?»

C'est un bouquin parfait pour «voir du pays» quand il nous est impossible de voyager. Il nous amène tantôt à Tahiti, sur les traces de Gauguin, tantôt à Svalbard, dans l'attente inespérée d'une aurore boréale.

[Chloe]

I think I was expecting something more profound and rooted in reality, but this appears to be a semi-autobiographical series of travel vignettes. I found that less interesting that a series of travel essays but what made me DNF this book (a goal of mine for 2022 - freedom to DNF books that aren't interesting within the first 50-100 pages) was the author's tone. It was smug at times, prejudiced at others. The first 2 chapters about Tonga and then Beijing's Forbidden City made my skin crawl at parts. This book is meant to be humorous, but I found that humor was punching-down instead of funny. Dreaded picking it up to read more, so I DNF'd. Not for me.

[Damiana · Rating 3 out of 5]

Primo libro che ho letto di Geoff Dyer, scaricato gratuitamente nell'ambito dell'iniziativa "Solidarietà digitale", e temo anche l'ultimo. Onestamente pensavo meglio: il libro racconta alcuni luoghi da lui visitati nella sua vita, ma l'ho trovato a tratti noioso. Peccato.

[Talia · Rating 3 out of 5]

Questo è un libro decisamente spiazzante, tanto è vero che se mi chiedessero a che genere appartiene io non saprei rispondere: diario di viaggio? raccolta di racconti autobiografici/di fantasia? saggio filosofico/sociologico? Tutto questo in qualche misura c'è, ma c'è anche dell'altro che non riesco bene a definire.
Non avevo mai letto nulla di questo autore e devo dire che è stato una piacevole scoperta: le sue parole a volte ti sferzano con ironia e sarcasmo, altre ti accarezzano con delicatezza e malinconia ma sempre ti lasciano qualcosa, che sia un motivo di riflessione sulla società o anche solo un semplice sorriso.

Ho apprezzato il libro anche perchè mi ha "costretta" a documentarmi su luoghi e persone che non conoscevo affatto: ad esempio non avevo mai sentito parlare del Lightning Field in Nuovo Messico o di Sabato Rodia e delle torri da lui costruite a Los Angeles e dopo averne letto mi è venuta voglia di saperne di più.
La mia parte preferita è senza dubbio quella ambientata alle Svalbard, mentre quella a mio avviso un pò più debole è quella dedicata ad Adorno.

In conclusione: lettura consigliata, a patto che siate disposti a farvi "sballottare" un pò in giro per il mondo senza soluzione di continuità!

[Deborah J · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars really.
The opening almost light-hearted tone was surprising and welcome. Previous experience of Dyers’ work has made me wary of his self-proclaimed intellectualism, but this is a good read. The piece on the northern lights made me laugh out loud in recognition - not of the northern lights, but of the feeling of being somewhere you’d wanted to go and then dealing with the disappointment with a kind of petulance. “Pilgrimage” is fascinating - Adorno and Sontag - and makes me want to read Walter Benjamin (something i’ve been gearing up to for about a year).

I’ll probably never experience at first hand the Spiral Jetty, or Rodia’s towers, but I doubt it matters. It’s perhaps enough to read Dyers’ account and reflect on why one should feel the need to travel, go and see things for oneself. However, this isn’t travel writing, a genre I don’t really care for; instead, it’s about Dyer and his obsessions.

This book is concerned with many things - jazz, light, photography, psychogeography, ageing, having a stroke, art. Oh, and travelling, and why perhaps you shouldn't.

[Sandra · Rating 4 out of 5]

Al principio sorprende porque Geoff Dyer no es un escritor de viajes al uso ni sus destinos tampoco lo son. No se deleita. No finge.
Arenas Blancas comprende nueve visitas. En una de ellas viaja con su mujer al norte de Noruega para ver una aurora boreal. Su cachondeo sobre la eterna noche oscura (del alma) es tan irreverente que puede llegar a provocar un ligero rechazo.
Dyer es verborreico, culto, jazzístico y bombardea con mil referencias. Es estimulante. Divertido.
Arenas Blancas tiene algo más. Evoluciona. El tono de Dyer pasa del cachondeo mental a la ternura reverencia del último capítulo.
Quiero más.

[Deb (Readerbuzz) Nance · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you've never read Geoff Dyer, you are missing out. This book has Dyer visiting great spots for travelers, but if you are thinking the Grand Canyon and the Eiffel Tower, you are way, way off. Dyer takes you to places you'd never think of yourself and shares his odd random thoughts along the way, thoughts you'd never think of yourself. It's nevertheless a fun trip.

[Jake · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fascinating criticism of why we travel--though offers no alternative which is necessarily a bad thing. I got a little bored near the end when talking about LA, but that could be my personal distrust of the city.

3.75/5

[gallizio · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ho sceso dandoti il braccio

[Anne · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've had Geoff Dyer on my radar screen for quite a while (I own two other of his 18+ books, Out of Sheer Rage and Yoga for People Who Can't Be Bothered to Do It, though they are packed away somewhere at the moment). I'm not even sure how this one came into my hands, but it proved a thoroughly enjoyable— thoughtful, funny, sympathetic —dinnertime companion for me this last week as I slaved away at a book arts/metalwork workshop in the Gold Country of California. The dinner break was my down time, and it was so nice to sink into this book, spend time with a new (undemanding) friend, after a long day of focused concentration and interaction with strangers.

The fact that I was elsewhere fits, because White Sands is about being elsewhere—adventuring, conducting pilgrimages, making associations between at-home and out-there. It comprises nine chapters: "Where? What? Where?" (about Gauguin and the South Pacific); "Forbidden City" (Beijing); "Space in Time" (Walter De Maria's Lightning Field, New Mexico); "Time in Space" (Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty, Utah); "Northern Dark" (Svalbard, Norway); "White Sands" (picking up a hitchhiker in southern New Mexico); "Pilgrimage" (the house that Theodor Adorno lived in in Los Angeles); "The Ballad of Jimmy Garrison" (Watts Towers, LA); "Beginning" (an ischemic stroke). Each chapter begins with a prelude, though the book ends with a prelude that lacks a following chapter; the final words of the prelude, and of the book: "Time is alive, permanently."

So the book is about place, definitely. (The back-cover keywords are "travel:essays.") But it is also very much about time. The preludes often take us far back into Dyer's youth—setting the scene, you might say; but the chapters bring us fully into his fifty-ish sensibility, erudition, curiosity, wondering.

And when I say the chapters are "about" those things: well, yes and no. Chapter 8, for example, "The Ballad of Jimmy Garrison," is about Watts Towers, yes; but it's also about jazz (very much about jazz), heritage, cathedrals, art, scale, ambition, disillusion—and more. Jazz is evoked in "Where? What? Where?" as well, which, yes, is "about" Gauguin and the South Pacific, but even more it is about how we, today, experience place (and our time), given the mythologies from the past (both cultural and our own), which so often bring disappointment in our real-time experience, our dreams, our idealizations.

Here's a representative passage, with its leaps: "After the museum we went to Mataiea and Punaauia (now a featureless suburb of Papeete), where Gauguin lived and where some of his most famous works were painted. I suddenly had the idea that yellow might be a symbol for banana, but apart from that my mind was completely blank and I couldn't think myself into Gauguin's shoes, couldn't see the world through his eyes. As I stood there, however, seeing what he had seen without even coming close to seeing as he had seen, I did get an inkling of the attraction of Islam. Impossible—not even conceivable—that a Muslim, on making the mandatory, once-in-a-lifetime pilgrimage to Mecca, could be disappointed. That is the essential difference between religious and secular pilgrimage: the latter always has the potential to disappoint. In the wake of this realization there swiftly followed another: that my enormous capacity for disappointment was actually an achievement, a victory. The devastating scale and frequency of my disappointment ('I am down, but not yet defeated,' Gauguin snivel-boasted) was proof of how much I still expected and wanted from the world, of what high hopes I still had of it. When I am no longer capable of disappointment the romance will be gone: I may as well be dead."

I thoroughly enjoyed Dyer: his wit and humor, his British moroseness, his exuberance, his intelligence—but especially his perceptiveness and thoughtfulness, the way he can snap disparate ideas together and make a new something to wonder about. I flagged many passages in this book, and right now I'm thinking it's not impossible that I will go back and read the whole thing again. Maybe next time I'm off at a workshop, looking for a diverting dinner companion. (Or maybe I'll have dug through my boxes and found the two aforementioned titles. I bet they'd do the job just as well.)

[Mark Oppenlander · Rating 2 out of 5]

English author Geoff Dyer has won a number of literary awards, but I struggle to understand why. It's not that the man can't write; he can turn a phrase as well as the next wordsmith. But if this collection is indicative of his style and approach to essays . . . or reflects what he is like in real life . . . I think I would find him insufferable.

The book chronicles a number of Dyer's personal experiences, mostly involving travel. One story involves a disappointing research trip to French Polynesia, where Dyer plans to study the life of the artist Paul Gauguin. Another tells of an ill-fated trip to Norway to see the Northern Lights with his spouse. Others discuss visits he and his wife make to art installations such as The Lightning Field in New Mexico, or the Spiral Jetty in Utah. The common denominator in all of these tales and reflections is that Dyer is unhappy. He never really enjoys the experiences, and is left wanting something more.

But as one reads his essays, it seems obvious that the proximate cause of Dyer's dissatisfaction is Dyer himself. He absolutely exudes the privilege of the white, wealthy, educated, male European, who can always think of something better to be doing, or somewhere else to be. He finds Scandinavia too cold, and the South Pacific too dull. Nothing is good enough. In other stories, as he discusses obscure philosophers or jazz musicians, one can almost hear him looking down the bridge of his nose at those who don't "get it" or haven't heard of these figures. And don't even get me started on the story about the hitchhiker who may or may not be a convict; the way he and his wife (called Jessica in the book) treat this man would be unconscionable to most. Dyer comes across as a snooty, self-serving, amoral toad, deeply impressed by his own intellect and lost in life due to lack of meaning.

To be fair, Dyer has said that these essays span fiction and non-fiction, suggesting that elements have been fabricated. Still, they are clearly based on real events at some level. So what's fiction and what's fact? Has he tried to make himself look better or worse than he really is? If the latter, why would one go to such depths to come across like an asshole? Perhaps Dyer thinks he is being clever or funny, in the way that folks who are cynical and jaded believe they are being cool. For me, he just seemed like a jerk, and I felt sorry for his wife.

The one essay that bucks the trend is the final entry, "Beginning," in which Dyer faces an unfavorable medical diagnosis. Here the author seems more self-reflective, more humble. He must confront his own mortality and privilege, at least obliquely, and consider that the world isn't really about him. It's a small ray of humility, amidst a book that is filled with hubris and disdain.

I was intrigued by some of the places Dyer traveled to in this book. However, I think if I went to these places, I would hope to come at them with curiosity and respect. Dyer seems incapable of these things, and I don't think I would enjoy traveling with him.

[Bibiana · Rating 2 out of 5]

Y sin saber yo mucho de libros sobre viajes me voy a atrever a decir que el libro es malo, ya lo siento, pensaba que iba a estar genial, pero ha sido todo lo contrario. Si quieres un libro en el que oír llorar y quejarse a su protagonista, aquí lo tienes. Dejo la reseña completa del blog: http://www.madridylibros.com/2018/04/...