Voyager

by Russell Banks, Pierre Furlan (Translator)

Russell Banks n'a jamais cessé de nourrir un désir d'évasion qui l'habite depuis l'enfance, et qui l'a notamment conduit des îles de la Caraïbe aux sommets de l'Himalaya.

Dans ce captivant recueil de récits, qui se lit aussi comme un véritable livre de vie, Russell Banks invite le lecteur à l'accompagner dans ses voyages les plus mémorables. Entretien avec Fidel Castro à Cuba, retrouvailles "hippies" d'anciens élèves à Chapel Hill vingt ans plus tard, fugue à Édimbourg pour convoler en secret avec sa quatrième épouse, excursions exigeantes en très haute montagne, autant d'étapes formatrices au fil desquelles l'écrivain interroge sa relation au monde, aux femmes, et, plus largement, à la condition humaine.

Entrelaçant, de paysage en paysage, histoire personnelle et collective, contexte politique et social, la relation de voyage se fait ici examen de conscience et méditation profonde, ouvrant un chemin vers le coeur et l'âme d'un écrivain aussi prestigieux que respecté.

Genres: Travel, Nonfiction, Essays, Memoir, Autobiography, Biography Memoir, Biography

423 pages, Paperback

First published May 17, 2016

About the author

Russell Banks was a member of the International Parliament of Writers and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His work has been translated into twenty languages and has received numerous international prizes and awards. He has written fiction, and more recently, non-fiction, with Dreaming up America. His main works include the novels Continental Drift, Rule of the Bone, Cloudsplitter, The Sweet Hereafter, and Affliction. The latter two novels were each made into feature films in 1997.

Reviews

[Holly · Rating 2 out of 5]

In the first piece in this collection, titled "Voyager," Banks uses a Caribbean island-hopping adventure as the frame for telling his soon-to-be fourth wife an account of his first three prior marriages and why they failed. His place-centered writing in this piece was fine - Banks is, of course, an excellent writer - but my god when he wrote about love and romance and his passion for the act of marrying the prose would immediately turn purple and grandiose and filled with psychoanalysis-inflected nonsense. It was self-aggrandizing BS. Banks is ostensibly being revealing and self-critical in this personal narrative, and contemplates that he must have had a role in allowing the unions to fail and in abandoning his daughter (really?). But I heard it as self-aggrandizing: He ultimately realizes that none of it was truly his fault (he had to reenact his parents' bad marriage a few times before he learned), and it was really his ex-wives' faults - for loving him too much and needing too much of his attention (or something). He goes through the motions of self-criticism and then applauds himself for doing it. I was listening to the audiobook while doing some solo long-distance driving and couldn't easily fast-forward or pause the file at 70mph. So I felt trapped in the car with this windbag who catalogues his past wives' faults (and great beauty and passionate sexualities, of course) - but is so confident that this current wife-to-be is his one true love and everything will be different now - which just made me roll my eyes and talk back to the steering wheel.

Perhaps because the first long piece irritated me so much I came to the whole collection with a skeptical eye, tinged feminist. His stance as an affluent, educated, highly successful white American was apparent in most observations, and his "male gaze" (the women here are so beautiful...). Bank is also adamant that he needs to go off exploring by himself in a new place - to get in touch with himself and the place, he says. - This grated on me because he doesn't seem to recognize that this is privilege a woman traveling alone often doesn't have.

Banks makes the distinction between being a traveler and tourist, and assures his fiancée in the first essay during their island-hopping adventure that the two of them are travelers, not tourists like most Americans ("They go for a week and manage to visit and explore no more than a single island, or if they're lucky, a single cluster of islands.") But how can he be a true traveler when he is visiting "thirty islands in sixty days," all expenses paid? And when they spend only a few hours near the hotel or airport and dislike the place because it seems too commercial and gaudy (an economy relying on tourism) and then jump back in their plane and move to the next island before he has even tried to get off the beaten track or talk to the people?

The last two pieces in the collection were the finest, I thought. Here Banks chronicles his mountain-climbing trips in the Andes and the Himalayas. (I assumed that climbing companion who is renowned playwright & screenwriter named David is David Mamet?) I became caught up and interested in these stories and Banks's self-observations were more believable because he wasn't over analyzing himself and others.

But throughout the whole collection Banks' travel writing is about himself. And when he's not talking about himself I didn't see him delving deeply into the people and culture of places. Instead he composes descriptions of places, observations on the natural world and such - and these are usually evocatively drawn and often quite lovely.

[Jeanne · Rating 2 out of 5]

Since travel is a favorite genre of mine & the Caribbean (actually any island) a preferred destination, thought I'd give this one a try, although I was not familiar with the author. Banks, who comes across as an obnoxious egotist, devotes the first section to "true confessions" about his past, with island hopping & a brief glimpse of Caribbean history as a sidebar. I did enjoy revisiting the Seychelles (vicariously this time.) But then lost interest when Banks romanticizes getting married for the fourth time (groan~) & did a fast forward through the dreary chapters describing treks in cold rainy places.
This is a strange collection, with not much continuity to time or place.

[Stephanie · Rating 2 out of 5]

If you are as intensely interested in Russell as he is in himself, you'll love this book.

[Liz · Rating 1 out of 5]

I didn't get very far into this book before I realized it is a type of travelogue that I despise: an older, usually white, male who recounts travels hidden among their life's "trials." They never learn from where they visit and often disparage the cultures they encounter. They act superior to everything they see, until it reflects them. Then they hate it.

[Laurie Mcclary · Rating 1 out of 5]

I did not finish, the story line slow and I tired of the author blaming everyone but himself for his three failed marriages. In the part I read there wasn't much travel writing.

[Jim · Rating 2 out of 5]

It is a bit of a disappointment when an author whose work you highly regard (CLOUDSPLITTER) delivers something that you just didn't like too much. While the latter essays were ok, I would advise people to not even attempt the first long essay "Voyager." My God, how many serial "ands" can one writer pack into multiple sentences and on one page, over and over and over and. . . well, you get the picture. I had a graduate-level professor who would have been apoplectic. A few cases of this structure is ok (lots of authors use it), but Banks really overdid it. And then, we get too much personal information and contemplation (repeatedly) about his marriages and love interests. He did have an interesting life; I like his political and social stances. One other criticism is his repeated mentions in just about every essay of his dislikes (such as package tourism) and his eye for lovely lasses. Anyway, the latter half of the collection wasn't so bad, but steer your cruise ship away from the former half.

[Clifford · Rating 4 out of 5]

Having studied with Russell Banks and read most of his fiction, I was happy to come upon this collection of travel essays. I suspect that some people will be put off by the long first entry in the book, a recounting of a trip he took in the Caribbean with the woman who would become his fourth wife, in which he shares with her--and the reader--the sad history of his previous marriages. Meanwhile, they hop from island to island and the story gets bleaker and bleaker. But for the reader who perseveres, the second half of the book is less self-indulgent, filled with adventures around the world, including a Himalayan trek when Banks was already in his 70s.

See my full review here.

[Wendy Cosin · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was good to finish this book of travel essays upon my return from travel; of course, it makes me wish I could write. That said, I hated the first half of the book - Banks mixes up exploring Caribbean islands with a seemingly endless story told to his future fourth wife about the failure of his first three marriages. The subsequent shorter essays are more interesting, both about the places he visited and his experiences as an older person hiking in high mountains.

[Scott Gilbert]

So weird to be reading these stories about a 70-year-old man climbing mountains around the world, while I, at 55, am laid up with a cold and can't get up the gumption to drive 2 hours to Galveston. I think I could manage a flight to the U. S. Virgins, though, if given a ticket.

[Nicole Geub · Rating 1 out of 5]

had to turn it off. boring. this is a biography of the guys life and it's not what I was looking for. couldn't get past the first part. not my flavor I guess.

[Maud Lemieux · Rating 4 out of 5]

Je suis tellement en train de découvrir un auteur majeur... la deuxième partie est franchement plus intéressante que la première.

[Elizabeth · Rating 1 out of 5]

There was a time when I would have loved this book. The writing is good but the self-absorption and justifications feel overplayed

[Laura Anne · Rating 4 out of 5]

An old man recounts his travels and adventures in a memoir format and at times it is very moving. It made me look at my past relationships and the reasons they failed with an outside perspective.

[Doctor Moss · Rating 4 out of 5]

Voyager is part memoir, part travel book. If you’ve read Banks’ fiction, this semi-autobiography will give you a kind of parallel universe to the world of those novels. I would never say that this book is better or anywhere near his novels. But that's mostly because he is a great novelist.

People like Banks took a hard path. Most don’t do as well at it as he has. These are the people who drift out of high school, maybe go to college, maybe go to a few colleges, but they never settle on a nice, secure way of life. They don’t learn accounting or computer science. They roam, they try things out, they seem to fail a lot at personal relationships. They are dire introverts with a counter-need to build friendships and romances.

They have lives that are interesting at least. And some of them can make other people’s lives interesting through their writing. Not all — some are undoubtedly those people you don’t want to get stuck having to listen to in some bar or at a counter at Denny’s. But out of that same group, you get people like Banks.

Almost half of the book is a single essay. It recounts Banks’ return to the Caribbean, his original time there fictionalized in Jamaica Stories. He and his wife to-be, Chase, go from island to island, mixing thoughts about the current state of the islands, with Banks’ quasi-confessional to Chase about his three earlier marriages and their sad and sometimes guilty endings.

It’s all a bit of a “journey through the past.” And parts of it aren’t easy for Banks, and, probably not for his wife-to-be either. You see some of the same self-imposed angst that his characters have. Always being at least slightly out of step, even with good times, is painful.

Many of the other essays have to do with hiking. Banks is a hiker and a mountain climber. A very serious one, even into his seventies. As a hiker and climber, he isn’t a tourist as he was sometimes in the Caribbean. It’s all about the hike, or the climb. And he doesn’t always succeed.

Banks is like his characters, more anti-hero than hero. Things don’t always go well. He can’t always be proud of what he does, but he’s trying to put together a whole that he can respect.

[drowningmermaid · Rating 3 out of 5]

So .... this is a journey of self-reflection against a backdrop of travel from a literature professor on his fourth wife. If that gives you strong Philip Roth-in-real-life vibes, well, there are some of those.

It starts really strong and really engaging-- someone being realistic about his relationship failures while telling about travel with all its gritty reality as well as glory-- so he plays up, rather than tones down, the ransacking of his car (tourist hate) and the plantation owner who has, in modern days, fathered the not-slaves serving at his table. Some of the things that happen to him are so weird they strain credibility-- seriously he FORGOT that he was peripherally involved with the MAFIA? He met his own personal version of Seinfeld's Newman following him around to avenge an imaginary insult from his father? Or is the implication that this guy was his father's student/lover? Ok, I mean that one I could believe more easily.

But somewhere towards the end all I can think listening to this is Holy God this guy is full of himself. I feel as if I, too, have had a compressed version of one his marriages. Going from thinking he is a likable misanthrope to raging, hatable narcissist in the space of 350 pages. At some point, around when he takes up mountain climbing, it starts to feel like he is pointedly going out of his way to try to feel better about himself by disparaging everyone around him-- like a bitter, snide Dave Barry.

[Rage · Rating 2 out of 5]

It got better towards the end, which is the only reason this isn't one star. I almost put it down midway through the first story - it was just him banging on and on about his wives, how shit a human being he was being (without admitting it outright, obviously - very much like the peak American exceptionalism way he writes about colonialism), how beautiful his ex? wife (I lose track) is, how he's having an affair but it isn't really an affair because they're separated...

Oh, and he's thinking of this while in the Carribbean making vaguely racist remarks about the locals. That's where the travel writing bit comes in.

It improves significantly with his later stories about hiking through the mountains, although he constantly has that privileged, trying to be woke but actually being casually racist white man voice - there are parts that made me scrunch my nose up in disgust, and I'd quote them except I don't have the stomach to go back and find them. (I remember one, about him being surprised at an English sign outside the House of Slaves, and remembering that Black Americans exist as an afterthought. Horrific!)

Then again it isn't hard to improve significantly on most of the book. There are far better travelogues to read.

[Chris Tilden · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have never read a Russell Banks piece of fiction, so when I stumbled upon Voyager at our local library books sale, I decided it was time to read SOMETHING by this noted American author. I'm not sure that Voyager is a good pick to decide how much I enjoy the work of Mr. Banks, as I imagine this work differs considerably from most of his fictional work, as this is a series of "travelogues" of various "voyages" of his, including a several-month tour of all of the Caribbean Islands as part of a writing assignment, a college reunion in Chapel Hill, and mountain climbing in the Andes and the Himalaya. Overall I found it enjoyable and well-written. A few of the pieces I found a bit tedious. Woven into the story of his travels in the Carribbean were reminisces on his three marriages (on this trip he was traveling with the woman who would become his fourth wife) which I found distracting and a bit self-indulgent, and I could have done without the college reunion (uninteresting). But his descriptions of his mountain climbing efforts in the Andes and Himalayas were beautiful and compelling. No regrets for having read this one.

[Susan Emmet · Rating 3 out of 5]

Grabbed Banks off the new shelf at the library, excited to enter his travel musings.
The first half, dedicated to the Carribbean and figuring out why three marriages failed and the fourth would work, went well for me in remembering times on St. John and St. Thomas, but much less so with his thoughts on youthful failures, abandonment of children and wives, playing the blame game, and rollicking through the islands on someone else's dime.
The second half - travel pieces - are more solid and echo his strengths as a writer. A sense of place, of loss and gain, an ability to transform and transcend, an appreciation of human strength and weakness, a sort of humility, a growing awareness of the vagaries and gifts of aging - these essays captured me, especially "Fox and Whale, Priest and Angel" and "Old Goat."
Good travel writers often operate best in solitude and inhabit a non-judgmental cocoon. I'm not an inveterate traveler, but much reading makes me think this way. Banks perhaps needs to feed his ego less and sense of amazement more.

[Theresa · Rating 1 out of 5]

Part One is carried along in a parallel structure: island hopping through the Caribbean to write a magazine article, while also explaining his first three marriages to his fourth fiancé. While it seemed a good idea at first, I found it too much, too shallow to enjoy. All the islands merged into one portrait, as did the story of his wives and mother, whom he claims conditioned him to marry poorly the first three times.
I felt irritated by his "falling in and out of love" as if he were helpless to take ownership of his decisions. The others just weren't 'right' for him. (What about him for them?)
Maybe it is too much like the national news at this time, but I found it depressing and whiney.

I read the final chapter as well, but it just didn't grab me.
I am disappointed, bec I have read Banks' fiction and I believe him to be a fine writer.

[Janice · Rating 1 out of 5]

I’ve enjoyed this author’s fiction, but found the stories in this collection tedious at best. It is well written, but that’s about all I can say positive about it. The first and longest was supposedly about his travels in the Caribbean, however he kept weaving in bits pondering his failed marriages and past wives that truly were boring to anyone other than him. I trudged through over many months, and found this was the ideal book to read right before going to sleep, as it made me incredibly drowsy. My advice is to skip this book entirely, and read his other fine writing.

[David W · Rating 4 out of 5]

Most of Part 1, on the Caribbean islands, was so disappointing, especially from an author who has spent so much time in Jamaica, that I almost quit reading it. But Part 1 ended with his visit to Cuba, & his meeting w/Castro renewed my interest in the book. The rest of journeys described in the book were great, especially nthe last 2, on hiking in the Andes & Himalayas. And yes, I get that travel books like this are about the author, but even if the backdrop of the journey is to play only a minor role, it still has to impart something of the flavor of a place being written about.

[T P Kennedy · Rating 3 out of 5]

A moderately interesting collection of travel writing. The book starts with a long piece where the travel writing is a cover for an autobiographical reflection on his past relationships. This is a little self indulgent but very revealing. There's a few short but good travel pieces. The book deteriorates towards the end with a series of climbing anecdotes. These pieces don't advance much beyond the level of tall tales and seem to be exercises in self praise. In short, a very mixed bag.

[Sonja · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have mixed feelings about this book. I enjoyed the descriptions of the various travel destinations, but didn't really care about some of the personal stuff: his ruminations on his marriages. I had just finished reading the title essay where the locale was the string of Caribbean islands, which unfortunately were devastated by Hurricane Irma and are now awaiting the second wallop from Hurricane Jose.

[Laurie · Rating 4 out of 5]

It took me a while to get into this book, not being very interested in the Caribbean, but finally everything Banks writes about is interesting, especially himself and the energy that propels him in his relationships and in his life. An inspiration. I am now inspired to get to the Seychelles, although perhaps it too,has been spoiled in the years since he was there.

[Jeannette · Rating 2 out of 5]

I had expectations. The book failed to meet most of them. My problem, yes, but this writer was far too superficial in his travel writing. He didnt describe places very well, the people he met, the situations he found himself in, all failed to evoke anything profound in this failed reader, me. What did I miss?

[Patti · Rating 4 out of 5]

In Voyager, I found myself much more interested in finding out more about Banks than the places he visited. I hungered to learn more about his journey through four marriages, his love of both Miami and Keene, NY, and his drive to make death-defying climbs even at 72. I finished the book feeling that the world needs more people like Russell Banks. I grieve he no longer graces this earth.

[R. Patrick · Rating 4 out of 5]

Russell Banks is a gifted writer. He has a wonderful turn of phrase. A couple of the chapters are more memoir than travel writing, although they have a lot to do with geography. The chapters that are more travel writing than memoir are well written, colorful, and poignant.

[Delorean · Rating 3 out of 5]

Has interesting details of the author's life. Enjoyed the description of various islands he visited. Overall, it was ok.

[Suzanne · Rating 1 out of 5]

did not finish

[Korie Brown · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very well written. I enjoyed both the travelogues and the personal musings.