The Global Soul: Jet Lag, Shopping Malls, and the Search for Home

by Pico Iyer

From the acclaimed author of Video Night in Kathmandu comes this intriguing new book that deciphers the cultural ramifications of globalization and the rising tide of worldwide displacement.

Beginning in Los Angeles International Airport, where town life-shops, services, sociability-is available without a town, Pico Iyer takes us on a tour of the transnational village our world has become. From Hong Kong, where people actually live in self-contained hotels, to Atlanta's Olympic Village, which seems to inadvertently commemorate a sort of corporate universalism, to Japan, where in the midst of alien surfaces his apartment building is called "The Memphis," Iyer ponders what the word "home" can possibly mean in a world whose face is blurred by its cultural fusion and its alarmingly rapid rate of change.

Genres: Travel, Nonfiction, Essays, Memoir, Japan, Unfinished, Current Affairs

302 pages, Paperback

First published February 29, 2000

About the author

Pico Iyer is a British-born essayist and novelist of Indian descent. As an acclaimed travel writer, he began his career documenting a neglected aspect of travel -- the sometimes surreal disconnect between local tradition and imported global pop culture. Since then, he has written ten books, exploring also the cultural consequences of isolation, whether writing about the exiled spiritual leaders of Tibet or the embargoed society of Cuba.

Iyer’s latest focus is on yet another overlooked aspect of travel: how can it help us regain our sense of stillness and focus in a world where our devices and digital networks increasing distract us? As he says: "Almost everybody I know has this sense of overdosing on information and getting dizzy living at post-human speeds. Nearly everybody I know does something to try to remove herself to clear her head and to have enough time and space to think. ... All of us instinctively feel that something inside us is crying out for more spaciousness and stillness to offset the exhilarations of this movement and the fun and diversion of the modern world."

Reviews

[Mastin · Rating 1 out of 5]

Pico: While I understand your being overwhelmed at the rate at which things are moving in your life, I have one piece of advice: slow down. I felt anxious reading this and when I felt the need to pop a Xanax I realized that if his intent was to make the reader feel harried, he succeeded. If it was his intent for me to strangely be bored at the same time, he succeeded as well. Don't waste your time.

[shannon · Rating 2 out of 5]

I wanted to like this a lot more than I did. For some reason, Pico Iyer's writing style makes me think he wants readers to feel sorry for him for not having an easily categorized identity. And I don't feel sorry for him, so it is annoying. He does have some interesting observations about the world but I can't get past his tone to fully appreciate them.

[Vignesh · Rating 4 out of 5]

"The sense of home is not divided, but scattered across the planet, and in the absence of any center at all, people find themselves at sea."

The book is mostly about how as a global soul, or a permanent alien wherever he goes, Pico Iyer finds himself lacking an identity, a sense of belonging. And the book seems to be further about how he makes peace with that fact, a process through which he tends to help the reader make up his mind about the same.

As someone who never had a feeling of home tied to a geographical entity - it has always been the people who brought in that feeling - the book was wonderfully relatable, at least in parts, and completely in spirit. This book perhaps deserves a longer form article, with more personal details, but the very fact that it made me ache for places I've never seen and experiences that I've never had, is a win in its favor.

The book is dense, I'll give you that. The parts where he talks about Canada or the Atlanta Olympcs were really difficult to get through. Sometimes I find myself wondering if he's trying to console me, the immigrant, or he's trying to get me empathize with his sense of non-belonging.

Iyer references a lot of writers, and literary works -- sometimes I can't make if he's reciting poetry or quoting religious texts -- not even a tenth of which an average reader like me would come across in his life. It helps Iyer describe his feeling of being lost, while you are left to vicariously feel that through his writing.

I like this book for the fact that it has given me the reassurance that it is okay to not feel at home anywhere, or feel at home everywhere you go, no matter how far removed you are from the people who actually call it home, that there are several people who feel the same way, that it is alright to feel nostalgic about a place you've only spent a weekend at, that it is alright, even when everything around you echoes your deepest insecurity - wherever you go, even when you go to the place you've called home for your entire life, you feel like you "[...] live in a country where you have to explain that you really belong here."

[Oceana2602 · Rating 1 out of 5]

Well, this sucked.

I had never heard of Pico Iyer until I joined a group here on goodreads that talks about travel literature. I love travel literature (at least I think I do. Maybe I just love Paul Theroux and Mark Twain.) I got the impression that Iyer was one of THE travel authors to read, and immediately put him on my ebay watch-list. A few weeks later, this book was what I was able to acquire(and good thing I bought it for Euro on ebay, too, because it certainly wasn't worth more!)

I wish I could say Iyer lost me, but actually Iyer never even got to me in the first place. He writes likes one of these columnists for monthly fashion magazines - desperate to come up with something smart, because they are, after all, getting paid for it, yet knowing that hardly anyone will read their piece, which is usally buried somewhere in the last couple of pages between not-so-shiny-ads, the impressum, more ads and the preview for the next edition, and that even if someone stumbles upon their one-pager, they could easily scare them off with too much actual content.

In that spirit, when Iyer tries to sell his idea of living in an airport for a few months off as smart, when it is clearly just plain old stupid and about as deep as the puddle in my empty glass, I decided that my time would be better spend looking at the shiny ads on the first pages of Vogue, and I did just that.

(Yes, despite being mean above, I read Vogue and Instyle myself. I'm a bit ashamed, but I'm also a girl and I like shiny things.)

Book's for sale, btw.

[Phannette Nguyen · Rating 4 out of 5]

This will likely to be an unfinished review because as with many thought-provoking books that I’ve come across, there are reflections and observations that the author writes about that I was not able to truly comprehend, probably because I’m still young and haven’t traveled far and long enough to accumulate enough life experiences. But I will try my best to sum up my thoughts on this book, nevertheless.
First off, I will say that this is not an easy book to read. I think the pace of this book reflects the pace at which travel and perhaps life takes place for many people these days too: dizzying fast, vertigo and anxiety-inducing. The book is not only a compilation of travel essays but also of thoughtful observations on the porous state of cultural borders that are dissolving and disintegrating as the result of globalization. Throughout the book, Iyer eludes to and reflects on the effects that globalization has on a person’s sense of belonging, on what it means to be have the face and blood typical of one nation but making a living and finding home on a different continent. In his quest to find peace in the midst of all the hectic flights and a home for his wanderlust soul, he came upon many realizations and interesting observations on cities and airports. This is perhaps part of the reason why I was so drawn to this book: recently I realized that home, that is also the city where I spent the first 16 years of my life growing up in, where I used to spend afternoons biking around and exploring every nook and crannies and getting so enchanted by the hidden charms that it has to offer, no longer stirs up that strong sense of belonging in me when I got off from the plane. Instead, I found myself longing for home in every step I take, everywhere I go. I was tired of feeling homesick for a place that only exists in my mind, of feeling lost and not belonging anywhere: I’m too westernized (and Americanized) to carry deep conversations with my high school friends who have never experienced racism and microaggression and are likely to be privileged in their own bubble at home living in a homogeneous society. But then I’m not Americanized enough to not cringe whenever I have to make small talk or when someone said how are you but really didn’t mean it or have the time to listen to how I am really doing. I am an alien at home in the westernized way that I act and carry myself out and I am an alien here in the States because I am not white and I don’t fit into the mainstream culture here either. I left home at the age of 17 with a simple goal in mind, to find a better education, to learn and better myself. Little did I know I also unwittingly signed up to be a part of the Global Souls club, a club whose members like Pico Iyer, pledge allegiances to not just one country but several and sometimes, none. The longer I live abroad and the more I travel, the less I feel the need for borders and nationalism. I think I’m getting dangerously close to the state of utopia and singing Imagine by John Lennon here but who knows. The world is already a global village and the direction that it is moving toward is definitely toward more globalization which means more people will be part of the Global Souls, whether they know it or not.
The last chapter of the book was interesting and I got to the last page, heaved a sigh and smiled a little because even though this is not a thriller or travel diary entries set in any particular chronological order, I feel like the book did have a happy ending. This is the book that I want to read again in my 30s and again in my 40s, 50s, and 60s, till I get to be the same age as Pico Iyer when he wrote this book. The world would definitely be a different place than the one the he lived in. How different? Only time will know.

[Hugh · Rating 2 out of 5]

Easy to read, but can be boring and annoying at times.

It can also be a discomfiting read for someone (like myself) who has undertaken intensive academic study of phenomena like globalization, transnational networks and communities, diaspora, and so on.

But this might be a good text to read with undergraduates or young students interested in learning more about globalization--the strength of the teaching utilizing the weaknesses of Iyer's problem- and contradiction-filled text. An extra challenge would be to find the strengths in the text.

In all fairness though, I am writing from 2013 and Iyer published this book in 2000, meaning that he likely finished reading it in 1999 or so, when the dream of globalization and the optimism fueling it hadn't burst, before Sept. 11, 2001, and before the global economic crisis beginning in roughly 2008.

[John · Rating 2 out of 5]

Bailed on this one halfway through as I found it almost sci-fi than nonfiction. I understand that it is about real life people and places, but situations so far out of the mainstream that I couldn't begin to identify with the content, and I've traveled a fair amount and am familiar with the world of heavy duty frequent travelers.

[Jessica · Rating 1 out of 5]

Pico Iyer is known as a travel writer, but this book reads closer to an autobiographical dissection of his identity crisis. Iyer writes about a difficult topic, the modern migrant’s search for a sense of belonging. If you have parents from different cultures, multiple passports and/or nationalities and no right to vote in any country in the world, you might find this book intriguing.

As a third culture kid myself, I found I could relate to Iyer’s observations on many levels. The modern migrant’s values, priorities, needs and wants are uniquely different to those of people who have only known one nationality, country and home. Warning: this book is less for the modern traveller and more for the modern migrant or TCK who constantly asks him or her self, ‘Where is home?’

I do have to add however that the entire tone of the book is disorienting. Iyer’s frequent use of brackets to qualify some of his comments and opinions gets irritating rather quickly. I found myself skipping through vast sections by the time I’d reached the third chapter, anxious to escape the glut of dizzying words and ideas being presented.

I openly admit that I skipped a couple of chapters to focus on the final one: The Alien home. To quote to use of a phrase that Iyer uses in this final chapter, I found this book ‘half strange and half strangely familiar.’ I often found myself relating to the sentiments of The Global Soul and the concept he presented, but I tired of all the verbal anecdotes, bracketed qualifications of his comments and unnecessary observations that riddled the book. Hence, the utter relief when I was done with it and returned it to my bookshelf.

[Kasper · Rating 1 out of 5]

look, this book made me dizzy and pico's insistence on how freaking global he is really began to grate after about ten pages. good for you bro, you're a global soul! but hey maybe so are the rest of us? and his writing style -- i get what he's trying to do, but after about two pages, it's unnecessary to keep cataloging who/what everyone is, where they are from etc etc. i think that kind of overshadows/whelms his point about the global soul or whatever -- if you are truly a global soul, man wouldn't that stuff not even matter?

i think this is book is well-intentioned but irrelevant with the creation of the term third culture and third culture kids. so if you're looking for a book that will explain why you never feel at home when you've moved from country to country all your life, this is not it. if you are looking for a book that will make you dizzy with diversity and movement and will probably annoy you to no end after about ten pages, this is it.

[Josh Fish · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is insightful as the author himself leads such a multicultural life. He is a British born Indian who grew up in America and lives in Japan. He talks about airport culture (or meta-culture) and cross cultural relationships. The prose is manic exposition almost all of the way through but Iyer has so many facts at his fingertips I never felt like I was living solely inside his head. I still have my questions, such as how most of the world can't live like him (flying from country to country). It never mentions really what he does for a living except that he is a writer. This book is a must read for people living today to understand the globally connected world we live in.

[Rajiv Chopra · Rating 1 out of 5]

I have been a global soul. I have lived in India for most of my life, in England as a child, and then in China and Singapore.
I worked in China and Singapore, and travelled many countries, saw many malls and airports. The emptiness of this life got to me, and I quit despite being at the top.

The book, like the global soul, is essentially empty. While he writes well, it seems to be a slapdash of bits of writing and anecdotes piled together. There was a super opportunity to go deep and really talk about the essential emptiness of this life

Despite the seeming attractiveness of this life, it is empty, because we all want our roots to be strong. He missed this.
Sad,

[Alex · Rating 2 out of 5]

Iyer is one of the great travel writers, and I give this 2 stars only in comparison with what I know he is capable of. He has a promising start, discussing the notion of a global soul: a uniquely modern human created by advances in technology and breaking down of borders and colonialism. But he seems to lose sight of his iniitial premise, and rambles on about Toronto, the Olympics, England and its colonies, and Japan. Some good parts, but overall he gets lost in the absractionism and shades of gray that he uses so well in other books. Sometimes a little black and white is a good thing.

[Chris Edwards · Rating 1 out of 5]

I profoundly dislike this book. I dislike it both for its style of writing, and the general worldview it proclaims.

Iyer's writing style comes across as directionless, as if this book is a compilation of notes he's made over the years as he waits in airport terminals. I suppose that could be forgiven, given the book's subject matter being Iyer's journey as a "directionless" global soul, but still. Many sections are needlessly verbose, while Iyer qualifies many of his statements with long, bracketed sequences.

But my real problem is with Iyer himself. He's - how can I say this? - ignorant. He is the consummate privileged, naive, neoliberal cosmopolitan that has never ventured out of the safe cultural enclaves of developed world urban bubbles. He lives a life of airport lounges, respectable hotels, Blackberries, coffee shops, and buzzwords. While he offers numerous interesting questions about the nature of identity and multiculturalism in a globalized world, he squanders many opportunities to provide interesting answers to them because he's so set on delivering meaningless platitudes. There's a lot to be said about the meaninglessness of global consumer culture, and how a jet-setting lifestyle deprives one of a tangible identity, but Iyer just doesn't grasp onto those thoughts for long enough.

He writes about LA, but he never actually leaves the airport. He visits Canada to write about Canadian culture, but not only does he never leave Toronto, he complains that the outlying Ontario towns are too "whitebread" anyways (this is his polite way of saying he thinks there are too many white people in them and they're boring). He travels to Hong Kong, and barely touches upon its 6 million Chinese inhabitants. He casts Japan as "dehumanizing," but admits he doesn't know how to speak Japanese. Iyer feels directionless not because the world is cold and dehumanizing, but because he never bothers to venture into the interesting parts of it.

Now, this book was written in 2000, which was a relatively long time ago in the history of modern globalization, but it has not aged well. In hindsight his views reveal all sorts of inadvertent truths about the nature of late 20th/early 21st century global cosmopolitanism that pervaded many intellectual circles in the early 2000s. There is a shameless, self enforced ignorance of rural cultures, of worldviews that don't line up with those of high flying urbanites like him, and of the economic and social realities of globalization that him and his ilk were blissfully unaware of because they were too busy talking about palm-pilots and their grammar school days (yes, Iyer went to Eton and Oxford).

2016 must not have been a good year for Pico Iyer.

[T.R. Ormond · Rating 3 out of 5]

Because Iyer talks so much about the immigrant experience, his book made me realize that I should return to reading Salman Rushdie's Don Quichotte, which I had put back on the shelf for being a little too post-modern and metafictional for my taste. Iyer reminded me that there is more going on in a story like that than just literary games. The displacement of people between different cultural spheres and the associations that linger, fade, or get adopted -- this is a very real part of many people's experience today. And describing this experience forms most of the content of Global Soul.

But The Global Soul is now twenty years old. In certain respects (those mentioned above), this book is still very timely. In other respects, Iyer was less prescient.

For example, in his chapter on Toronto, he mentions that the retribalizing of groups on the internet is a good thing, or at least a good deal better than geographic tribalism. After all the discord created and aggravated by social media, I cannot agree with him. Any form of tribalism is dangerous.

Also, Iyer romanticizes the Global Soul. He likes its freedom, its lack of connection, its mobility. I can agree that the openness required for such a life can be a positive force, but, on the other hand, there is something so fleeting and nonchalant about "place" that is not very appealing. It's almost as if countries and cities are disposable. If everyone faced the world with the Global Soul, then no one would be committed to anywhere. And think of all the participation in consumerism and the burning of fossil fuels if everyone was traveling all the time.

There does not seem to be much consideration of staying in one place and finding meaning there, protecting it from harm. This might sound an awful lot like more tribalism, but I guess I'm referring to the types of knowledge and activity that lead to sound ecological choices and ethical patterns of life.

Not that Iyer is opposed to ecology. Just that he seems to overlook the Global Soul's cost to ecology (or he accepts it as inevitable).

[Powersamurai · Rating 4 out of 5]

I myself am a Global Soul like Iyer. Of one heritage, born in a different country and living in a totally different one. Hence, I can relate to much of what he has to say. How did I find this? Well, Iyer wrote the Introduction to the new edition of The Inland Sea. That piqued my interest in him, but didn't search any further until February this year when raiding Blue Parrot Books with my biblioholic mate, Gaijinmama, where I found this 2nd-hand copy signed in April 2007 by the man himself to Tony (whoever Tony is)--a true global soul. My favourite quote is:

"The English hate me for being more English than they are; they want you all to conform to some image they can patronize." (as spoken by Iyer's acquantaince of Indian heritage)

My word, the Japanese feel threatened, too, when you step out of the 'gaijin' box.

[Sophie · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not a whole lot of joy in this book. Basically seven long - sometimes rambling - essays dealing with the meaning of multiculturalism, (inter)nationalism, globalization, etc.

Generally speaking, I found this one pretty dull. It's Iyer musing, for 300 pages - where is home? where am I from? why do I look Indian and not speak the language? etc, etc. Particularly the first half seems to be a collection of observations of "culture clash" (for lack of a better term): Chinese girls working in Mexican restaurants in Canada, or whatever the case may be. That sort of oddity might be interesting the first time, but it got old - even quicker for anyone else who has traveled and seen similar things.

The only chapter I liked was the chapter on Toronto and how it's faring under heavy immigration; it was interesting enough to make me want to read more about the city.

[Troy Parfitt · Rating 2 out of 5]

People say that Video Night in Kathmandu is good. I wouldn't say this one was. As a Canadian, I found his assessment of Toronto to be rather ungrounded. He seems to think it's a kind of multicultural utopia, and although Canadians heap a lot of undue scorn on the place, it has a lot of social problems: a rich-poor disparity for one, guns for another. This was my first attempt at Pico Iyer; I just didn't get it, but perhaps I should try again.

[David · Rating 2 out of 5]

Very disappointing, reads like a cross between one of those anecdotal management books, celebrity name-dropping and a reality show about living in airports; full of punk statistics and dubious stereotypes. Not a travel book, more of a hangover.

[Daryl Farmer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great observations offer insights into contemporary globalism. Iyer is at his best when showing the peculiarities of life in our current times.

[S. · Rating 4 out of 5]

mega-super genius Pico Iyer, Eton, Harvard, Oxford at age 29 puts out Video Night in Katmandu, as its title suggests, a wryly humorous look at incongruities and abstractions-playing-out in odd corners of the world, and confirms his already existing reputation as an essayist, a solid 4 or 5 star book that is name-dropped among the literati (GR reports 1250 reads, which makes Iyer a medium-ranked essayist). 1991 (age 32) brings out a Japan study that focuses on the sweetness of the culture rather than its dark interior. 1993 returns Iyer to form, Falling off the Map, attracting a 3.78 from the crowd amidst some true fan accolades. but then GR reports Iyer had a less than stellar decade in the 1990s, a drop off from 3.8 territory to 3.5, (actually significant here on GR) and from 700+ reads to sub-500 territory. well, this is one of the two books Iyer put out in the 90s (or, technically, the year 2000 in this case) that the stats say is a drop-off... but whereas I under-voted the crowd for The Lady and the Monk, here I offer the sympathy over-vote.

well... simple truth: Iyer has become slightly darker and slightly less interesting--if that is possible. the parody title of this book would be "Pico Iyer's soul," because it's actually all about Iyer Iyer Iyer, the global restless world wanderer who splits his time between Cuba and Japan and lived years in America without wanting to be a part of it. Iyer's anecdotes are also darker-- in place of gentle humour about obscure backpacking bars, there's more coverage of inequity, prejudice, and the inability of any society to absolutely 100% fully all-bases-covered bring in non-traditional groups as fully recognized majority-types. Iyer probably doesn't even realize he's doing it--but what comes out of this off decade in his life (30s) is a sort of inevitable darkening of character; away from continual oxonian paradise to being profiled at airports.

well... I'm sympathetic and then I'm also a little wary of this sort of prose. the situation (in an unsympathetic viewpoint to Iyer) might be that Iyer was too sweet from the start, and now the world isn't living up. on the other hand, he is outlining the achievements and failures of multiculturalism. on the one hand, as Iyer reports, the English cricket side is now more than 80% foreign-born or 2nd generation; on the other, as Iyer's own closest friends--Indians, apparently--point out, they're the only ones celebrating traditional Englishness, which is a sort of twist or irony peculiar to British identity (viz., to be British is to decry Britishness; the Indians are demonstrating how foreign they are by celebrating Tennyson's birthday whereas native Brits despise and loath Tennyson).

so this book is full of convuluted identity-mind games like this, but clearly Iyer is working on a darker level than in years past, and if Iyer doesn't have sweet innocent charm, then what does he exactly have? as fate would have it, the 2000s apparently marked a return of Iyer's good form (perhaps one's 40s are more relaxed than the end of youth of one's 30s), so I guess we are all lucky to have this achievement.

Iyer's work implicitly brings up the problem of "statistical prejudice." if 9/10 of the Indians who approach me in public places are attempting to negotiate some sort of trade deal or marketing project (and I am a literature major; I'm probably not going to get involved in any import-export project), what happens when I try to slide away from the 1/10 Indian at the airport who turns out to be an Oxonian and wishes to discuss Proust with me? this is something that I think most people in the end consider the "inescapable" part of human relations.

[Heather · Rating 2 out of 5]

(2 stars as in, "it was OK," but if I could rate the essays/chapters separately, I'd give the last one 4 stars and a few of the others 3 stars)

This was a slow read for me, and mostly not because I was savoring it. I don't know, maybe I wasn't in the right mood, or maybe this just isn't the book for me: maybe I wanted a travel book more than I wanted a book about globalization and multiculturalism, or maybe the ways things have changed since this book was written/published (it came out in 2000) mean that it hasn't aged that well. There were things in this book that made me think of Alibis by André Aciman, which I really liked: Aciman and Iyer both write in part from/about their experiences of living between or across different places and cultures, and there's a concern, in both, with connection or disconnect, but chunks of Iyer's book felt more reportorial than personal, which perhaps made me like it less.

Of the seven chapters/essays in this book, my favorites were The Global Marketplace, in which Iyer, jet-lagged, wanders a bit in Hong Kong, and The Alien Home, in which Iyer writes about living in Japan as a foreigner, though there were bits I liked in the others as well. I appreciate Iyer's eye for the humorous or quirky or telling detail, like when, in "The Airport" (which is about spending a bunch of time at LAX sometime in the late 1990s) he writes this:

Around us, in the free-for-all chaos of the Customs Hall, beagles were sniffing busily (in coats that said AGRICULTURE'S BEAGLE BRIGADE on one side, and PROTECTING AMERICA'S AGRICULTURE on the other), and a voice on the PA system was calling out for one Stanley Plaster; on a bulletin board, there was a letter from a child (bewildering, surely, to a person just arriving from Guangzhou) that began, "Dear Taffy, We liked your show. You are cute, smart, and a good sniffer. . . ." (68-69)

I wanted more little snippets, details seen or overheard, like in The Empire, when there's this, about a player on England's cricket team: "he grew up in the East End, and his father used to stand on the street selling birds. The trouble was, they were homing pigeons" (241).

Other pieces, like The Multiculture (about Toronto, immigration as vibrancy, Canadian literature, the literature of exile) and The Games (about the Olympics and their ideals/tensions, focused largely on visits to Atlanta in advance of and then for the 1996 Games) felt way too long to me, though I liked Iyer's description of how he tries to step away from the pageantry and big events at the Olympics to experience something else, whether that's curling in Japan or baseball in Barcelona.

I think I appreciate the final piece, The Alien Home, for being one of the more personal-feeling pieces in the book, and also for being one of the most lyrical, with sentences like this: "And sometimes, on these sharpened sunny days, when the cloudless autumn brightness makes me homesick for the High Himalayas, I fall through a crack somehow, and find myself in a Japan of some distant century" (272). Or this, about Kyoto: "I still catch my breath when I see the lanterns in the autumn temples, leading up into the bamboo forests, as into another life, or hear the temple bells ringing along the Philosopher's Path at dusk" (285-286). There's also a beautiful description in this piece about driving up Mount Hiei after a snowstorm, the world made silver and white and quiet. I would read a whole book of this, gladly.

[Perry Whitford · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pico Iyer is an Indian with an Italian sounding name (which he says is often taken for a female name, and I admit I thought this was by a female when I bought it), raised and educated in England, mostly a resident of America and Japan as an adult, whose job as journalist has him constantly criss-crossing the globe.

That background and resume certainly make him well equipped to investigate the increasing phenomena of rootlessness amongst so many of the world's citizens, and to provide some pointers about "how to keep the soul intact in the face of pell-mell globalism", as he defines his goal in the opening essay.

I can't really say that he managed to do that, or even that there was a coherent book here amongst this collection of essays, which could well have been published in isolation without suggesting a collection at all.

That said, after an underwhelming start, I grew to appreciate his style by the end, despite what seemed to me some fairly limited techniques for a travel writer.

For instance, in the second essay, he spends some time living in LA International Airport, but all he really tells us is that lots of different people from different nationalities go there, without really engaging much with any of them.

The essay on The Global Marketplace is set entirely in Hong Kong, an interesting place in itself, but not really representative of any place other than itself, so not great material to define a global anything, let alone a soul.

All he really did was walk about again, or at most talk to some friends, who comprised the majority of the informal interviewees across all the essays.

Mind you, to be named a "friend" in this book was to be used as a foil be Iyer, to be betrayed as a bigot or a racist. If they were friends before, they wouldn't be now if they recognised themselves here!

However, the essay on multiculturalism was an insightful look at a city at the vanguard of active policy, Canada's Toronto. Likewise, the essay on Atlanta as it prepares to host the Olympics in 2000 was equally impressive, exposing the unsavory contradictions of that soulless corporate concourse calling itself a city.

Iyer himself found a resting place for his global soul in the last essay, but as well-reasoned a solution as it was for him, I can't see it working for your average cosmopolitan migrant. It could only really work for someone as cavalier towards friendship as Iyer appeared to be.

I concede that the book may have resonated more had I got hold of it when it was first published, its multiculturalist themes have been exhausted in the dozen years which have passed.

But I still think it failed as a consistent volume, despite some good writing and that appealing title.

[Artur Coelho · Rating 3 out of 5]

Confesso que sempre que pego num livro de Iyer fico com um misto de admiração e inveja. Viajante consumado, deambulador poético pelos recantos do mundo, Iyer é um desenraízado que encontra as suas casas algures pelo mundo. É um consumado escritor de viagens, mas não esperem dele guias turísticos para as atracções do exotismo ou pormenores peripatéticos dos estranhos costumes das populações dos trópicos, das estepes ou das grandes metrópoles. Não deixa de ir olhando para estes detalhes, mas não são o cerne do que escreve. Iyer mistura o périplo pelo espaço exterior com viagens ao interior riquíssimo da alma humana, decomposto com uma intensa solidão e inquietude que busca, constantemente, o prazer da viagem. É admirável, e como não sentir uma ponta de inveja por um caminhante do mundo que veio encontrar abrigo espiritual numa Kyoto imutável no tempo?

Neste conjunto de ensaios Iyer explora a solidão da viagem, o aeroporto como não-lugar de transiência e transformação, a busca pela compreensão das outras gentes e outros lugares, o conflito entre tradições locais e um espírito de normalização globalizante, as derivas culturais que culminam no multiculturalismo, a visão de uma Inglaterra como casa espiritual pela língua e cultura que choca com a realidade do país em si, e despojos do império vistos por aqueles que se deslocam por entre as antigas colónias. Não é claro o que o autor quer dizer por Global Soul. No seu caso, designa a alma errante de um anglo-indiano crescido entre a Califórnia e Londres, em busca da espiritualidade simples, armado com uma profunda bagagem literária e uma curiosidade insaciável pelo que se encontra para lá da linha do horizonte. Não é certamente o enfado multiplicado pelos efeitos do jetlag do viajante global ou o deslumbre simplista do turista com os paraísos artificiais resplandecentes sob o sol dos trópicos. É esse o espírito de viajante que confesso também partilhar, embora as minhas possibilidades de trotar o mundo e vir acabar frente às amendoeiras em flor de Kyoto sejam quase inexistentes.

[Patrick McCoy · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have something of a love-hate relationship with Pico Iyer. I read his first two travel books Video Nights in Kathmandu and The Lady and the Monk and I found them both a bit too personal. Some of his journalism hit better for me-I am interested in travel, Japan, literature, and many other subjects he is also interested in. So I thought I would give the Global Soul from 2000 a chance. I have to admit I liked it more than I expected (I would have given it a 3.5 star rating if they allowed half points here). Iyer sets himself up as the prototype for the Global Soul-born in England to Indian parents, sent to boarding school in the US, current resident of Japan), The process begins when Iyer's parent's house burning down and he loses all of his keepsakes and possessions to set the stage for a life of being rootless and in-flux in "The Burning House." In the next chapter, "The Airport," he discusses LAX and how it is something like it's own village. The following chapter, "The Global Marketplace," is about Hong Kong as being like a an airport mall, somewhat reductive in my opinion. This chapter is notable for the introduction of a school friend who travels three weeks a month and loves it." Next, Iyer discusses Toronto as "The Multiculture," which isn't such a stretch, but isn't as distinct today in that regard. "The Games" is curious chapter that seems to have been written since Iyer usually reports on the Olympic Games as a journalist. I guess it does seem to be worthy of discussing why the base for some of the largest global brands (Coke, CNN, Holiday Inn, etc.) isn't so global, but it is the longest chapter in the book. Then Iyer looks deeper into his navel with the country of birth and education, England in "The Empire" before looking at this current home of Japan where he proudly admits to his three old child level vocabulary and interest in the Japan version of all things western. It is outdated in a way that makes me feel nostalgic for the late 90s and early 'oughts.

[Abhay · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fascinating account of what is increasingly a reality in the modern age. Some highlights:

"Perhaps science and industry... will unite the world, i mean condense it into a single unit, though one in which peace is the last thing that will find a home" Wittgenstein in 1946

"The man who finds his homeland sweet is still a tender beginner; he to whom every soil is as his native one is already strong; but he is perfect to whom the entire world is as a foreign land"

"The essential questions America asks of a newcomer is, "What will you do with your future?" Canada adds to it the more difficult one: "What will you do with your past? How much will you abandon everything that's made you what you are, and become a Canadian (whatever that may mean)?"

"I like hotels because in a hotel-room you have no history; you have only essence."

"Writers have to have two countries, the one where they belong and the one in which they live really" Gertrude

"The most peaceful place on earth, is among strangers" Canetti

[Martyn Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book marks the high point of a particularly expansive view of the idea of the global. This book was published in 2000, so it’s pre-9/11. The description of airport experiences was in short order superseded by the security theater we’ve lived with for two decades. Although public consciousness of climate change was growing, Pico Iyer didn’t at this time feel the need to ponder the deep conflict between the global world he inhabited (linked by airplanes and multinational corporations) and the planetary systems that preserve biodiversity. With terrorism, climate change, and mass migration largely off the table, there was space to consider human purpose inside the domain of the Global.

I follow recent ecocritical discussions in taking the word “global” to denote technologically-aided human connections built onto the surface of our planet. When we speak of the “global” we don’t mean the planetary processes that maintain life, but a world based on the pride of human accomplishment. The Global Soul is an exploration of the spaces that in this sense most deserve the adjective “global.” The chapters center on cities that we easily recognize as global cities: Los Angeles, Hong Kong, Toronto, Atlanta, London, and Tokyo. Each city provides a chance to think about institutions and frameworks that are distinctly global (the airport, the mall, the Olympics, the British Empire). Surrounded by all this, Pico Iyer asks what it means to be a global soul, and this turns out to be a surprisingly valuable project: what spiritual comfort could a human being find within the global world?

Iyer should by no means be understood as trying to escape all these structures, and that’s part of the logic of labelling himself a “Global Soul.” Others might be tempted to step back from the global into national or religious identities that feel more defined, but Iyer explicitly accepts his homelessness: “As a permanent alien, I’ve never been in a position to vote, and, in fact, I’ve never held a job in the country where I more or less live... and I’ve never had a partner who belongs to the same race.” That’s not a complaint but an open admission that in central parts of his life he sees himself as homeless. He has nourished no civic connections; he works for corporations located quite distant from where he lives; even within the intimate bond of marriage he is connected to someone with whom he doesn’t share a first language. Many of Iyer’s readers have no doubt experienced some of the dislocations of global life, but Iyer pushes this to a point well past what most would be willing to imagine for themselves.

The opening chapter of The Global Soul (“The Burning House”) stands up quite well as a complete essay. This chapter isn’t set in one place, but works to set out a framework for thinking about global life. For anyone who feels suspicious that globalization is another word for market capitalism, this chapter will feed that view: “Globalism has become the convenient way of saying that all the world’s a single market.” And Iyer takes us along to a meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. It would appear that there’s no way to disconnect global existence from a set of multi-national corporations and their financial interests. The internet in this book is present in ways less obvious than the central role it would come to hold over the next decades, but Iyer meets someone even in 1999 who speaks of it as the “planetary soul.” Looking back now we see that the internet would advance the interests of global corporations, but for Iyer it still represented a hope for a community formed on something larger and more encompassing than soil and more meaningful than financial success. The internet held out the possibility of a community that could exist in and around and perhaps over the global, but it’s hard to believe in that now.

The “burning house” of the opening essay is from Iyer’s experience of a fire at the home of his parents in Southern California. In his telling he left their home with just a shoulder bag of things: “All the props of my parents’ sixty years, all the notes and prospects I’d been collecting for fifteen years, allt he photographs, memories—all the past—gone.” The book thus opens with the central trope of homelessness becoming literalized. This loss of the past and memory has been recognized as a central part of the experience of modernity at least since Marx — “All that is solid melts into air.” Bruno Latour offers a definition of moderns as people who “live off a land that they don’t inhabit.” These are exact descriptions of the experience of the Global Soul. The possibilities of home have been stripped away, the house burned down, and instead of groping for a new country, Iyer asks if homelessness itself might become a kind of home.

The concept of the burning house opens up a path to engagement with the meaning and purpose of a Cosmopolitan life. Iyer sees an ethical value in this existence, and at one point he ventures a definition of the Cosmopolitan as “someone who can appreciate what it feels like to be Other.” A true Global Soul isn’t someone who travels a lot for a job or as a tourist, but someone who has developed a sense of empathy. This empathy comes with reflection about homelessness, and frequently Iyer turns our gaze to people who are “global” as a result of displacement and forced migration. As Iyer flees yet another California disaster (floods this time), he stumbles upon neighbors he didn’t even know existed: Mexican migrant workers living on the grounds of a nearby house. The Global Soul recognizes a kinship in all forms of modern homelessness.

But the question remains, even if there is some sense of an ethic in the ability to see others, what about community and purpose? By definition it’s hard to form community out of homelessness. But something like that is what Iyer has in mind. He is drawn to the naturalist Henry David Thoreau, who gets mentioned both at the end of the opening essay and again at the end of the book, where we encounter Iyer in Japan and reading Thoreau on “sunny Sunday mornings.” The American writer who most theorized what it might mean to truly inhabit a place becomes a touchstone. Is it possible to find a Walden wherever we happen to be, or is Walden something we find through a lifetime of connection to a place? Another figure, explored more fully by Iyer in later works, is the Buddhism of the global (and homeless) religious leader, the Dalai Lama. Buddhism offers a way of thinking about the Self that could function as a home for the Global Soul.

[Adam · Rating 4 out of 5]

I regret that I forgot to review this book as soon as I finished it, so my memories of it are a bit of a shambles now. I apologize in advance for any inaccuracies in what follows, for I am now operating from the impressions that it left upon me. These, I am sure, have surely evolved since I read the final page now almost a month ago and may lead to fantastical interpolations that are not sustained by the text. With that apology...

What an opening image! A home, a life, burning to the ground. And from this bittersweet situation, eager curiosity soon springs, as Mr. Iyer, the perfectly-situated, impossibly-resourced protean man, embarks on a series of dislocated (yet harmonious -- sometimes a bit too repetitively so) physical and mental quests through a series of anomalous nowhere-anywhere spaces to answer, with overlapping tongues and from ever-changing vantage points, the questions pounding on the cage around his spirit: who am I? where am I? what are we? And perhaps silently, invisibly even to himself: are there any limits on where I may go and what I may call "me" or "mine"?

How apt to begin a book so boldly; to treat the conflagration of a life as material for superficially mournful musings, to cannibalize what for most would be a tragedy in order to make of it the thesis of a journalistic investigation. How perfect, in a book written by a multiethnic figure with international duties in extranational territories (and an unaccountably large expense account) which was published just after the turn of the millennium.

What a time -- in 2023 -- to read a book which is so patently a product of its era: when the 1990s in the West still felt like how the whole world was always meant to be (as if it were what the 80s were leading up to and what the tumult of the early 2000s would surely only briefly interrupt); when the myth of meritocracy was still in full swing; when people were unreflective about their privilege and there were not entire grassroots industries fueled by shoveling indignation at displays of privilege into coal furnaces of class and ethnic outrage.

It is utterly profound to witness, knowing how it would turn out, how optimistically Iyer considers the emerging forces of globalization. He is mildly critical and yet so casual about McWorld, about his own astonishing freedom of movement, about the constellation of globetrotting expatriates he ... is not exactly surrounded by, but whose stars he occasionally orbits as he traces his own, godlike circuit through the heavens, weaving an ever-denser net above the cattle-people who inch along upon the earth, eclipsing those lesser beings' view of those heavens -- or perhaps more accurately painting an entirely new, manufactured view for them (not that the plebes play much of a role in this book).

Iyer seems so sure (with minor qualifications), from his world-spanning, ironically limited vantage point, of an Edenic, post-nation-state future of world citizens whose genetics will be beautifully tangled and whose possibilities will be endless. It is amazing -- humbling -- to see reflected in his words my own innocent arrogance in that dot on the timeline of human history.

For me, personally, it took only the period between 1999 and 2003 for every one of my fragile, adolescent illusions to be bombed to utter smithereens, as if I had been a personal target of a shock and awe campaign. But I digress.

Despite what I have said thus far, I was less interested, while reading, in the absence of the sort of painfully self-aware and performatively contrite language that I find so suffocating and distracting that infects contemporary discourse and which I believe stunts effective social action. Instead, I was simply fascinated by how effervescent the tone of this book was, precisely because it took a tour through so much of the non-accountable territory that would eventually catch fire (as the true cost of Western materialism and unchecked corporate expansion revealed itself) and begin to burn the world.

The combustion of the middle class; the decay of civil discourse; the resurgence of populism, nationalism, and xenophobia; the poor hating the rich; the rich openly disdaining the poor; racism; sexism; all the other isms....None of these things appear to be remotely on Pico Iyer's radar. And why should they have been? Even after witnessing his own home burning, what reason would he have had to read in those flames anything but fresh opportunity?

I wonder how Mr. Iyer reads his own book today. I wonder if he feels differently about its ideas. I wonder if he feels differently about the world today; or if, as seems to be the case with so many of the people who continue to run and/or capitalize upon the state of the world (I say "seems" because I of course cannot witness what is going on inside people's hearts, only how they act), a burning house is still more a symbol than a reality.

My own journey has taken me down from my dreams into the mud of life, and from my head into my guts. I have been working painstakingly and imperfectly on radical acceptance: trying to fully inhabit the reality of my life, of my body; journeying into the experience of life and conversation with it, rather than trying to seduce it or simply talk it to sleep while I hunch in safety behind a rampart of theory and metaphor. I hope to more fully see and hear and commune with others, with curiosity and compassion, accepting the frightening mystery of their irreducibility.

In the midst of this journey, and as I conclude my reflections on the shared past that Iyer summoned up for me, I suppose I wonder how Iyer experiences life today, whether he is still a hostage of the anti-paradise he described nearly 25 years ago, and if today his writing draws him closer into contact with the earth or if his assignments continue to suspend him a mile in the branded sky above it.

[Bryan Lee · Rating 4 out of 5]

In the introduction to an anthology of travel writing for 2008, Anthony Bourdain, probably known more as a writer about food & travel than as a chef, mentioned Pico Iyer in a list of travel writers that really know their craft. Iyer writes about travel and what changes in travel's ease and speed have on passenger after s/he walks off the passenger gangway. He focuses on how humans, now newly able to cross natural barriers of timezone, culture, and distance, have altered their perceptions of their own "mother cultures", or indeed what it is like to have "a" culture. Iyer, like Paul Theroux and to a lesser extent Bill Bryson, is able to capture the wonder of travel without treating a destination like pornography for an audience who never will go there anyway. He is not the Travel Channel. He's the Atlantic or The New Yorker.

[Judit Szabo · Rating 5 out of 5]

An interesting, pensive book about being constantly on the move, and the individual's place in a world that's getting smaller and smaller every day. Some chapters tackle hands-on topics like the Olympic games, others are more abstract, but the general idea is finding your identity somewhere other than the place you were born.

This is not a book you'll flick through in a weekend - it's best enjoyed at a peaceful, quiet time, when one can dedicate undivided attention to reading. I really enjoyed Pico Iyer's beautiful, distinctive writing style and sophisticated language. If topics like travelling and moving to another country, adapting to a new culture is relevant to you, you will probably appreciate the general sentiment in the book.

I would also recommend watching his TED Talk: "Where is home?".

[Isla McKetta · Rating 4 out of 5]

Is globalization and the increasing speed of our connections changing the nature of who we are as people? Iyer looks at examples including the life of a global businessman stopping over in Hong Kong, the intersections of lives at LAX, and what the Olympics say about multinationality.

The experiences are all personal, and I got the sense as I read it that Iyer was really looking to explore what it means to be home. The book encouraged me to look at my global soul and how living abroad has shaped my sense of self and of home.

Though the book is sometimes repetitive and the references are older, I very much enjoyed the searching nature of this text.