Status Updates From Questions of Travel

He bookmarked the site.
Over time, he came to build a collection of abandoned websites. If an official site fell into obsolescence, it was remodelled or removed from The commissioning organisation’s server. But sites set up for private purposes merely languished when the need they fulfilled had passed. These derelict places drew Ravi. Some, like the Trojan Room coffee-pot site, had once been famous.

‘Have you noticed, the only word you never hear around this place is “tourism”? Because tourism’s about dollars, no argument. But “travel” lets you pretend. Travel has an aura. It allows us to believe that publishing guidebooks is, you know, a good thing. We can tell ourselves that what we do contributes to global harmony, international understanding, you know the stuff I mean.

EVERY DAY, THE NEW, THE unexpected, the arbitrary arrived in Laura’s inbox, in her in-tray, in person. Accustomed to working alone and without interruption, she was ill prepared for office life. It was like being dropped into a country where she didn’t understand the language: the disorientation, the constant switching of focus, the way the trivial and the momentous presented on the same plane.

In flower-sprinkled grass, Fair Play was liberating a moth from the wheel of existence. Plumbago draped the fence; the blue of flowers turned unearthly at dusk. In the middle of the yard rose what Ravi had taken for the skeleton of a giant shade umbrella. Hazel showed him how to peg his washing to its ribs. It was called a Hills hoist: ‘A great Australian invention.’ For a long time, Ravi went on thinking of it

Naples could madden by refusing to perform itself. It was such a slovenly, neglectful place. The cat hit by a scooter remained in the street to flatten slowly, the best room in the museum was closed without explanation, the seventeenth century courtyard had been turned over to cars. Laura said, ‘I’d like to stay here forever.’ One possible response to that was, You can’t—how would I manage without you?

Other cities—Venice, Rome, Florence—offered riches to the casual eye. Naples chose secrets and revelations. Laura learned to follow the dingy street, to descend the unpromising stair. There would be a vaulted ceiling, or a family feasting on melons under a pergola, there would be the trace of a fresco or a damaged stone face. A dull thoroughfare brought a red-robed saint with an arrow in her breast—

A sunless afternoon brought the pitiless arches of the Colosseum. Out-of-place figures, shivering in synthetics, came slipping out. The offered carvings, and beads hefty as sorrows. One elongated, knife-thin form, a Giacometti sculpted from ebony, knelt to release a white bird at Laura’s feet. Together they watched it whirr heavenwards, a soaring no less full of hope for being mechanical.

Across the world, the world-weary were waiting. Time after time, Laura would learn that she had missed the moment; to be a tourist was always to arrive too late. Paradise was lost: prosperity has intervened, or politics. The earthquake had finished of Naples. Giuliani had wrecked New York. Immigrants ruined wherever they squatted. France—well, France had always been blighted by the necessary evil of the French.

Not liking this book at all, nothing is holding my interest. Won’t continue

Not enjoying at all. Boring characters, too much description and a story going nowhere fast. I can’t go on….