Neither Here Nor There: Travels In Europe (1993) - Plot & Excerpts
Bill Bryson is near the top of my Most Read Authors list, not because I'm a particular fan, but because his audiobooks make easy listening for my daily walks. He doesn't attempt to do voices, I don't need to think too hard, and sometimes his stabs at humour make me laugh (and more often, make me roll my eyes). Neither Here Nor There has the advantage of being an interesting concept to me: after living in England for a dozen years, Bryson spontaneously decided to go see the Northern Lights, and after being charmed by his stay in Hammerfest, Norway -- and regretting that he had only made a handful of trips onto the continent in his dozen years on its cusp -- he decided to recreate a backpacking trip he had made through Europe when he was twenty. This could have been very interesting -- revisiting the sites of his memories and re-evaluating cultures through his more mature viewpoint -- but that's not what Neither Here Nor There does. Instead it's a never-ending loop of Bryson: arriving in a foreign city without hotel reservations; being disappointed with the accommodations he can secure; complaining that he can't read the menus in restaurants (and constantly fearing that he will be served pig innards if he chooses unwisely); he either pays too much for not enough food or is filled comfortably at a reasonable cost; he drinks several beers with dinner while he reads a book; he walks the main boulevards and people-watches (without actually talking to anyone); he spends his days in museums, often complaining about the number of tourists that get in his way (without acknowledging that he, too, is simply one more tourist); and is usually surprised that there's no express travel route to the next city he'd like to visit. In one breath, Bryson declares that he loves to travel: Is there anything, apart from a really good chocolate cream pie and receiving a large unexpected cheque in the post, to beat finding yourself at large in a foreign city on a fair spring evening, loafing along unfamiliar streets in the long shadows of a lazy sunset, pausing to gaze in shop windows or at some church or lovely square or tranquil stretch of quayside, hesitating at street corners to decide whether that cheerful and homey restaurant you will remember fondly for years is likely to lie down this street or that one? I just love it. I could spend my life arriving each evening in a new city.And in the next, he's complaining: I sat on a toilet watching the (brown) water run thinking what an odd thing tourism is. You fly off to a strange land, eagerly abandoning all the comforts of home and then expend vast quantities of time and money in a largely futile effort to recapture the comforts you wouldn’t have lost if you hadn’t left home in the first place.For a travel/humour writer, Bryson doesn't seem to particularly enjoy travelling, and the humour is nearly exclusively based on a kind of wearying and childish negativity: There is no scope for privacy and of course there is nothing like being trapped in a train compartment on a long journey to bring all those unassuageable little frailties of the human body crowding to the front of your mind -- the withheld fart, the three and a half square yards of boxer shorts that have somehow become concertinaed between your buttocks, the Kellogg’s corn flake that is unaccountably lodged deep in your left nostril.If you find that hilarious, you might get some laughs here, but what I found even worse is the mean-spirited assessments that Bryson makes of nearly every place he visits: •tBulgaria, I reflected as I walked back to the hotel, isn’t a country; it’s a near-death experience.•tNorwegian television gives you the sensation of a coma without the worry and inconvenience.•tIstanbul isn't a city, it is a collective delirium.•tWhat do you call a gathering of boring people in Switzerland? Zurich.•tGermans are flummoxed by humor, the Swiss have no concept of fun, the Spanish think there is nothing at all ridiculous about eating dinner at midnight, and the Italians should never, ever have been let in on the invention of the motorcar.Bryson also takes many opportunities to remind the reader of the unforgiveable actions of Germany and Austria during WWII -- and I mean many opportunities -- and while I certainly agree that Nazism was one of the great evils in the history of the world, Bryson's obsession here would be like me writing a travel book about the United States and repeatedly saying, "But of course these beautiful buildings wouldn't be here if the early Americans hadn't wiped out the Indians" or "One must always remember that America can thank 200 years of slavery for the foundation of their powerful economy" (and I don't mean to be offensive with that, but Bryson rather offended me in this same vein and it's meant as analogy only). And one last complaint: even though Bryson travelled to Sofia, Bulgaria and witnessed the citizens queuing in bread lines and being barred from eating in his posh hotel restaurant, he concludes dolefully: This was 1990, the year that Communism died in Europe, and it seemed strange to me that in all the words that were written about the fall of the Iron Curtain, nobody anywhere lamented that it was the end of a noble experiment. I know that Communism never worked and I would have disliked living under it myself but none the less it seems that there was a kind of sadness in the thought that the only economic system that appeared to work was one based on self interest and greed.I would have expected that assessment from the 20-year-old hippy Bryson -- not a grown-up family man who has presumably benefitted from Capitalism -- and that's probably the major failing of Neither Here Nor There: it totally misses the opportunity for reflection. Never does Bryson observe the changes that time has made in his perspectives, this is just boom boom boom -- arrive, eat, sleep, look, leave -- with occasional memories of having been in a city before (usually involving drinking and girl-chasing), throwing in barbs about what he doesn't like about a country (usually involving the ways in which it's not like America or Britain), and concludes nothing. This book was rather pointless, but at least it was easy listening.
I did like this book, although I couldn't help feeling that following Mr. Bryson through Europe was a little like watching the movie Dumb and Dumber. I have traveled in Europe and my philosophy was completely different from his. I knew that typical American tourists spend a day or two in a place and then go on to the next place. I disagree with this idea so much because I don't see the point of spending a lot of money on a plane ticket to go to another continent if I am not going to experience something amazing, and you can't expect amazing unless you take the time to do so. I took three months with my sister to travel by rail to 7 different destinations and we spent a significant chunk of time in each place. It is not that hard to do especially if you put yourself out there and try to meet some people. Once you show an interest in the culture and history of the place that you are in, you will be amazed at how people welcome you into their worlds. We stayed in the home of a guy that we had just met, who was a friend of a friend, in Rome and his mother served us an amazing breakfast in the mornings, and she didn't speak a word of English. This friend of a friend also took us to his three favorite pizzerias and his three favorite gelatorias, each day a different combination. We were there for a week and learned a few words of Italian, learned a lot about the history of Rome, and most importantly learned about what it is like to be a Roman today.I felt that Mr. Bryson totally missed this concept. It seemed that at every turn he was disappointed with where he was and the experience he had. It's no wonder! He spent absolutely no time trying to learn about the people or even to speak a few of their words. I spoke one word of Russian to a Russian bartender once and from that moment on I was the only person in my group that he would even try to communicate with. I read this book because I was feeling a little nostalgic about my travels and wanted to remember these places a little. The only thing that kept me from hating it was Mr. Brysons sense of self-deprecating humor. Just when I was about to give up on him because his sense of adventure was so skewed, he would make a knife-sharp remark indicating that he was an idiot, and then I would feel better and keep reading.Mr. Bryson is from Iowa and in this case it is clear that you can take the boy out of Iowa, but you cannot take the Iowa out of the boy.
What do You think about Neither Here Nor There: Travels In Europe (1993)?
"Hugely funny (not snigger-snigger funny, but great-big-belly-laugh-till-you-cry-funny" - Daily Telegraph.Hmmm... I think that review is a trifle misleading falsehood. Sure, some parts were funny, but it wasn't the sort to make your belly hurt and make you cry. I can sum up the book with this: Mr. Bryson goes from one country to another and:1. Finds himself a hotel. Always expensive. So he ends up complaining. 2. Finds a restaurant/bar. Finds it expensive and/or food is terrible. So he ends up complaining. 3. Walks around the city. Always finds flaws here and there. So he again ends up complaining. 4. Finds himself in a crowded train station, and again complains about the long queues. In the book's 22 chapters, that was almost always the scene. Not one part of the book gave me the sense of excitement; which I believe it should have! It is a book about traveling anyway... in Europe!! What Bill Bryson did was not traveling at all. He lacked the whole sense of it. Traveling is not just about roaming around, stopping by bars, getting drunk, noticing how awfully constructed a building is, or how noisy and dirty the streets are. It is about getting into the heart of a country... id est, its culture.. its people. He missed that.
—Cynthia .
Why bother to actually travel when you can just regurgitate stereotypes that have been passed around since man invented borders? Honest to God, he really complains about haughty Parisian waiters. I didn’t find anything in this book of essays to be even remotely insightful and I don’t ever find Bryson to be funny. Most of what I have read by him is just a collection of his gripes against the rest of humanity. I have never read any of his travel stuff where he actually meets an interesting person who has something worth saying. When I first read this several years ago I just figured that it was the first thing Bryson wrote, perhaps when he was a college student packbacking around Europe. It was published when he was 48 years old. It is completely lacking in the sort of wisdom you would expect from a writer that old.
—Leftbanker
while bill bryson does possess a fair amount of the cranky traveler that has overwhelmed the genre these days (and is found particularly appealing by the united states audiences) it fails to appeal to the younger traveler-more hopeful travelerthe comments that i found to be most exciting/humorous/poignant were those involving mr bryson's earlier european travail with the unfortunately unlikeable katz, particulalrly their almost pathetic and as my bryson claims, "catholic" starved sex drives, adventures with the opposite sexpeople out of their twenties may find mr. bryson incredibly poignant and humorous, however i feel that that may be the extent of his appeal
—brendan
