Video Night In Kathmandu And Other Reports From The Not-So-Far East (1989) - Plot & Excerpts
Iyer in his introduction tells us this is “less like a conventional travel diary than a series of essays” of a “casual traveler’s casual observations” of the Asia he saw “over the course of two years... [spending] a total of seven months crisscrossing the continent.” Each chapter covers his thoughts about one country: Bail (Indonesia), Tibet, Nepal, China, Philippines, Burma, Hong Kong, India, Thailand, Japan. Most of the essays have an overarching theme through which he looked at the country. Bali as paradise lost, Nepal as Hippie Magic Bus Tour, India’s Bollywood, Thailand its skin trade, Japan and its passion for baseball. He admitted he had never formally studied Asian affairs and didn't know any of the languages of the countries he visited, but he is well-traveled and well-informed. At the time of his travels he was a writer on world affairs for Time magazine and had written for the Times Literary Supplement, Partisan Review and the Village Voice. The book struck me as rather dated at times, or at least amusingly of its time, the essays mostly being about travels around 1985. A generation has passed since Iyer traveled through these countries. Iyer at first seemed obsessed with this idea of cultural imperialism, hitting that theme continually and calling tourists “lay colonialists” despite showing that those aspects of Western pop culture and ideas are things that Asians adopt--and adapt--for themselves. Just as Westerners often do the same (only to be labeled “cultural vultures” by Iyer.) He seemed oblivious to the ironies of a British-born man of Indian extraction, Oxford and Harvard educated, who called America home ranting about how cultural exchange “corrupts” the “purity” of Asian cultures--while himself as a visitor doing his part to carry the contagion. His very name is a combination of the Buddha’s name and that of an Italian philosopher. He called Japan his “ideal” and he currently lives there with his Japanese wife. So he’s a man who himself mixes cultures, yet seemed often to decry that, or at least be deeply ambivalent. He also sometimes struck me as naive and condescending. I recently read Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love and though I had my issues and poked some fun at it in my review, I thought Gilbert had a more balanced view of Bali, which Iyer presented as this paradise without crime and a culture of harmony. Gilbert rather than a few weeks spent months there, and she didn’t spend time as a tourist in the usual expat haunts, but actually interacted with ordinary Balinese. The people weren’t museum artifacts to her that need to be preserved under glass.Yet despite my criticism I don’t regret my time spent reading Iyer. He caught Asia at an interesting time. For instance traveling through China right post-Mao, experiencing the maddening house-of-mirrors communist bureaucracy and the vibrancy of the emerging market economy, Hong Kong while still a Crown colony and the Philippines as “People Power” was ushering the Marcos regime out. He’s erudite, often lyrical, witty and at times funny, and, on occasion heart-breaking. His essay on the Philippines and its crushing poverty comes to mind: sad and surreal. His multinational perspective does make him often insightful about the cross-cultural currents he witnessed. And over the course of his book, and in his epilogue and 2000 afterword, he did seem more nuanced and less judgmental about the exchanges between East and West.
Pico Iyer is a talented writer and a thoughtful cultural analyst. The book is now dated, having been written in the mid-eighties, but that isn't one of my motivations for its rating. I found the glimpses of things that have definitively changed to be interesting, and often they made me wish I had some sort of comparative current nonfiction text about the region, to compare, but this is really a problem of my lack of comprehensive reading, not the book's.My three-star rating comes from two developmental problems that I couldn't get over in the text, which are often related. The first is that the text suffers from too many ideas. When I picked up the book and saw that it was called Video Night in Kathmandu, then read the first chapter about Rambo, I thought that the book would be a comparative exploration of culture through the lens of imported Western media. And it was... and it wasn't. The chapter on India was an especially bad offender. Heavy on analysis, light on examples, it felt difficult to discern if I was reading a travelogue trying to be a film studies tome or something else. Iyer went a lot of places and saw a lot of fascinating things, but he didn't always put those things down in a way that was cohesive.This brings me to my second developmental objection: I never quite became convinced that the order of the chapters, and the order the cities were introduced within each chapter, made sense. Sometimes we would jump abruptly in space and time from Tokyo to its anagram friend Kyoto without any warning. At the beginning of the book, I would get a glimpse at Burma that once references Bangkok, confirming that Iyer had already been there, yet the book wouldn't actually discuss Bangkok until nearly the end. I'm okay with a lack of chronological cohesion if there is a larger reason, but in this case I was unable to find it.I am glad I read this book, but I wouldn't read it again, nor another book by Iyer. Bring me one of his travel pieces for a magazine, though, and I'd happily eat it right up.
What do You think about Video Night In Kathmandu And Other Reports From The Not-So-Far East (1989)?
A somewhat dated travelogue of Asia, that examines the effects of Westernization on the East. The author's time in Asia happened in the mid 80s, with the latest visit being 1987. Obviously, Asia has changed immeasurably since then, and his descriptions of a Beijing full of bicycles, the Philippines under the Marcos regime, or Bollywood movies where the women are all plump, give the book a quaint "snapshot" feel. That said, much of Iyer's observations about some of the deeper cultural phenomena still ring true. Especially when describing the poverty and hope of Thailand, the Philippines, India, or Indonesia, Iyer's experiences aren't particularly different from what one faces today.Well written and an entertaining read for anyone interested in travel and culture in Asia.
—Patrick
Not quite finished yet... I have to admit, I was hoping for something else. It's a very dated book, from a privileged male solo traveller perspective. I assume this is an early book, and look forward to reading his later ones. I find the writing to be repetitive at times, echoing nearly word for word a previous phrase. Some of the essays drag in parts - too long and could have wrapped up his point in fewer words. Personally, I also find his perspective, reported interactions and observations paternalistic and off putting at times, yet interesting for how it highlights our shift in attitudes (In the West). I did love his command of language; the wordplay, and evocative imagery.
—Holly
Disappointing. Pico rails about how badly the West has polluted the rest of the world, lamenting the ruined purity of far-flung places. Michael Jackson cd's for sale in Indonesian villages? I'm shocked, shocked! For anyone who has been around the world a bit, this book is just too obvious, and for anyone who hasn't, it's a cynical and jaded expose of...nothing too interesting. What a clever fellow! He finds what he expects to find; this book is about as interesting as a restaurant review of Chili's or TGI Fridays. Not fun. And the writing is repetitive. He only had 50 pages of real ideas.
—keith koenigsberg
