An intriguing, if oddly drifting, travel/marital drama.
The author recounts her 1975 sail across the Indian Ocean, a turning point in her strange marriage, in this second installment of her memoir series.
In 1975, Joyce was in California, ready to write about how she and her husband, Charles, had just been eyewitnesses to the Cyprus coup/war. Then they received a letter from Dylan, a Cyprus acquaintance. Dylan, of British descent, and Mia, his Israeli girlfriend, were picking up a yacht for a Swedish millionaire in Taiwan and wondered whether their American friends would like to crew part of the way, from Sri Lanka to the Seychelles. To Joyce’s surprise, Charles, enigmatic about his money and career, jumped at the offer. Joyce soon realized that the situation was quite odd. The other couple were often tense, yet also displayed a passion that Joyce (who had a history of miscarriages) and hashish-smoking Charles lacked. The group set sail without charts and had many perilous moments during an approximately monthlong voyage in monsoon season. Joyce read books during the voyage and mused upon topics including reincarnation. Mia hinted that Charles was a CIA agent, which Joyce already suspected. The yacht eventually blew off course to Diego Garcia, a remote British/American military outpost. Charles and Dylan fell out about this time, and Joyce and Charles ended their journey soon after in the Seychelles. Back in the United States, Joyce had visions of Charles with other women, leading to her leaving the marriage. Joyce (The Lullaby Illusion, 2013) apparently had some amazing experiences, with this latest narrative being the second installment of her world adventures. While her situation regarding Charles (who she further indicates was a CIA operative in an epilogue) has dramatic potential, it is surprisingly underdeveloped. Joyce spends too much time on banal descriptions of meals and sightseeing, particularly during the couple’s stopover in India, and too little on what Charles was up to. The account also fails to clarify the activities of Mia’s brother, who was also onboard. While Joyce offers some lovely moments, such as when dolphins swim up to the yacht, her New-Age-type musings make her seem dreamy, indeed rather clueless, given her sinking marriage.
An intriguing, if oddly drifting, travel/marital drama.Pub Date: Jan. 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-943158-90-4
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Peel Productions
Review Posted Online: March 25, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Elegant essays marked by surprising shifts and unexpected connections.
Largely autobiographical meditations and wanderings through landscapes external and internal.
National Book Critics Circle Award–winner Solnit (River of Shadows: Edward Muybridge and the Technological Wild West, 2003, etc.) roams through a large territory here. The book cries out for an explanatory subtitle: “field guide” shouldn’t be taken as a literal description of these eclectic memories, keen observations and provocative musings. Four of Solnit’s essays have the same title, “The Blue of Distance,” but the first segues from the blue in Renaissance paintings to a turquoise blouse the author wore as a child, then to the blue of distance seen on a walk across the drought-shrunken Great Salt Lake. The second presents Cabeza de Vaca, a Spanish explorer who wandered for years in the Americas, and then several white children taken captive by Indians; their stories demonstrate that a person can cease to be lost not only by returning, but also by turning into someone else. The third blue essay explores the world of country and western music, full of tales of loss and longing. The fourth introduces the eccentric artist Yves Klein, who patented the formula for his special electric blue paint and claimed to be launching a new Blue Age. How does it all fit in? Don’t ask, just enjoy, for Solnit is a captivating writer. Woven in and out of these four pieces and the five others that alternate with them are Solnit’s immigrant ancestors, lost friends, former lovers, favorite old movies, her own dreams, the house she grew up in, harsh deserts, animals on the edge of extinction and abandoned buildings. All become material for the author’s explorations of loss, losing and being lost.
Elegant essays marked by surprising shifts and unexpected connections.Pub Date: July 11, 2005
ISBN: 0-670-03421-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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