Book Fever
By Marcia Loy
November 7, 2008 San Miguel de Allende

Traversing the Americas

There is not much to say about most airplane journeys. Anything remarkable must be disastrous, so you define a good flight by negatives: you didn’t get hijacked, you didn’t crash, you didn’t throw up, you weren’t late, you weren’t nauseated by the food. —Paul Theroux

This week, Book Fever looks at three very different trips around North and South America. 

The Journals of Lewis and Clark, Bernard DeVoto, 1953. When I was married, my husband, daughter and I did a lot of canoeing in Illinois, Wisconsin, Canada’s Boundary Waters, Tennessee, Georgia and Florida. I don’t think I ever failed to imagine what it would have been like to be the first Europeans to see the continent. And here, for your reading enjoyment, they are.

The twenty-seven or so men and one Indian woman with her baby who traveled from St. Louis to Ft. Clatsop, in what is now Oregon, left in 1804. They were led by Meriwether Lewis, a 30-year-old former soldier who served as Thomas Jefferson’s private secretary, and George Rogers Clark, who was 34 and also a former soldier. They were an ideal team. Both had extensive wilderness experience; both were skilled commanders. Lewis was the diplomatic and commercial thinker, Clark the negotiations expert. Lewis had been trained in botany, zoology and celestial navigation; Clark was an engineer and geographer. Both were experienced rivermen. Lewis was introve
rted and moody; Clark was an even-tempered extrovert. Together they took a marvelous two-year trip, hoping to find the Northwest Passage. Instead, they explored half a continent.

Excerpt: [I have corrected variations in the spelling.] A cool morning, determined to run the rapids, put our Indian guide in front, our small canoe next and the other four following each other. The canoes all passed over safe except the reed canoe which ran fast on a rock at the lower part of the rapids. With the early assistance of the other canoes and the Indians, who were extremely alert, everything was taken out and the canoe got off without any injury further than the articles [with] which it was loaded [getting] all wet. At 14 miles passed a bad rapid at which place we unloaded and made a portage of three-fourths of a mile, having passed four smaller rapids, three islands and the parts of a house above. I saw Indians and horses on the south side below. Five Indians came up the river in great haste. We smoked with them and gave them a piece of tobacco to smoke with their people and sent them back.… In every direction from the junction of those rivers the country is one continued plain low and rises from 
the water gradually, except a range of high country on the opposite side about two miles distant from the Columbia.

Here is a book that is a little masterpiece of travel, history and adventure. —Hilton Kramer in The New York Times Book Review

In Patagonia, Bruce Chatwin, 1977. Award-winning travel writer Chatwin has been all over the world since 1962. This book is full of larger-than-life, idiosyncratic people, as is Patagonia itself, and the author met many of them. When I was looking for an excerpt, at first I thought I’d write about the Lithuanian; then I considered mentioning Butch Cassidy, the Sundance Kid and his Etta. Then I met the English horticulturist in Ushaia who had traveled everywhere studying and enjoying flowering shrubs. She had been to Japan, Oregon, Australia and Africa. In the end, though, I went back to the Lithuanian. I love Lithuanians.

Excerpt: [Sarmiento’s] most distinguished citizen was the Lithuanian, Casimir Slapelic. Fifty years ago he found the dinosaur in the barranca. Now, toothless, hairless and in his middle eighties, he was one of the oldest flying pilots in the world. Each morning he put on his white canvas flying-suit, pottered down to the Aero Club in his Moskva and hurled himself and his antique monoplane to the gales. The risk merely increased his appetite for life. . . .

“What shall we now?” [Slapelic said.]

“The Boers.”

“The Boers are difficult but we’ll try.”

We drove to the east side of town where the Boers had their bungalows. Slapelic knocked on one and the whole family came out into the yard, stared with set faces at the Englishman and didn’t say a word. He called on another and the door slammed. He found the Welsh husband of a Boer woman who would talk but knew little. And then he found a fleshy Boer woman who leaned over her red garden gate and looked fierce. She also would talk, but for money and in the presence of her lawyer.

“Not very friendly,” I said.

“They are Boers,” said Casimir Slapelic.

Tony Cohan’s singular novelist’s heart and eye, and the master craftsmanship of his prose, set him far apart from anyone else today writing about ‘travel.’ He goes through the looking glass beyond ordinary journeying and discovers not just a place, a culture, a history, but the interstices of mood, longing, the beauty and tragedy of the people he finds in that place. He is our preeminent explorer of Mexico. —Peter Nichols

Mexican Days: Journeys into the Heart of Mexico, Tony Cohan, 2006. I’m here in San Miguel de Allende in part because of Tony Cohan’s On Mexican Time. I knew I was going to retire in Mexico when I saw his book in the Borders bookstore on Michigan Avenue in Chicago. After I read it, my daughter and I scheduled a visit to Morelia, Guanajuato and San Miguel. I liked one, loved one and hated one. San Miguel was the one I hated. I loved Guanajuato but decided to live in San Miguel for six months. I’ve been here four years and have no plans to leave.

Mexican Days is a fascinating look at a fascinating country. Cohan traveled around Mexico writing about people, food, culture and events. He’s an astute observer all of them. His book made me determined to see more of the places he talks about and visit the towns and regions he describes. I’ve visited some; I want to visit more.

Excerpt: Guanajuato, the first inland Mexican city I’d ever visited, held an enduring romance for me. Crumbling, operatic Guanajuato, with its heaped architecture and twisting medieval streets; its cool stone labyrinth of subterranean tunnels and great ruins from the silver mines that had endowed its patrons with centuries of wealth; its university, museums, churches, and government buildings of pink and green quarried stone. Guanajuato, with its bookshops and student cafés, serpentine lanes, worn tinted walls, and little plazuelas.

A mere hour away from San Miguel, it was utterly different: if San Miguel was sol, Guanajuato was sombra. People from San Miguel were always quick to praise Guanajuato but seldom visited except to attend the yearly Cervantino arts festival or on a day trip to show visiting guests. But I’d always suspected that had I not settled in San Miguel, I might have ended up here. . . .


Next week, Book Fever takes a close look at Paul Theroux’s travel books. Happy reading!

Coleman and Perrin’s new novel wins awards

The forthcoming novel Anna’s World by local authors Wim Coleman and Pat Perrin (ChironBooks, Dec 1, 2008) has won awards in the first two competitions in which it was entered. It was the top award winner in the “Fiction & Literature: Young Adult Fiction” category of the National Best Books 2008 Awards, sponsored by USA Book News. 

The book is also a silver medal winner in the “Young Adult Fiction” category of the Moonbeam Children’s Books Awards. Moonbeam judging is based on content, originality, design and production quality, with emphasis on innovation and social relevance.

For more about the book or the authors’ other current projects, see www.playsonideas.com/  and www.chironbooks.com/. 

Haciendas: 250 for US$55 

Rizzoli New York announces the joint venture of architectural photographer Ricardo Vidargas and editor Linda Leigh Paul on the book Haciendas: Spanish Colonial Houses in the U.S. and Mexico. The October release is US$55, available at Librería La Deriva at Fábrica La Aurora.

Haciendas features 250 photographs of magnificent architecture in modern Mexico and the southwestern US. Sumptuous photography and provocative descriptions capture the increasing fascination with hacienda architecture today, as evidenced by the movement to renovate classic adobe homes, the abundance of new hacienda design and the inspiration Spanish colonial architecture provides to homeowners, designers and architects.

Vidargas was born in San Miguel de Allende and ventured to New York City in the late 1970s to pursue his photography career. After working first as an assistant to some of the top photographers, he later opened his own commercial studio in 1981.

Vidargas returned to San Miguel with his wife, Joan, in the late 1990s and taught photography at the Instituto Allende for five years. Now he travels around photographing beautiful homes and teaches workshops whenever he can.