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Neither here nor there: Travels in Europe Kindle Edition
In the early seventies, Bill Bryson backpacked across Europe—in search of enlightenment, beer, and women. He was accompanied by an unforgettable sidekick named Stephen Katz (who will be gloriously familiar to readers of Bryson's A Walk in the Woods). Twenty years later, he decided to retrace his journey. The result is the affectionate and riotously funny Neither Here Nor There.
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherWilliam Morrow Paperbacks
- Publication dateJune 2, 2015
- File size1285 KB
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From the Trade Paperback edition.
From the Inside Flap
So begins Bill Bryson's hilarious book A Walk in the Woods. Following his return to America after twenty years in Britain, Bryson decided to reacquaint himself with his native country by walking the 2,100-mile Appalachian Trail, which stretches from Springer Mountain in Georgia to Mount Katahdin in Maine. The AT, as it's affectionately known to thousands of hikers, offers an astonishing landscape of silent forests and sparkling lakes--and to a writer with the comic genius of Bill Bryson, it also provides endless opportunities to test his own powers of ineptitude, and to witness the majestic silliness of his fellow human beings.
For a start, there's the gloriously out-of-shape Stephen Katz, a buddy from Iowa who accompanies the similarly unfit Bryson on the trail. Once Bryson and Katz settle into their stride, it's not long before they come across the fabulously annoying Mary Ellen, whose disappearance ruins a perfectly good slice of pie, a gang of Ralph Lauren-attired yuppies from whom Katz appropriates a key piece of equipment, and a security guard in Pennsylvania who, for no ascertainable reason, impounds Bryson's car. Mile by arduous mile these latter-day pioneers walk America, along the way surviving the threat of bear attacks, the loss of key provisions, and everything else this awe-inspiring country can throw at them.
But A Walk in the Woods is more than just a laugh-out-loud hike. Bryson's acute eye is a wise witness to this fragile and beautiful trail, and as he tells its fascinating history, he makes a moving plea for the conservation of America's last great wilderness. An adventure, a comedy, a lament, and a celebration, A Walk in the Woods is destined to become a modern classic of travel literature.
From the Back Cover
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
To the North
In winter, Hammerfest is a thirty-hour ride by bus from Oslo, though why anyone would want to go there in winter is a question worth considering. It is on the edge of the world, the northernmost town in Europe, as far from London as London is from Tunis, a place of dark and brutal winters, where the sun sinks into the Arctic Ocean in November and does not rise again for ten weeks.
I wanted to see the Northern Lights. Also, I had long harbored a half-formed urge to experience what life was like in such a remote and forbidding place. Sitting at home in England with a glass of whiskey and a book of maps, this had seemed a capital idea. But now as I picked my way through the gray late December slush of Oslo, I was beginning to have my doubts.
Things had not started well. I had overslept at the hotel, missing breakfast, and had to leap into my clothes. I couldn't find a cab and had to drag my ludicrously overweight bag eight blocks through slush to the central bus station. I had had huge difficulty persuading the staff at the Kreditkassen Bank on Karl Johansgate to cash sufficient travelers' checks to pay the extortionate 1,200-kroner bus fare — they simply could not be made to grasp that the William McGuire Bryson on my passport and the Bill Bryson on my travelers' checks were both me — and now here I was arriving at the station two minutes before departure, breathless and steaming from the endless uphill exertion that is my life, and the girl at the ticket counter was telling me that she had no record of my reservation.
"This isn't happening," I said. "I'm still at home in England enjoying Christmas. Pass me a drop more port, will you, darling?" Actually, I said: "There must be some mistake. Please look again."
The girl studied the passenger manifest. "No, Mr. Bryson, your name is not here."
But I could see it, even upside down. "There it is, second from the bottom."
"No," the girl decided, "that says Bernt Bjørnson. That's a Norwegian name."
"It doesn't say Bernt Bjørnson. It says Bill Bryson. Look at the loop of the y, the two l's. Miss, please."
But she wouldn't have it.
"If I miss this bus when does the next one go?"
"Next week at the same time."
Oh, splendid.
"Miss, believe me, it says Bill Bryson."
"No, it doesn't."
"Miss, look, I've come from England. I'm carrying some medicine that could save a child's life." She didn't buy this. "I want to see the manager."
"He's in Stavanger."
"Listen, I made a reservation by telephone. If I don't get on this bus I am going to write a letter to your manager that will cast a shadow over your career prospects for the rest of this century." This clearly did not alarm her. Then it occurred to me. "If this Bernt Bjørnson doesn't show up, can I have his seat?"
"Sure."
Why don't I think of these things in the first place and save myself the anguish? "Thank you," I said and lugged my bag outside.
The bus was a large double-decker, like an American Greyhound, but only the front half of the upstairs had seats and windows. The rest was solid aluminum covered with a worryingly psychedelic painting of an intergalactic landscape, like the cover of a pulp science fiction novel, with the words "Express 2000" emblazoned across the tail of a comet. For one giddy moment I thought the windowless back end might contain a kind of dormitory and that at bedtime we would be escorted back there by a stewardess who would invite us to choose a couchette. I was prepared to pay any amount of money for this option. But I was mistaken. The back end, and all the space below us, was for freight. "Express 2000" was really just a long-distance truck with passengers.
We left at exactly noon. I quickly realized that everything about the bus was designed for discomfort. I was sitting beside the heater, so that while chill drafts teased by upper extremities, my left leg grew so hot that I could hear the hairs on it crackle. The seats were designed by a dwarf seeking revenge on full-sized people; there was no other explanation. The young man in front of me had put his seat so far back that his head was all but in my lap. He had the sort of face that makes you realize God does have a sense of humor and he was reading a comic book called Tommy og Tigern. My own seat was raked at a peculiar angle that induced immediate and lasting neckache. It had a lever on its side, which I supposed might bring it back to a more comfortable position, but I knew from long experience that if I touched it even tentatively the seat would fly back and crush both the kneecaps of the sweet little old lady sitting behind me, so I left it alone. The woman beside me, who was obviously a veteran of these polar campaigns, unloaded quantities of magazines, tissues, throat lozenges, ointments, unguents, and fruit pastilles into the seat pocket in front of her, then settled beneath a blanket and slept more or less continuously through the whole trip.
We bounced through a snowy half-light, out through the sprawling suburbs of Oslo and into the countryside. The scattered villages and farmhouses looked trim and prosperous in the endless dusk. Every house had Christmas lights burning cheerily in the windows. I quickly settled into that not unpleasant state of mindlessness that tends to overcome me on long journeys, my head lolling on my shoulders in the manner of someone who has lost all control of his neck muscles...
From the Trade Paperback edition.
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Product details
- ASIN : B00T3DR5DA
- Publisher : William Morrow Paperbacks; Reprint edition (June 2, 2015)
- Publication date : June 2, 2015
- Language : English
- File size : 1285 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
- Print length : 322 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: #165,307 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #36 in Travel Humor (Kindle Store)
- #113 in Humor Essays (Kindle Store)
- #127 in Travel Writing
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About the author
Bill Bryson was born in Des Moines, Iowa, in 1951. Settled in England for many years, he moved to America with his wife and four children for a few years ,but has since returned to live in the UK. His bestselling travel books include The Lost Continent, Notes From a Small Island, A Walk in the Woods and Down Under. His acclaimed work of popular science, A Short History of Nearly Everything, won the Aventis Prize and the Descartes Prize, and was the biggest selling non-fiction book of the decade in the UK.
Photography © Julian J
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Bryson’s journey began and ended in the two geographical outposts of Europe, Hammerfest and Istanbul. By virtue of his narrative both so inviting and vivid with the use of languages both colloquial and literal that are so characteristic of his writing style, readers will easily and willingly follow his train of travel through the chapters, as he first takes us to Hammerfest to watch the beautiful shimmering gossamer of Northern Lights. We find Bryson feeling not-so-attractive while sitting on a bench at a park in Copenhagen, where all people looked handsome and beautiful. Such existential estrangement became heightened in Belgium, for all along he felt homesick, reminiscing about an old diner in Iowa and its cantankerous but hearty old waitress he frequented. In Amsterdam, he was concerned about the country’s “oddly wearisome” social conventions in regard of its complacency toward untenable political stance under the banner of tolerance. We see Bryson in the streets of Stockholm disappointed in the perfect socialist country littered and defiled by wastes mindlessly thrown away anywhere by its civilized residents without a shade of shame.
And who would not but sympathize with Bryson’s pathos in Florence? Here in this City of Flowers, Bryson saw the ubiquitous Gypsies importune everyone, with their haggardly clothed little children as an instrument for orating their poverty to passers-by at which Bryson was righteously indignant. He questioned himself why the police were not making any efforts to stop the Gypsies from harassing people. Further in Austria, we feel for him as his idealization of Austria as the epitome of all things European was ungraciously punctured by unfriendly services, an irritatingly slow mode of business operation, and a lack of charming coffeehouses where he could rest his spent body and spirit for a time. What a Don Quixote-like journey full of episodes it was.
Bryson’s cultural notations of each country he visited were, however, devoid of malicious sarcasm or jingoistic ignorance of its customs or social conventions. Things that he experienced in his travel in Europe was a clash of cultures he came from – originally Iowa, The U.S. and England afterwards – and cultures he had imagined in his mind, all of which spellbound him like a Boy in Wonderland. In fact, what fascinated him in Europe was his discovery that the world could be full of variety in which there were many different ways of doing essentially identical things, such as eating and drinking and buying movie tickets.Unlike other travel writers who only write about the sunny sides of the countries and peoples in their interests, Bryson is unafraid of telling readers his observations through his experience with a certain kind of fraternal or even paternal affection with his trademark wits wonderfully interwoven with intelligence and humanism.
The travel ends in Istanbul with his hope of seeing more of the world, his everlasting wanderlust still luring with a vision of Asia across the Bosporus Bridge. He’s all up for the unforseeable happenings awaiting for him to encounter because that’s the glory of foreign travel, a travel to a terra ingonita where anyone can become a stranger, a wanderer blissfully ignorant of almost anything. To Bryson, the whole existence of traveler is to be constructed by a series of instantaneous guesses and endless actions. Notwithstanding all the woes of a lone traveler who was culture-bound, Bryson’s travels in Europe was something of his experience in Wonderland filled with a great sense of childlike wonder and appreciation of the wonders of each country in its own colors. Neither Here Nor There is his tale of veni vidi, vici experience and entertaining accounts of the world through his eyes with amusing and telling details resembling none other than themselves.
So off he went, pack on his back, but not alone. With him were some understandably indelible memories of 20 years earlier when he and his friend, Katz, lit out for the old country. Bryson, 1990, follows mostly in the footsteps of Bryson & Katz, 1970.
Readers may recall Katz as his companion on the Appalachian Trail in "A Walk Through the Woods." There, Katz's direct action against whatever ailed him (like lightening his pack by throwing most of their food over cliff) and briskly-to-the-sharp-point complaints played well with Bryson's more positive (or at least determined) spin for really funny, now iconic book.
This time, Bryson goes it alone as traveller & writer. He has to be both Katz & Bryson for the re-run. Now & again, Bryson not only recalls Katz but seems to be channeling Katz's kvetches. However, kvetch or not, much is really, really funny and rarely, rarely dull. This 1990-2 trip seems both the best of times and the worst of times.
There were plenty of the best of times and few write as deftly as Bryson.
--After 16 days in Hammerfest, selected solely to see the Northern Lights, his magnificent reward for bitter cold & not much to do: "...a display of lights that went on for hours. There was only one color, that eerie luminous green you see on radar screens, but the activity was frantic. Narrow swirls of light would sweep across the great dome of the sky, then hang there like vapor trails..."
--In Copenhagen, "Is there anything..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...deciding whether that cheerful & homey restaurant you will remember fondly for years is likely to lie down this street or that one...?"
--And in the Netherlands, an exchange between a kind-faced hotel-keeper & his wife, Marta, (in Dutch) about the availability of a room for Bryson, as Bryson heard it. Many readers may find this episode really, really, REALLY funny. Its' punch line is, "Most heartily" and the dialog which can not be reproduced in this review may leave susceptible readers, like Marta, most m**st.
The worst of times are frequent.
"I took a place in one of the lines. Progress was glacial. It was hot. I was tired, I was sweaty, I was hungry, My feet hurt. I wanted a bath. I wanted a large dinner & several beers. There wasn't a single part of me that was happy."
Bryson calls them as he sees them, with an acerbic comment (or many) a la Katz. Occasionally, the innocents get caught in a blast intended for the guilty.
Readers can think of "Neither Here Nor There" as a sometimes fretful guide to Europe. Most travellers have had times like that & may admire Bryson's way with words in expressing their own eerie flashes of occasional fury.
A lot of skies get changed in this 30 chapter, 240 page book including those over Oslo, Paris, Brussels, Belgium, Aachen & Cologne, Hamburg, Gothenburg, Stockholm, Rome (which delighted our traveller), Naples, Florence, Milan, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, and Bulgaria (which did not delight).
Readers approaching these pages knowing what to expect will enjoy "Neither Here Nor There" most heartily and most m**stly. At the low used book prices, a fine value!
It still has his usual sarcastic humor that I usually adore and admire and I have to admit I laughed out loud a few times while reading this book.
What made the rating low is his consistent “crapping” on most of the countries he visited to an almost annoying point.
If you like to travel so much, and enjoy it, why take a verbal dump on every country you visit? He does praise certain things about each country here and there but that’s just mostly the scenery.
As a person who eventually (hopefully next year or 2024) is going on a European tour, I’m not discouraged by his words, but rather curious to see (in his opinion) how bad these places are. I’ve never been out of the US so I’m sure my opinions and experiences will mostly (hopefully) quite contrary to his.
Overall not a bad read, but it’s walk in the woods, pun intended.
Top reviews from other countries
es una visión muy divertida y cínica sobre los países europeos que visitó.