Neither Here nor There: Travels in Europe
by Bill Bryson
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Book Reviews of Neither Here nor There: Travels in Europe
Book Review: this is a different book about europe
Summary: 4 Stars
Many of the negative reviews of this book point out that more often than not Bryson goes of on complaint tangents about a slew of things about his travels. I must agree with these critics. It seems obvious that if you don't like the bizzarity of red-light districts don't peruse them or if you don't want to spend an uncomfortable pair of days on a bus bound for the outer reaches of Norway don't board the bus. Simple as that! Yet Bryson does these things and finds fault with them. I believe that may have something to do with America and maybe only Americans can understand this. We are a country who, for many of us, love complaining more than not. We are not stoics. We are commenters and fault-finders. In this manner I can indentify with Bryson as I myself have been a traveller in Europe and frequently felt the same way. Another negative that stopped me from giving all the stars to this finely written book is Bryson's pervasive hate of industrialism or mass commercialism and mass tourism. I'm sorry to say it, but if we take a quick peek at the recent history of Europe we see that it may have never been the storybook/postcard destination that Bryson envisions. Maybe he had such a hard time finding his perfect Europe because its a figment of his imagination. Let's take a peek at this history- for the first half of the last Europe was rocked by the two most devestating wars ever- before that Europe experienced fifty years of instability as revolutions came and were violently supressed in nearly every country-before that were the massive invasions of Napoleon-before that was a country were you were luck to live to your twentieth birthday and not be killed by Europe's world-famous crowd diseases that spawned from Europe's history of pure squallor and lack of anything that we would today recognize as sanitization. Now Bryson complains about the culture sapping American-style commerialism and disneylandish style tourism. If that Europe's biggest problem all Europeans and travellers should thank thier lucky stars when comparing this with Europe's past history. The Europe Bryson wants is elusive in that Europe may never have been the perfect combination of unseemly commercialism and sanitation that it appears he wants. I gave the book four stars because it is one the few books that I read that made me laugh out loud. It is extremelly well written. Bryson's sense of humor even during the complaint sessions is amazing. I suggest anybody who has ever even thought of Europe to read this immediately.Book Review: Very Entertaining Travels
Summary: 4 Stars
This is the second book by Bill Bryson that I have read, but since the first was Shakespeare: The World as Stage, this was the first time I got to experience Bryson's humor and travel writing. I was hardly disappointed. In "Travels in Europe" Bryson writes about the cross-continent trek that he took alone in 1990 and he weaves memories of a trip that he made in the 1970s with a friend across Europe. Bryson travels from Hammerfest in northern Norway to Paris, Belgium, and the Netherlands, to Germany, Denmark, and Sweden, to Italy, Switzerland, Lichtenstein, and Austria, to Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, and finally Istanbul. Bryson can be both hilarious and serious at times (for example his sobering discussion of Switzerland), although he is mostly hilarious. There is at least one sentence on each page that will make you grin, and there is about one sentence in every ten pages that will make you laugh out loud.
A sampler: while at a restaurant in the German city of Aachen, Bryson attempts to order a beer,
My waitress spoke no English, and I had the most extraordinary difficulty getting myself understood. I asked for a beer and she looked at me askance. "Wass? Tier?"
"Nein, beer," I said, and her puzzlement grew.
"Fear? Steer? Queer? King Leer?"
"Nein, nein, beer." I pointed at the menu.
"Ah, beer," she said, with a private "tut," as if I had been intentionally misleading her.
Although it is clear that Bryson took some artistic license in creating this dialogue, this comical passage highlights the difficulty that Bryson encounters throughout his travels in only knowing one language. And at times I wished that Bryson was multilingual, as Bryson would have been able to probe the various countries and cultures that he experienced. Rather, it seems that Bryson is stuck with the normal tourist sites and relegated to eating alone in expensive restaurants; but Bryson is a great writer so his wit and prose make up for this inconvenience.
Once he gets to Yugoslavia Bryson notices that he has become homesick, and I must admit that I too was getting a little worn out of his increasingly monotonous travels, and I was glad when he wrapped things up in Istanbul. But all-in-all this was a fun book to read.
Book Review: Excellent Memoir
Summary: 5 Stars
I picked this book up on a whim. I found myself near the Travel section and it just called my attention. I had been wanting to get a travel memoir for a while, so I decided to follow my instinct and buy it and read it immediately. I am very glad I did.Bryson's memoirs of his trip through Europe are incredibly funny and poignant. Interspersed throughout the narrative are stories from a 1972 trip he took with a "friend" named Stephen Katz which help to bring modern Europe into focus. Bryson, who at the time was living in England though he is American, has a bit of a "best of both worlds" kind of vision, which makes him able to see Europeans on their own terms, so to speak. The book covers a lot of ground, as Bryson travels from Scandinavia, through the usual staples of Western Europe, and ends up on the fringes of Europe, in Yugoslavia, Bulgaria and Istanbul. Some of the places he visits I have visited myself, and in those cases it was fun to see how we each experienced the city (I am happy to report we share our opinion of Naples, namely Ugh!) and/or country; in those cases where he goes to places I have never been (and there are quite a few those), the fun is in both his stories and just the sheer fun of travel. As I said, Bryson is funny in a candid way; he has no problem telling you about how many times he got drunk, or the various times he gets completely taken for a fool, always with wit and humor. Travel memoirs usually include these little details, factoids, that make the places come alive, and Bryson, though not a scholar and not a travel guidebook writer, injects quite a few of them in, always with an eye to bring the destination to life through history and context. In the end, however, the book is excellent because it is a very heartfelt and honest travel memoir that takes you along as a companion. Anyone who has ever traveled can relate to it, especially if you have visited Europe and can chuckle silently (or loudly, as I did too many times to count) when you remember all those little quirks that are quintessentially European. On a personal level, memoirs like this help me to bring into focus my own trip to Europe, going on three years ago, and remind me of the joy of travel, of the joy of seeing new lands, of the joy of coming home ready to do it all, all over again. And that is something that I appreciate immensely.
Book Review: Very funny, but missing the "fun"
Summary: 4 Stars
Bill Bryson's humor is, as always, top-flight. One reviewer mentioned a series of jokes that he found "tiring" ... personally I found the caricatures very funny. Of course Bryson's comments are generalizations, many of them over-generalizations for humor's sake, many of them are grossly inaccurate I am sure. But the reality is that we *all* generalize, and while I understand the European point of view, I would ask the critics of this book who cry xenophobia to think about all of the over-generalizations Europeans have of America and Americans. But hey, we're all entitled to our own opinion, and humor perhaps more than anything is something that is lost in translation. I don't think the European audience is the one Bryson is targeting anyway, and I'm sure there exist many books in Europe that lampoon America to a degree that most Americans would similarly take offense at. C'est la vie.
While the humor itself rates 5 stars, the "travel" part is 3~4 stars at best. I do agree with the critics that note Bryson's somewhat formulaic style becomes a little weary after a while, and aside from the funny stories and interludes, Bryson's travels are actually on the dull side. In many ways, it felt like a sequel that was a watered down version of the original--I wondered if Bryson wouldn't have been better off writing about just his *original* youthful travels around Europe with Katz instead of this version we had--Europe: Part Deux. Bryson himself seemed to lose interest in his own travels around Italy, and often it felt like he was more interested to leave the last town than to enter the next one. By Istanbul, Bryson was clearly just going through the motions. Bryson's general lack of attachment to these places keeps the reader at arm's length as well.
In the end, I think the reader's opinion of this book will depend on how the humor is received. If you don't find it funny, this book will be a miserable read. For me, and I believe most people, the humor is hilarious enough and the flashbacks are interesting enough to carry the reader's interest from beginning to end. Still, I agree with those who say it does not match the level of Bryson's other works. The style remains but this book is missing a bit of the soul that makes Bryson's works such interesting and entertaining reads.
Book Review: Rucksack traveling through Europe.
Summary: 4 Stars
"Traveling is more fun," Bill Bryson (aka "Bernt Bjornson") observes in this hilarious account of his backpack travels through Europe, "hell, life is more fun--if you can treat it as a series of impulses" (p. 131). After first backpacking through Britain, Ireland, Scandanavia, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, and Italy in 1972 (p. 13), as a "skinny, shy" 20-year-old American from Iowa, lost in "private astonishment" (p. 20), and then returning with Stephan Katz (Bryson's memorable hiking companion in A WALK IN THE WOODS) the following summer (p. 20), Bryson attempts to recapture that experience nearly twenty years later in NEITHER HERE NOR THERE. Bryson lived in England for fifteen years before setting out on his midlife pilgrimage from Hammerfest, Norway to Oslo, Paris, Brussels, Belgium, Cologne, Amsterdam, Hamburg, Copenhagen, Gothenburg, Stockholm, Rome, Naples, Florence, Milan, Como, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Austria, Yugoslavia, Sofia and Istanbul. While the result is characteristic Bryson, this book doesn't quite hit the mark of some of Bryson's other books (e.g., A WALK IN THE WOODS, A SHORT HISTORY OF NEARLY EVERYTHING, NOTES FROM A SMALL ISLAND), primarily for the following reason.Somewhere along the way, Bryson lost his sense of "private astonishment" for Europe. Wherever he travels in this book, and as hard has he tries, Bryson is unable to recapture his youthful sense of wonder for Europe again; it is neither here nor there. As a result, and as numerous other reviewers have previously noted, this is the travel narrative of a xenophobic tourist, who finds very little to praise about his experience traveling through Europe. Instead, we find Bryson tramping through Europe, rather indistinguishable from the hordes of other boorish tourists who overrun major tourist destinations like Paris, Florence, Brussels, Stockholm, Rome, in search of inexpensive American food like burgers and beer, offering us very few original insights along the way, attempting instead to entertain us with sophomoric and mean-spirited humor. While many rucksack travelers (including me) have known the "private astonishment" Bryson experienced while traveling through Europe in his younger years, few readers would ever want to visit the Europe Bryson has described in this book.
G. Merritt