Another day, another Bill Bryson book narrated by William Roberts.

The Lost Continent starts on the east coast of America. This time Bryson's quest is to travel inward and through the entire country, telling lots of stories about it afterward. One might think he impudently copied Jørgen and Magnus and their summer vacation last year. Except that Bryson used a car and we used our legs.

…and that Bryson went through 38 states while we managed three.

…and that Bryson published this book in 1989 while we were busy with our non-existence.

At this point I consider myself a fan of his. Still, I’m not as enthusiastic about this book compared to the other ones I’ve read. The observations seem less vivid, the sarcastic comments more resentful than playful. I looked up the publication order and it turns out that this was one of his first works. I suspect he was adjusting the literary balance between conveying a love for adventure and all the misery it brings along. The result in this case was a bit too harsh compared to the hilarious storytelling of A Walk in the Woods.

Just proves I could read Bill Bryson writing about (complaining about) absolutely nothing and still enjoy it! Liked it, glad I read it, can’t really recommend it. Bryson rules.

Bill Bryson came highly recommended, by many different readers but after reading this book I have no interest in reading any of his books. He writes as an expat who clearly feels superior to all other Americans. And says as much, he of course being the only person who has ever felt suffocated and stifled by the small town he grew up and went to another country in search of something more, makes judgements upon all those Americans who choose to stay in America and God forbid, live a simple life in a small town. He has nothing good to say about anything American (except maybe his widely recognized, one of greatest, sportswriter father & baseball) and is not in the least funny, not even in a ironic sarcastic sense, in is his tour of small town America.

Bill Bryson wurde 1951 in Des Moines, Iowa geboren. In den späten Achtzigern lebte er in Großbritannien, kehrte jedoch für einen langen Besuch in seine Heimat zurück, um die weniger bekannten Ecken der USA zu besuchen, wo ja der Legende nach die Hillbillys leben. Dabei herausgekommen ist einer seiner ersten zum Schreien komischen Reiseberichte.

Ich kenne Bill Brysons spöttischen, aber meistens gutmütigen, wenn auch nicht immer politisch korrekten Humor schon aus „Notes From a Small Island“. In seinem Buch von 1989 widmet er sich jedoch nicht Großbritannien, sondern seinem Heimatland, den ländlichen Bundesstaaten der USA. Auch das gelingt ihm so gut, dass ich immer wieder laut und lange lachen muss. Vor allem Ortsnamen haben es ihm angetan, so erfindet er immer wieder Städtenamen wie „Coma“, die den verschlafenen Arsch-der-Welt-Charakter (sorry) der Orte unterstreichen sollen.

Auch Kultur- und Freizeiteinrichtungen bekommen ihr Fett weg, etwa das Henry Ford Museum:

„… a bottle containing Thomas Edison’s last breath. I found this item particularly captivating. Apart from being ridiculously morbid and sentimental, how did they know which breath was going to be Edison’s last one? I pictured Henry Ford standing at the deathbed shoving a bottle in his face over and over and saying, „Is that it?“ (Seite 181)

Brysons Humor ist großartig, aber ich muss anmerken, dass ich auf den Deutschland-Nazi-Spruch auf Seite 268 hätte verzichten können. Manchmal ist er eben doch verletzend.

Neben vielen Lachern bietet das Buch aber auch Interessantes, wovon ich noch nie gehört hatte. Etwa eine Passage über die Volksgruppe der Melungeons, die europäische Züge und meist blaue Augen, jedoch eine sehr dunkle Hautfarbe haben. Es gibt Vermutungen, dass es sich um die Nachfahren der verschwundenen Siedler von Roanoke handelt, die sich mit den dortigen Indianern vermischt haben sollen. (Wenn ihr den Begriff googelt, findet ihr Bilder.)

Bei aller Komik verschweigt Bryson nicht die schlimmen Eigenschaften der von ihm durchfahrenen Gebiete. Etwa über den Süden:

„In some counties in the South, blacks outnumber whites by four to one. Yet until as recently as twenty-five years ago, in many of those counties not a single black person was registered to vote.“ (Seite 67)

Ich erinnere: Das Buch ist aus den 80ern. Heute müssen Afroamerikaner örtlich immer noch um ihr Wahlrecht kämpfen und White Supremacists versuchen mit allen Mitteln, ihre Stimmabgabe zu verhindern. (Ich empfehle diesbezüglich das Buch „White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide“ von Carol Anderson.) Es hat sich nichts verändert.

„The Lost Continent“ war dementsprechend gerade zum Zeitpunkt der Präsidentschaftswahlen in den USA interessant zu lesen, denn die meisten Trump-Wähler sind in diesen ländlichen Gegenden zu finden. Ein vergnügliches, aber auch informatives Buch.

The Lost Continental: A Look at Bill Bryson

Bill Bryson's travel books are mostly like this one, a constant whining about everything. His other non-travel books I love. It's not that I don't get the "humor" in this book, I just think that it isn't funny, not in the least. I should also say that I have lived a full one quarter of my life outside of the United States and I don’t care if someone makes fun of anything and everything American (I’ve done a bit of bashing myself).

A dyspeptic man in his middle thirties, whose constant bad mood seems more like someone in their mid seventies, drives around the U.S. and complains about absolutely everything he sees, smells, hears, and eats. If this sounds like your idea of a good time, read Bill Bryson’s The Lost Continent: Travels in Small Town America (Abacus, 1990).

He constantly mocks small towns in America by referring to them by such names as Dog Water, Dunceville, Urinal, Spigot, and Hooterville—and this is in the first five pages. Don’t worry about the intrepid insulter running out of clever names for hick towns; Bryson has a million of them and he uses every single one.

The only things about which Bryon has a favorable view are natural wonders and the homes of rich people. He marvels at the obscenely-posh residences of ultra-wealthy, early 20th century industrialists on Mackinac Island which were built before income taxes and most labor laws. He would probably be thrilled with pre-revolutionary France or Czarist Russia. One of his very few favorable reviews of American cities was of the ski town of Stowe, Vermont, which caters almost exclusively to the rich.

When he is traveling through the southwest, he complains about the Mexican music on the radio. He seems more content to resort to bigotry than to come to some sort of understanding about the culture he is visiting. In my opinion, it’s always more interesting to praise something that you understand than to mock something that you don’t. I'd have taken the time to translate a few of the songs and tell readers what they are about. In fact, I've done this and Mexican ranchera music is all about stories of love, heartbreak, and often violence which describe the cowboy culture of Mexico’s northern territories. Bryson implies that the people who listen to this music are just too stupid to realize that it's only one tune played over and over.

He gripes about a weatherman on TV who seems rather gleeful at the prospect of a coming snow storm, yet Bryson seems to relish in the idea of not liking anything that he experiences in his journey. His entire trip is like a storm he passes through. Just once I wanted him to roll into some town that he liked and get into an interesting conversation with one of its residents.

Here are examples of the cheeriness with which Bryson opens a few of his chapters:

“I drove on and on across South Dakota. God, what a flat and empty state.”

“What is the difference between Nevada and a toilet? You can flush a toilet.” (One reviewer called Bryson "witty.")

“I was headed for Nebraska. Now there’s a sentence you don’t want to have to say too often if you can possibly help it.”

“In 1958, my grandmother got cancer of the colon and came to our house to die.” This last event must have brought untold joy to the young writer.

Tell us more, Bill. His narrative is more tiresome than any Kansas wheat field he may have passed on his road trip through hell. Most Americans seem to be either fat, or stupid, or both in the eyes of Bryson. I can only assume that Bryson himself is some sort of genius body builder (although in his photo on the book jacket he's a fat schlub). Just one time I wanted him to talk to a local resident over a beer or a cup of coffee. I wanted him to describe his partner in conversation as other than fat or stupid. Not even one time do we hear about a place from somebody who lives there. We could just as easily have read the guidebooks as Bryson did, and he could have stayed home and saved himself thousands of miles of misery.

Whenever someone starts to tell me about somewhere they've traveled, I ask them to describe their favorite thing about the trip, be it a special spot, food, the people, or whatever. If they start to complain about the place, I either change the subject or walk away if I can. Travel is supposed to broaden the mind, not make it narrower.

i fucking hated this book. every other page this smug POS is commenting on some woman being fat, stupid, or both. everywhere he goes he makes fun of the locals and not in an endearing way. he complains when people aren't friendly to him and i wanted to reach through the book and choke him and yell IT'S BECAUSE THEY CAN TELL YOU'RE AN ASSHOLE. he's wistful for an America that can never come back and shouldn't come back, but he's too obsessed with the white picket fence Leave It To Beaver fantasy to appreciate the America he's in. the best passages of the book are when he describes the landscape, because he takes zero time or care to actually engage with any generosity of heart the people he meets -- he just makes fun, doesn't care to learn anything about them or treat them as though they may have a worthwhile life in the "nothing" town he's deriding, what a concept.

he's not funny. humor punches up. meanness punches down, and he punches down on every page.

the one thing i will give this book is it made me think a lot about what it would take to revive small towns that have collapsed due to outsourcing and big box stores/chains. and that he has nearly inspired me to copy his exact trip but approaching it with at least some generosity of spirit, updating on the towns as they are nearly 30 years after the book was originally written and save the space he takes up fantasizing about naked waitresses or making fun of people's weight to actually have conversations with those people and learn their stories.

i haven't read anything else by bill bryson, and perhaps he's matured since he wrote this at 36 and is now in his 60's, but fuck 1989 bill bryson. this guy sucks and out of 299 pages, about 295 worth were depressing if not just plain insulting.

Bad. Bad. Bad. While Bryson can be funny at times, I quickly grew tired of him and eventually he just annoyed me with this one. I would have stopped in the middle, but for my book club's sake, I plodded through, skimming some sections toward the end. This isn't real travel writing. Bryson was a longtime expat in England who returned to the US apparently so he could cynically criticize just about everyone and everything he saw here. I got the feeling that he had pitched the book idea to his publisher and gotten his advance money before thinking better of the idea when it was already too late. It sounds like this "journey" was a labor of hate.

I also lived in England for a couple of years before returning to the US. But when I returned, I saw this country with fresh eyes and now feel better able to appreciate both its strengths and its faults. Bryson sounds like he just came back to show us how much better HE is than us. His wit just doesn't sound like it comes from someone who ultimately cares about his subjects. It just sounds like a schoolboy ripping on anyone who's different from him. His other books may be better but definitely give this one a pass.

I have a weakness for road trip books. The last time I traveled cross country I made a point to stay off the interstates and drove the secondary roads. I loved Blue Highways, and I loved the travel portion of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (the philosophy part left me shaking my head and saying, “That’s all he’s got? Not much of an idea to build a meaningful life around.”). I keep looking for a contemporary road trip book that looks at the good and the bad of today’s small towns and have yet to find one. (Yes, I read James Fallows’ Our Towns, and thought it read like an extended Chamber of Commerce blurb.)

Lost Continent is now thirty years old, so it’s not exactly a current look at small town America, but I have read Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods, and In a Sunburned Country and liked them, so I decided to read this one as well. This is not him at his best. Halfway through I was thinking that perhaps he signed a contract to produce a certain number of books, and threw this one together without much enthusiasm.

He has an eye for detail, and sometimes he is able to capture the essence of a place in a few words. That’s the kind of style that made him a famous writer. Too often, however, he plays the humorist too broadly, and it comes across as petty and mean spirited. We can’t all run off to England and start a new life; some people have to stay home and eke out a living in small towns under difficult circumstances.

Sarcasm is a tough act to pull off, especially at book length. Some of what he writes is genuinely funny, some is meh, and some seems forced. I read some reviews where the writers said that perhaps this book was not written for an American audience at all, but for the Brits, a bit of a poke at an unfamiliar, and to British sensibilities, vulgar culture. Maybe. I think I could be talked into that point of view. In any case, most travel books make me think about getting out a map and planning where I want to go next, but this one just made me want to find a better book.

(English below)
Bill Bryson è un po' così: o lo ami o lo odi.
Potrei definirlo il re del sarcasmo, ma è decisamente qualcosa di più. È quell'occhio sul mondo che è capace di vedere le cose da un altro punto di vista.
Qui seguiamo Bill nelle sue peregrinazioni attraverso il suo paese di nascita, gli Stati Uniti. Di proposito l'autore evita tutti i posti celebri (per esempio San Francisco) raccontando l'America attraverso le piccole città, quelle che si incontrano lungo la strada con i piccoli diners.
Bill non teme gli stereotipi, li cavalca. A volte può sembrare fastidioso, ma il suo raccontare il mondo è lucido e il libro, per quanto ormai abbia più di trent'anni, rimane attuale. Come se si trattasse una fotografia contemporanea!

Perché leggere Bryson: è esilerante, brillante e ti fa venire voglia di andare in capo al mondo solo per trovare un albero.


Bill Bryson is like that: either you love him or you hate him.
I could probably define him the king of sarcasm, but he is definitely something more. He is the eye which is able to see things in the world from another point of view.
Here we follow Bill in his wandering through his home country, the United States. In his travel he is avoiding all the well-known places (like San Francisco) to describe America through the small towns, the ones you encounter along the road with their small diners.
Bill is not afraid of stereotypes, he rides them. Sometimes he can sound annoying, but his way of talking about the world is meaningful and the book, even if it is more than 30 years old, sounds like it has been written a couple of months ago. Like a contemporary photography!

Why reading Bryson: because he is funny, brilliant and he leaves you this urge to travel anywhere in the world just to find that specific tree.

This is the first Bill Bryson book I have read and it's not hard to see why he has become so popular. Written in a mostly conversational style, as though he were relating the highs and lows of his travel experiences to his friends over dinner just after he returned, it is filled with very poignant, evocative language. Bryson's descriptions make you feel as though you can see what he can sees. I really enjoyed The Lost Continent for this reason alone.

However, The Lost Continent is almost more of an anti travel guide. I reckon that for more than half the book he is mercilessly bagging the places he visited during his drive around the United Sates, and the people who live there. It's really very mean at times, although I'm sure it is intended to be funny. Crass generalizations and hyperbolic stereotyping are the order of the day. Clearly this is meant to be a humourous read, but I have to say, I barely cracked a smile.

I'm not saying it's a bad book. On the contrary, it's very good. It's just that Bryson comes across badly. He doesn't sound like a nice person, although he, and his critics may argue that he is simply being honest, and that the nasty and predominantly negative commentary he provides is not indicative of his character.

Ironically, I feel as though I must visit the places he visited. I feel compelled to walk in his footsteps and see how my perception and experience marry with his. Could some of these small American towns be as bad, or as good, as he described? It's a question I hope to be able to answer one day. For now, I will consider reading what he has to say about my homeland, Australia, in his book, Down Under. Do I dare? Am I brave enough?

I had really hoped to like this one and I tried my best. But something in the tone, in the content, in the narrative that really out me off. I feel cheated as it does not feel like a real travelogue - it is more like a snooty man drives across the towns and roads only to judge everything and everyone severely and does not get educated at all. Is it not the saddest travel story where you go about finding fault with everything and laughing at all that you see and in the process get no real experience at all.

Bryson's writing style is quite amusing. Otherwise I for one would find him quite unbearable. His prejudices seem to come straight from the British tabloids. One can really tell he's lived in Britain for a long, long time. I thought he would spoil all the places he visits for me with his negative attitude, but actually he can't. His Europe was already a place I've never encountered, even though I live in the centre of it. Which leads me to the conclusion that it's nothing to do with the places themselves - it's just that he takes his miserly, grumpy self everywhere with him.
My "favourite" bit was about some Idaho ski resort, quoting: "Sun Valley ... is built to look like a Bavarian village. ... As so often with these things in America, it was superior to a real Bavarian village. There were two reasons for this: (1) It was better built and more picturesque; and (2) the inhabitants of Sun Valley have never adopted Adolf Hitler as their leader or sent their neighbours off for gassing. Were I a skier and rich, I would on these grounds alone unhesitatingly choose it over Garmisch-Partenkirchen, say." --- Garmisch and Bavaria will be devastated.
And I'm sure the original owners of Idaho (Shoshoni, Nez Percé and others) were paid a fair price for their lands back in the old days?? Methinks I read about the Bear River massacre of 1863. Just saying ...