Descubrí a Bill Bryson en un viaje a Inglaterra, hace ya muchos años. Pregunté por él a la vendedora, y me comentó maravillas del escritor. Lo compré, lo leí, y me gustó mucho. Se trataba de “Notes from a small island”. Desde entonces he seguido sus libros con bastante asiduidad, y lo considero un escritor genial y divertido a partes iguales.

En “Neither here nor there” nos recrea un viaje en plan mochilero que realizó por Europa en la década de los setenta, empezando por Noruega y acabando en Estambul. La verdad es que no tiene desperdicio. Algunos pasajes son auténticamente hilarantes, otros contienen reflexiones ridiculizantes de algunos colectivos que se ha ido encontrando, todo servido con unas dosis de humor muy británico. Pero, ¡no confundir con una especie de guía de viaje! Bryson no suele dar grandes descripciones de los lugares que ha visitado, ni te servirá para que no te pierdas en cualquier gran ciudad europea. De hecho, él suele hacerlo a menudo, (perderse), a veces con consecuencias nefastas. No, se trata de una divertida narración de anécdotas, salpicadas con un poco de su mala leche habitual en este tipo de narraciones. ¡No busquéis tampoco datos culturales en este libro, tampoco los vais a encontrar! Yo, que he procurado viajar por Europa con asiduidad, coincido plenamente con muchas de sus reflexiones, incluso las no políticamente correctas, que de esas tiene unas cuantas.

¡Lástima que en ese viaje no llegara hasta España! ¡Me hubiera gustado reírme a gusto con sus disparates! Divertida y recomendable lectura. No la colocaría entre las mejores obras de Bryson, porque las tiene mejores, sin duda, pero he pasado un buen rato con ella.

An enjoyable travelogue of Europe in 1990s by a humorous curmudgeon
Nobody does irritable, ironic, and curmudgeonly travel writing in a humorous and self-deprecating way like Bill Bryson. He travels through a Europe that is already in the past for us, especially Eastern Europe as it emerges from behind the Iron Curtain as the Soviet Union collapses. There are loads of humorous, sometimes bitingly-sarcastic observations of the up-tight Germans, indolent French, and dysfunctional Italians, exploring stereotypes to see what truths lurk beneath them. He certainly seems determined to eat and drink his way through each country, thereby learning the cultures at their most fundamentally accessible level. It's a very human and ground-level approach, and usually produces some amusing episodes and the occasional astute observation. Good fun, though certainly dated in many ways.

I'm not sure I'm going to finish this book because I'm only on page 41 and I can barely focus on the words because I'm overwhelmed by the desire to to punch him very, very hard. I was trying to let some other ignorant comments go but then the chapter on Paris began. He goes on about how lights in French hotels are on a timer causing people to grope around in the dark if they do not find their room quickly enough:

"And from this I learned one very important lesson: The French do not like us. On my first trip to Paris, I kept wondering: 'Why does everyone hate me so much?'....The other thing I have never understood about the French is why they are so ungrateful. I've always felt that since it was us that liberated them--because let's face it, the French Army couldn't beat a girls' hockey team--they ought to give all Allied visitors to the country a book of coupons good for free drinks in Pigalle and a ride to the top of the Eiffel Tower. But they never thank you."

Seriously? They should thank us and give us free things? His arrogance and sense of entitlement is disgusting. It's the same thinking that caused people (who had never been to Paris) to tell me prior to my trip abroad that French people hate Americans. As I expected, this statement was completely wrong and everyone I interacted with was polite and helpful, many friendly (gasp!).

I can't imagine I will learn anything useful from this book other than how sorry I am for every person who encountered (and will encounter) Bill Bryson on his travels.

Bryson writes hysterical travel books. In this one he sets out to re-create a backpacking trip of Europe he made during the seventies when he was twenty. His descriptions of people and places will have you falling out of your chair. The beer he is offered in Belgium, for example, defies his palate. He just can’t associate the taste with any previous experience, but finally decides it puts him in mind of a very large urine sample, possibly from a circus animal. (He should have stuck with Coca-Cola, nicht wahr, Wendell?)

Bryson has truly captured some of the giddy enjoyment that I experience when traveling in a foreign country where one does not speak the language. “I can’t think of anything that excites a greater sense of childlike wonder than to be in a country where you are ignorant of almost everything. Suddenly you are five years old again. You can’t read anything. You have only the most rudimentary sense of how things work. . . . Your whole existence becomes a series of interesting
guesses.”

At the Arc de Triomphe, some thirteen streets come together. “Can you imagine? I mean to say, here you have a city with the world’s most pathologically aggressive drivers -- who in other circumstances would be given injections of valium from syringes the size of basketball jumps and confined to their beds with leather straps -- and you give them an open space where they can all go in any of thirteen directions at once. Is that asking for trouble or what?”

Interspersed are salient comments about traveling on European trains. “There is no scope for privacy and of course there is nothing like being trapped in a train compartment on a long journey to bring all those unassuageable little frailties of the human body crowding to the front of your mind – the withheld fart, the three and a half square yards of boxer shorts that have somehow become concertinaed between your buttocks, the Kellogg’s corn flake that is unaccountably lodged deep in your left nostril,”. . .and rude comments about the Swiss: “What do you call a gathering of boring people in Switzerland? Zurich.”

He reveals some funny stories about himself. “I had no gift for woodworking. Everyone else in the class was building things like cedar chests and oceangoing boats and getting to play with dangerous and noisy power tools, but I had to sit at the Basics Table with Tubby Tucker and a kid who was so stupid that I don't think we ever learned his name. We just called him 'Drooler.' The three of us weren't allowed anything more dangerous than sandpaper and Elmer's Glue, so we would sit week after week making little nothings out of offcuts, except for Drooler, who would just eat the glue. Mr. Dreck never missed a chance to humiliate me. 'And what is this?' he would say, seizing some mangled block of wood on which I had been laboring for the last twenty-seven weeks and holding it aloft for the class to titter at. 'I've been
teaching shop for sixteen years, Mr. Bryson, and I have to say this is the worst beveled edge I've ever seen.' He held up a birdhouse of mine once and it just collapsed in his hands. The class roared. Tubby Tucker laughed so hard that he almost choked. He laughed for twenty minutes, even when I whispered to him across the table that if he didn't stop it I would bevel his testicles."

It used to be -- not as common now as formerly -- that each public washroom had an attendant whose job it was to keep everything clean, and you were expected to drop in some change for his or her income. The sex of the attendant was irrelevant to the sex of the washroom and Bryson had difficulty getting used to the idea of some cleaning lady watching him urinate to make sure he didn't "dribble on the tiles or pocket any of the urinal cakes. It is hard enough to pee when you are aware that someone's eyes are on you, but when you fear that at any moment you will be felled by a rabbit chop to the kidneys for taking too much time, you seize up altogether. You couldn't have cleared my system with Drano. So eventually I would zip up and return unrelieved to the table [in the restaurant:], and spend the night back at the hotel doing a series of Niagara Falls impressions."

Bryson does not mince words, and his perspective on former Austrian president Waldheim echoes mine but is perhaps more trenchant. “I fully accept Dr. Waldheim’s explanation that when he saw forty thousand Jews being loaded onto cattle trucks at Salonika, he genuinely believed they were being sent to the seaside for a holiday. For the sake of fairness, I should point out that Waldheim insists he never even knew that the Jews of Salonika were being shipped off to Auschwitz. And let’s be fair again – they accounted for no more than one third of the city’s entire population (italics theirs), and it is of course entirely plausible that a high-ranking Nazi officer in the district could have been unaware of what was happening within his area of command. Let’s give the man a break. I mean to say, when the Sturmabteilung, or stormtroopers, burned down forty-two of Vienna’s forty three synagogues during Kristallnacht, Waldheim did wait a whole week before joining the
unit. . . . Christ, the man was practically a resistance hero. . . .Austrians should be proud of him and proud of themselves for having the courage to stand up to world opinion and elect a man of his caliber, overlooking the fact that he is a pathological liar. . .that he has a past so mired in mis-truths that no one but he knows what he has done. It takes a special kind of people to stand behind a man like that.”

As I’ve said many times, the hardest I’ve laughed whilst reading has been Bill Bryson books, and since I’d not even heard of this one, I checked out the audiobook - and laughed out loud many, many times, but was several times shocked by the graphic or frank language, and a little shocked at Bill’s amount of drinking, drunkenness, and discussions of trying to hook up when he and “Katz” had traveled to some of these places before. I am not a puritan about language or about the way other people live, but…I felt that I knew Bill and I clearly did not. I still snickered and snorted along as he described everything with such refreshing and biased honesty, but found his tendency to gravitate towards red light districts in each new town, and then describe them thoroughly with detached interest bordering on alarming. I still found several more places to add to my bucket list, but may not rely on Bill as a travel guide when I go there.

I've realized from reading this book how thin the line between hilariously funny and whiny is. And Bryson has crossed the line. Or maybe I drew the line thinner just because he did the unforgiveable act of not liking Cologne (which is still the loveliest city for me). So you've been warned, this review is subjective and biased (oh dear, so much so) and when I said I don't like it doesn't mean you won't, you probably will.

Anyway, midway reading, I suddenly had this thought. Is it possible that Bryson only wanted to see the northern light and then run away from dreary end-winter early spring to bella italia? But he also need to get a book out of it, so he sprinkled some belgium, tiny bit of german (really? only aachen, cologne and hamburg?), netherland, switzerland etc. and call it travel around europe. The problem is his heart was not on it. He went out off tangent most of germany & switzerland; don't get me wrong, I love his going off tangent on his other books, but here it feels just as if he did it because he didn't want to talk about whichever place he was, he didn't want to have to dig on the marvelous trivias that's part of his books' charm. He just whined and whined and whined in disguise of showing the real condition of tourist place in contrast to other travel books that drool and drip with honey. Italia he loved, so he talked about it. Though still not as well as he had talked about the Appalachian route or about Shakespeare.

Anyway, I don't think I'll re-read it nor will I bring it if I ever want to travel to Europe.

This is good, light and fun - a bit outdated now (first published in 1991) but the usual breezy, funny, Bryson read.

A funny, yet dated travel diary. The 50 something author re-travels the places he went to as a teen. It’s funny, sarcastic and witty. It’s a rambling city by city account of his travels from Oslo to Istanbul.

Neither here Nor there: Travels in Europe

من هامرفاست على حدود القارة المتجمدة الشمالية وحتى إسطنبول، يأخذنا بيل برايسون في كتاب رحلات ممتع، فبعدما عاش على حافة القارة - في الجزر البريطانية - ولسنوات طويلة، قرر برايسون أن يتخلى عن بروده وأن يحمل حقيبته على ظهره وينزل ليتجول في أوروبا، كان قد تجول فيها في منتصف السبعينات مع صديق ثقيل الظل، وها هو الآن يقوم بذلك متوحداً، يقفز من مدينة إلى أخرى، محباً للدنماركيين وكارهاً للسويديين والنرويجيين، معجباً بالطليان وطريقتهم الغريبة في الحياة، ساخراً أبداً ودائماً من كل شيء وأي شيء، كتاب ممتع، أنوي القراءة لبرايسون أكثر، فلديه حفنة من كتب الرحلات الأخرى في أستراليا وأمريكا وأفريقيا.

In theology, we call it a 'calling.' A vocation. The perfect match between your greatest love and the work for which you are most well-suited or which God or the Universe has called you to do. Bill Bryson describes his travels in Europe with that sort of passion. But add to that, not only his talent for conveying information, but also his characteristic sense of humor, his ability to describe the things he observes down to the minutest detail, his exquisite writing style, the way he paints so delicately, so specifically with words, and above all, his love, his love of all he experiences. Bill Bryson is the perfect travel companion. I, for one, am disabled and don’t see myself boarding a plane or train or bus anytime soon, let alone walking miles and miles, as Bryson does. But through this author’s words, I take wing as a reader and fly with Bryson. He makes me laugh so often; he also makes me cry; he makes me share his passion. He eats and drinks a lot throughout his travels in Europe. He also shares his admiration for beautiful women. But his most endearing quality for me is his honesty. He pulls no punches when he describes the qualities of the countrymen he encounters in the various nations through which he travels. But he also laughs at himself and often makes a fool of himself. He is no exception to the rule which he, himself, establishes. But with such keen intellect and such sheer artistry, he paints the entire picture in such an exquisite way. It is no wonder that Bryson is such a popular writer. I read the Audible version of this book. That is, I listened to it rather than reading it with my eyes. Bill Bryson was the narrator, and oh my God, what a narrator! He hypnotizes and charms the reader/listener with his beautiful voice, the way he veers between tenderness, admiration, and sarcasm. This has got to be one of my all-time favorite books. An illuminating history of Europe, as seen through the eyes of a modern traveler, a keen thinker, an immoderate drinker, a gourmand, an art connoisseur, a nature lover, a humorist, an isolationist, an awe-inspirer, a tickler, and a sharer of all he experiences, throughout the spectrum of physical, emotional, and intellectual. I love Bill Bryson. Period.

Funny at times, but the sarcasm started to annoy me. There was also too much comments on how expensive everything was, but overall the book wasn’t too bad.

I recall thinking this so lightweight I have never read him since.