John Steinbeck put a house on a pickup, left the wife behind in their Long Island home and traveled the nation for several months. This is his tale of that experience. I found many quotables here, and I guess one should expect that when the traveler’s name is Steinbeck. In a book of about two hundred pages, one can hardly expect a detailed look at all of America. Steinbeck picks his spots. Sometimes they work, sometimes not. It was, of necessity, merely a sketch of some parts of the country. But some of those sketches should hang in the Louvres. Two in particular grabbed me. His description of “The Cheerleaders,” a group of women who gathered every day at a newly integrated southern elementary school to taunt and threaten the black kids and Steinbeck’s look at the culture surrounding that was chilling, a close portrait of an incendiary place at an incendiary time, and is, alone, a reason to read this book. The other was his depiction of a redwood forest in northern California, where the massive trees alter dawn and blot out the night sky.


Steinbeck and Charley - from the NY Times

The subtitle of the book is “In Search of America.” What travel books are really about, particularly when undertaken by a literary person, is self-discovery. It works the same as in literature. The road, the quest, the journey all exist in an interior landscape and lead to an inner destination. I did not feel that this was much at work here, and was disappointed. Steinbeck kept his eyes on the external road. Sometimes his snapshots of early 1960s America were uninteresting. Sometimes they were compelling. The compelling parts made the trip one worth taking.




=============================EXTRA STUFF

Apparently, there is some thought that not all the material in this book was actually...um...real. GR friend Jim sent along a link to a site by a guy named Bill Steigerwald, who writes about Steinbeck. Looks like he did a fair bit of research and concluded that Steinbeck's journey may have been more of an internal one than we believed. check it out.

I first read this book in high school, and it's what made me fall in love with travelogues. In 1960, John Steinbeck drove a small camper around the United States with his dog, Charley. He wrote that he wanted to get to know his country again, to learn more about this "new America."

"For many years I have traveled in many parts of the world. In America I live in New York, or dip into Chicago, or San Francisco. But New York is no more America than Paris is France or London is England. Thus I discovered that I did not know my own country. I, an American writer, writing about America, was working from memory, and the memory is at best a faulty, warpy reservoir. I had not heard the speech of America, smelled the grass and trees and sewage, seen its hills and water, its color and quality of light. I knew the changes only from books and newspapers. But more than this, I had not felt the country for twenty-five years. In short, I was writing of something I did not know about, and it seems to me that in a so-called writer this is criminal. My memories were distorted by twenty-five intervening years."

"Travels with Charley" was published in 1962, and Steinbeck, who had been in poor health, died just six years later.

I remember loving this book. I loved Steinbeck's stories about the people he met and the places he visited, and even the details of how he organized the camper and his trip. I have recommended this book to countless friends over the years, gushing about how good it was.

So you can imagine my UTTER HEARTBREAK because I found out that parts of the story were fabricated or fictionalized. Reporters have verified that some details in the narrative could not have been true, and that Steinbeck made up a lot of the conversations he supposedly had with people along the road. (This news first broke in 2011, but I didn't learn it until I saw it mentioned in John Waters' book about hitchhiking, "Carsick.")

When the 50th anniversary edition of "Travels with Charley" was published in 2012, it came with a disclaimer: "Indeed, it would be a mistake to take this travelogue too literally, as Steinbeck was at heart a novelist, and he added countless touches – changing the sequence of events, elaborating on scenes, inventing dialogue – that one associates more with fiction than nonfiction."

So here is my conundrum: Knowing that parts of it have been fictionalized, should I continue to recommend it to others? If the book is as good as I remember, doesn't that outweigh its dubious origin?

Or I could just live in denial and remember the joy I felt when I first read it.

Update June 2014:
I was so upset to learn that Steinbeck had embellished his stories that I decided to reread the book to see how it holds up. It was great! It was glorious! I will even say that I think it's one of the best travelogues written about America, ever. "Travels with Charley" is beautifully written - it is so quotable and insightful that I had dozens of pages marked.

"It would be pleasant to be able to say of my travels with Charley, 'I went out to find the truth about my country and I found it.' And then it would be such a simple matter to set down my findings and lean back comfortably with a fine sense of having discovered truths and taught them to my readers. I wish it were that easy... This monster of a land, this mightiest of nations, this spawn of the future, turns out to be the macrocosm of microcosm me. If an Englishman or a Frenchman or an Italian should travel my route, see what I saw, hear what I heard, their stored pictures would be not only different from mine but equally different from one another. If other Americans reading this account should feel it true, that agreement would only mean that we are alike in our Americanness... For all of our enormous geographic range, for all of our sectionalism, for all of our interwoven breeds drawn from every part of the ethnic world, we are a nation, a new breed. Americans are much more American than they are Northerns, Southerners, Westerners, or Easterners... The American identity is an exact and provable thing."

Because it had been criticized by modern reporters, on this reread I paid more attention to Steinbecks' "conversations" with folks around the country, and yes, the dialogue was so smooth and concise that it had to have been finessed. But after considering the issue, I've relaxed on this point because I bet every writer does that. Every writer is going to streamline speech so that it reads well. Steinbeck even talks about writers who can quickly take measure of a place:

"I've always admired those reporters who can descend on an area, talk to key people, ask key questions, take samplings of opinions, and then set down an orderly report very like a road map. I envy this technique and at the same time do not trust it as a mirror of reality. I feel that there are too many realities. What I set down here is true until someone else passes that way and rearranges the world in his own style."

I do think Steinbeck got at the spirit of what was going on in America in 1960: it was a big election year between Kennedy and Nixon; racial tensions were high in the South because schools had been desegregated; and there was heightened anxiety about Russia and the threat of the atomic bomb. He even wrote about environmentalism and his concerns for how much waste America was producing, and he contemplated how the new cross-country interstate system would change the country. The guy was prescient, I tell you.

Some of my favorite parts were when Steinbeck tried to cross into Canada with his dog and ran into a bureaucratic snafu regarding Charley's vaccination paperwork (very amusing); a warm conversation he had with a family of immigrants while they shared a drink in his camper; and when he drove through a forest of massive Redwood trees out West.

"The redwoods, once seen, leave a mark or create a vision that stays with you always. No one has ever successfully painted or photographed a redwood tree. The feeling they produce is not transferable. From them comes silence and awe. It's not only their unbelievable stature, nor the color which seems to shift and vary under your eyes, no, they are not like any trees we know, they are ambassadors from another time. They have the mystery of ferns that disappeared a million years ago into the coal of the carboniferous era. They carry their own light and shade. The vainest, most slap-happy and irreverent of men, in the presence of redwoods, goes under a spell of wonder and respect."

Another theme Steinbeck returns to often is the wanderlust that seems to pervade Americans everywhere. He mentions how many families had started buying mobile homes so they can move more freely about, and how many others gazed at his camper and said they wished they could travel across the country.

"I saw in their eyes something I was to see over and over in every part of the nation -- a burning desire to go, to move, to get under way, anyplace, away from any Here. They spoke quietly of how they wanted to go someday, to move about, free and unanchored, not toward something but away from something. I saw this look and heard this yearning everywhere in every state I visited. Nearly every American hungers to move."

I so enjoyed rereading this book that I will definitely continue to recommend it to friends. I even upgraded my original 4-star rating to 5, because of how gorgeous Steinbeck's writing was. I just wish I could give Charley a biscuit and a belly rub for being such a good traveling companion.

My ratings are always about my level of immersion in and enjoyment of a book, and this was simply not what I expected. I thought it would be more of a travelogue of the places Steinbeck visited in his 3-month road trip across the United States in a custom truck camper named ‘Rocinante’ with his dog Charley. Instead, it was mostly a series of Steinbeck’s philosophical musings, side trips down memory lane and history lessons. Texas was the exception, however. Steinbeck went almost overboard in his thoughts and descriptions of Texas and Texans but then Texas is a big place with a big personality:

“Writers facing the problem of Texas find themselves floundering in generalities, and I am no exception. Texas is a state of mind. Texas is an obsession. Texas is a nation in every sense of the word.”

Steinbeck’s dog Charley was the highlight of the book for me and an absolute joy to meet, and John’s writing was at its best when writing about his beloved French poodle:

“Charley’s combed columns of legs were noble things, his cap of silver blue fur was rakish, and he carried the pompom of his tail like the baton of a bandmaster. A wealth of combed and clipped mustache gave him the appearance and attitude of a French rake of the nineteenth century, and incidentally concealed his crooked front teeth . . . He sat straight and nobly in the seat of Rocinante and he gave me to understand that while forgiveness was not impossible, I would have to work for it.”

There are some brilliant observations here about people and places, but many parts bored me and several felt contrived. Most readers liked it more than I did so don’t let this one reader’s “mediocre” 3 stars discourage you from jumping in Rocinante with John and Charley and touring 1960’s USA. I did save this one particular line in my quotes notebook as being particularly brilliant: “. . . a journey is like a marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.” Truth, from a man with three wives ;-)

I'm not a fan of Steinbeck but this was a great book: funny, witty, great dialogue, and excellent descriptions of the country he traveled across with Charley.

Charley is a standard poodle and he was a good companion as Steinbeck rambled in his self-made camper, the Rocinante, meeting laconic New Englanders, gruff Northwesterners, old friends and family in his hometown in California.

He has quite a bit to say about Texas and then the South. He tends to veer from description and delve into philosophizing at this point and, frankly, it's just not as interesting. It was the height of racial tension and Steinbeck saw it in all its putrid ugliness.

Instead of feeling ashamed, we should celebrate how far civilization has come since then.

A fun travelogue to read. Makes me want to go on a cross country road trip.

“When I was very young and the urge to be someplace else was on me, I was assured by mature people that maturity would this itch. When years described me as mature, the remedy prescribed was middle age.In middle age I was assured greater age would calm my fever and now that I am fifty-eight perhaps senility will do the job. Nothing has worked. Four hoarse blasts of a ships's whistle still raise the hair on my neck and set my feet to tapping. The sound of a jet, an engine warming up, even the clopping of shod hooves on pavement brings on the ancient shudder, the dry mouth and vacant eye, the hot palms and the churn of stomach high up under the rib cage. In other words, once a bum always a bum. I fear this disease incurable. I set this matter down not to instruct others but to inform myself....A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike. And all plans, safeguards, policing, and coercion are fruitless. We find after years of struggle that we not take a trip; a trip takes us.”
― John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley: In Search of America

I'm a big fan of Steinbeck and the honest and hard hitting way he writes about people in general and America in particular.

Travels with Charley is his non fiction travelogue where towards the end of his life in late 1960 after writing all his famous novels he takes an impulsive decision to travel the country in one long road trip. He custom orders a special truck/caravan which he names Rocinante. He overloads it with food, tools and a ton of books, takes his french poodle Charley as his sole companion and starts his journey from Sag Harbour New York in early Autumn and makes it back home in time for Christmas.

As he travels from one state to the other, we get a snapshot of each, complete with it's landscape, it's food it's culture and the people he meets.

He discussed politics and Nixon in one state, he talked about human waste and oil spills, consumerism and it's affects on environment and our planet, he crosses the Big Divide, he declared Montana as his favourite state which stole his heart. He dedicated a long chapter to Texas. His then wife was from there. According to him Texas is not just a state but a state of mind. It has it's own culture and it's steeped in history. As he drove into New Orleans he remarked the big difference between the North and South. Saw horrible treatment of Black Americans still being hated, segregated and called Ni**er openly. November 1960 is the time when the first black child was given admission into a "white " school which had created an uproar in the white public. A group of women protested loudly each day as the little girl came to school.

This last leg of his trip leaves him distraught and depressed and homesick. After thousands of miles across America, making a dozen motel stops, meeting score of people he couldn't drive fast enough to come back to his wife and his home.

For someone like me, who hasn't seen much of the United States, this book served as a great source of information, even if it was written 60 years ago. I got to travel with him vicariously and it turned out to be a very interesting, eventful journey.
I always wanted to go see Montana and I'm very happy it got Steinbeck's seal of approval !

Six years before he died, John Steinbeck (1902-1968) had a lonesome trip aboard a camper named Rocinante (after Don Quixote’s horse) around the USA. He said that he would like to see this country on a personal level before he died as he made a good living writing about it. Considering his heart condition, such trip alone could have been disastrous to his health but he insisted. The main question that he would like to be answered was “What are Americans like today?” and after travelling with his poodle Charley for around 10,000 miles for 3 months, he did not like the answer that he got.

He saw the wastefulness of the people. He got worried about excessive packaging that consumers liked. He noticed the ambiguity of culture brought about my mass media technologies. Advancement in technologies, though giving people instant gratification, could alienate members of the families from each other. He met people who could not be trusted even by giving the right direction. He met poor migrant potato pickers from Canada (that reminded me of the Joads family in his opus, The Grapes of Wrath). He finally saw Niagara Falls that made him happy because finally we could say we saw it already. He met unreasonable and illogical border authorities. He saw how people in different states differ on how they talk to one another and treat other people. For example, in New England people spoke very little and waited for him to come over while in Midwestern cities, people were more outgoing and did not hesitate approaching him. He got amazed on how fast the population grew in those states that he had visited before. When he visited Sauk Centre because he would like to see the birthplace of his favorite writer, Sinclair Lewis he got disheartened. A waitress in the restaurant did not know who Lewis was. In fact, ignorance, according to him, was prevalent in most people he encountered particularly in politics, economics and culture. In Texas, he despised the so-called “Cheerleaders” who were protesting the integration of black children in a school in New Orleans. In New Orleans, he learned that racism of the South was not confined with those towards blacks but also towards Jews. The trip ended with Steinbeck missing a U-turn and telling the policeman: “Officer, I’ve driven this thing all over the country – mountains, plains, deserts. And now I’m back in my own town, where I live – and I’m lost.”

This is my 3rd book by Steinbeck and for me this is the most down-to-earth. Although I have only been to California, Philadelphia, Texas and Ohio, visualizing those places he visited and conversations that he had with the people he met was not a problem. I used to enjoy watching American movies in the 50’s and 60’s and I was able to picture those scenes in my mind. Also, I think Steinbeck wanted to have a last hand long look with the people he wrote about in his novels that made him who he was – one of the greatest American authors (and certainly one of my favorite novelists of all times). So what if he had a heart problem? So what if he was alone with just a dog to talk to? So what if there was a raging snow storm outside? So what if he might be killed by dangerous mad men in the forests and highways? The thought of Steinbeck risking his life to be able to see the country for the last time and talk to the people who patronized his novels was a marked of a good artist or, simply, a good humble man.

And oh yes, if you love reading about dogs, read this because Charley could even talk. Steinbeck imagined words being said by his dog in one of the scenes and their dialogues were so clever and amusing. Steinbeck could write anything. He could make any scenario believable. Enough for me to gasp for air as his words were always outrageously breathtaking.

Eight years before a lifelong smoking habit finally killed his heart, John Steinbeck embarked on one last road trip across the United States. Steinbeck desired to see the country he described all his life with his own eyes - "to look again, rediscover this monster land", become reacquainted with its people. His sole companion would be Charley, a French standard poodle. Together they would board the Rocinante - Steinbeck's truck named after the horse of Don Quixote - and go and try to understand what America and Americans are like now.

My plan was clear, concise, and reasonable, I think. For many years I have traveled in many parts of the world. In America I live in New York, or dip into Chicago or San Francisco. But New York is no more America than Paris is France or London is England. Thus I discovered that I did not know my own country. I, an American writer, writing about America, was working from memory, and the memory is at best a faulty, warpy reservoir. I had not heard the speech of America, smelled the grass and trees and sewage, seen its hills and water, its color and quality of light. I knew the changes only from books and newspapers. But more than this, I had not felt the country for twenty-five years. In short, I was writing of something I did not know about, and it seems to me that in a so-called writer this is criminal. My memories were distorted by twenty-five intervening years.


n  Steinbeck and Charley at their home in Sag Harbor in 1962, the year the book was published.n

In 1960 John Steinbeck was 58 years old, and has already published all of his best known works -
Of Mice and Men (1937), The Grapes of Wrath (1939), Cannery Row (1945), East of Eden (1952). Thom Steinbeck, John's oldest son, believes that his father was aware that he was dying from his heart condition, and that he took the trip to say goodbye to his country. "The whole book is a big goodbye", he says, "he just wanted to go and see it all one last time. I don't know how my stepmother let him go, because she knew his condition. He could have died at any time. But he just went out, he just wanted to see it, be a kid again, one more time. Go out and say goodbye. And I tought that's a fascinating aspect of the book - if you go back and read it and realize that Steinbeck knows he's never going to see any of this again".


n  Rocinante on display at the Steinbeck Center in Salinas, California.n

Travels with Charley was a a significant success - published in the 27th of July in 1962, it reached the number one slot on the New York Times Best Seller list on the 21st of October, swinging the Nobel judges in his favor - Steinbeck would be awarded the prize just four days later. After 50 years the Nobel Academy made its record public, revealing that Steinbeck was in fact a compromise choice; it was felt that he had his best work behind him, and Steinbeck himself felt that he had not deserved the Nobel - click here to read an article from the Guardian which describes this in more detail.

Steinbeck's trip took him from his home in Sag Harbor north to Maine, where he attempted to cross into Canada - where the kind Canadian custom guards inform him that they can let him in, but the U.S. won't take him back as his dog is not sterilized. After a short rant about the opressive government (wonder what he would have to say now?) Steinbeck went west. He stuck to the outer border of the country and marveled at the beauty and tranquility of the state of Montanta ( declaring it his favorite of all), before going all the way to the Pacific Northwest and down to his home state of California.


n  Map of Steinbeck's journey as presented in the book.n

The first sections of the memoir are humorous in tone, full of witty interactions with quirky characters that Steinbeck encounters on the road - among them a family of French-Canadians in Maine, who worked the season as potato pickers; a travelling Shakespearean actor in the small town of Alice, in North Dakota badlands; friends from his youth in San Francisco.

The tone shifts significantly after Steinbeck reaches Seattle, and is amazed at how much it has changed - he muses how progress looks like destruction, as the little town he remembered became a bustling metropolis, killing a great deal of natural beauty. He goes back east, wanting to go down and grab a bite of the Deep South. He is shocked at the racism that he encounters in New Orleans - and a share of anti-semitism as well, as he is accused of being a New York Jew, one of those "who cause all the trouble" and "stirs up the Negroes". He sees a group of "cheerleaders" - women protesting the school desegregation act, and witnesses Ruby Bridges entering the William Frantz Elementary School to their "bestial and filthy" insults. The applause that the women receive left Steinbeck depressed that the beautiful city of New Orleans was "misrepresented to the world". His enthusiasm for travel evaporates, faced with harsh reality, and he leaves for home - feeling tired of travel and wanting it to be over.

Steinbeck's travelogue entered the canon of classic American travel writing, and while his position as an American man of letters remains unchallenged, dark clouds have set over this particular entry in his canon. In 2010, a Pennsylvanian named Bill Steigerwald followed the route described by Steinbeck, and traveled for over 10,000 miles. He found a number of significant inaccuracies between reality and Steinbeck's account, and wrote an article titled Sorry, Charley which appeared in the April issue of Reason magazine in 2011 and which he later expanded into a book titled Dogging Steinbeck. By following the route and checking places which Steinbeck wrote about, Steigerwald discovered that Steinbeck's actual journey was vastly different than the one he described in Travels. Steigerwald states that Steinbeck's wife, Elaine, accompanied him on 45 days out of the 75 that the trip took; that he didn't camp in the open as he described, but instead stayed in luxurious motels, hotels and resorts, including an exclusive Spalding Inn where he had to borrow a tie and jacket to be allowed to eat in the dining room.

"From what I can gather, Steinbeck didn’t fictionalize in the guise of nonfiction because he wanted to mislead readers or grind some political point. He was desperate", says Steigerwald. "He had a book to make up about a failed road trip, and he had taken virtually no notes. The finely drawn characters he created in Charley are believable; it’s just not believable that he met them under anything like the conditions he describes. At crunch time, as he struggled to write Charley, his journalistic failures forced him to be a novelist again. Then his publisher, The Viking Press, marketed the book as nonfiction, and the gullible reviewers of the day—from The New York Times to The Atlantic—bought every word."

Bill Barich, an American writer who also took the Steinbeck trip and published his account as Long Way Home: On the Trail of Steinbeck's America came to a similar conclusion. "I’m fairly certain that Steinbeck made up most of the book", he says. "The dialogue is so wooden". He goes on to add:

"Steinbeck was extremely depressed, in really bad health, and was discouraged by everyone from making the trip. He was trying to recapture his youth, the spirit of the knight-errant. But at that point he was probably incapable of interviewing ordinary people. He’d become a celebrity and was more interested in talking to Dag Hammarskjold and Adlai Stevenson."

Even Jay Parini, the author of a biography of Steinbeck and the man who wrote the introduction to Travels admits that he doesn't consider it to be an accurate travelogue: "I have always assumed that to some degree it’s a work of fiction. Steinbeck was a fiction writer, and here he’s shaping events, massaging them". But for him the discovery of the book's inaccuracy doesn't diminish its value: "Does this shake my faith in the book? Quite the opposite. I would say hooray for Steinbeck. If you want to get at the spirit of something, sometimes it’s important to use the techniques of a fiction writer." Parini has updated his introduction for the latest printing of the book, openly stating its romance with fiction: "It should be kept in mind, when reading this travelogue, that Steinbeck took liberties with the facts, inventing freely when it served his purposes, using everything in the arsenal of the novelist to make this book a readable, vivid narrative."

This explains the more adventurous and picturesque scenes of the book and its cast of interesting and quirky personalities that Steinbeck meets on the road, like the Shakespearian actor or the romanticized potato pickers from Quebec who resemble a bit the Okies from The Grapes of Wrath. The conversations he has with them do often feel scripted, as if the characters were given cue cards to respond in an appropriate way, such as a farmer not failing to mention that Kruschev was visiting the United Nations in New York (the day of the famous Shoe-banging incident) weeks before it actually happened, and why Steinbeck happened to be in New Orleans to witness Ruby Ridge entering the desegregated school. Steinbeck's own son John is even more blunt than both Steigerwald and Barich in doubting his father: "Thom and I are convinced that he never talked to any of those people....He just sat in his camper and wrote all that shit."

The shift in tone - from enthusiastic, humorous and sarcastic to melancholic and even grim - could be explained by Steinbeck reliving his trip as he was writing it, employing his wit and talent, wanting to recapture the idealism he sought but did not find and put it on paper, but failing to do so, with his enthusiasm evaporating near the end. "There’s no denying Steinbeck got away with writing a dishonest book", says Steigerwald. "Not only did he fudge the details of his road trip, but he pulled his punches about what he really thought about the America he found. In Charley he fretted about the things he didn’t like about American society: pollution, early signs of sprawl, the rise of national chains, the increasing prevalence of plastic. But in private he complained directly about the failings of his 180 million fellow Americans: They were materialistic, morally flabby, and headed down the road to national decline."

Perhaps the failure of reality to meet his memories and idea of America depressed Steinbeck, and made him tinker with his account of the journey to fit his vision; the fact that he kept the original manuscript of the book - now kept at the Morgan Library & Museum and available for scrutiny - shows that he wasn't overly concerned with being exposed as a fraud. Perhaps at that point of his life he simply did not care - which would also explain his shrugging of the Nobel. Steinbeck did take a trip through the country, but it's not the one he described here - it doesn't invalidate his insights and concern about the destruction of environment and observations on American society in the mid 20th-century. Steinbeck was not using a tape recorder and a camera to record his trip, and was retelling it subjectively; from memory, and being an estabilished writer he could not help but improve it when he saw fit. His purpose was less to write actual journalism and more to see his country for one last time, as his son claimed; as he admits in the book it didn't meet his expectations. There is a sense of disappointment hanging over the book, as if the the entire trip was too bitter an experience to be put on paper; Parini notices that Steinbeck seemed to be "never quite able to bring himself to say that he was often disgusted by what he saw". And indeed it seems that he was not. One might imagine Steinbeck writing an account of all that bothered him. Who would have thought that a book written by a man who went on a trip with his poodle could have been so bleak?

Without a doubt a fine effort by Steinbeck. He makes observations that were 50 years ahead of his time. He got disillusioned in the last part of the trip and you could see that in his writing. But nonetheless, a very astute observer of the American character.

Για αρκετά χρόνια έψαχνα την εξαντλημένη έκδοση της Νεφέλης χωρίς κανένα αποτέλεσμα, μέχρι μάλιστα που έχασα κάθε ελπίδα ότι θα το έβρισκα. Να, όμως, που οι εκδόσεις Παπαδόπουλος έκαναν την ευχάριστη έκπληξη και πλέον το βιβλίο επανακυκλοφορεί στα ελληνικά, με την ίδια μετάφραση, σε μια πολύ ωραία και προσεγμένη έκδοση. Και φυσικά το έπιασα αμέσως στα χέρια μου για να το διαβάσω επιτέλους (αφού τόσο καιρό το ήθελα πώς και πώς), αν και βέβαια έχω πολλά άλλα βιβλία του Στάινμπεκ να με περιμένουν στη λίστα με τα αδιάβαστα. Τέλος πάντων, σας κούρασα με το άσχετο μπλα μπλα μου, αλλά να, αυτό μου συμβαίνει όταν μόλις τελειώνω ένα καταπληκτικό βιβλίο που ήθελα τόσο πολύ να διαβάσω: Πολυλογώ ασυστόλως. Λοιπόν, πρόκειται για ένα φοβερό ταξιδιωτικό χρονικό γεμάτο εικόνες, συναισθήματα και σκέψεις κάθε είδους, από μια Αμερική που δεν υπάρχει πια, ή που (μπορεί να) υπάρχει εδώ κι εκεί. Ο Στάινμπεκ με την καταπληκτική του γραφή με πήρε από το χεράκι, με έβαλε μέσα στο υπέροχο φορτηγάκι του μαζί με τον ίδιο και το φοβερά συμπαθητικό κανίς του ονόματι Τσάρλι, και με ταξίδεψε στις Ηνωμένες Πολιτείες των αρχών της δεκαετίας του '60, λίγο πριν συμβούν κάποιες πολύ μεγάλες αλλαγές στην Αμερικάνικη κοινωνία (πού να ήξερε ο καημένος τι επιφύλασσε το κοντινό μέλλον!). Ο Στάινμπεκ με οξυδέρκεια, χιούμορ και φιλοσοφική διάθεση (αλλά και με την υποκειμενική του ματιά) αναδεικνύει την Αμερική της εποχής του, τους ανθρώπους και τα τοπία σε Ανατολή και Δύση, Βορρά και Νότο, προσπαθώντας ίσως να βγάλει μια άκρη για το τι είναι η Αμερική (οι ΗΠΑ δηλαδή) και ποιοι είναι οι Αμερικάνοι. Προφανώς δύσκολα βγάζεις άκρη με τέτοια ζητήματα, πάντως εγώ απλώς πέρασα τέλεια διαβάζοντας τις εμπειρίες του από το ταξίδι αυτό. Φυσικά με έβαλε στη διαδικασία να ψάξω για μέρη, γεγονότα και ανθρώπους που αναφέρονται στο βιβλίο και με έκανε να θέλω να κάνω κι εγώ ένα ανάλογο ταξίδι, αν και μάλλον μου λείπει η αποφασιστικότητα που χρ��ιάζεται για κάτι τέτοιο (καθώς κι ένα γέρικο και συμπαθητικότατο κανίς για παρέα). Τέλος πάντων, το βιβλίο ήταν ακριβώς όπως το περίμενα με βάση την ποιότητα του συγγραφέα του και τη θεματολογία του, χαίρομαι που το διάβασα, το απόλαυσα κυριολεκτικά από την πρώτη μέχρι την τελευταία πρόταση, και οφείλω να πω ότι δεν ήθελα να τελειώσει με τίποτα, πολύ ευχαρίστως θα διάβαζα και διακόσιες ή και τριακόσιες επιπλέον σελίδες με όλα όσα είδε και σκέφτηκε ο εξαιρετικός αυτός συγγραφέας κατά τη διάρκεια του ταξιδιού του. Ελπίζω κάποια στιγμή να βρω και το "Ρωσικό ημερολόγιο", ένα επίσης ταξιδιωτικό βιβλίο που σίγουρα θα έχει ένα ξεχωριστό ενδιαφέρον.

Brilliant! What a wonderful writer. He had me smiling, laughing and loving Charley and then…..New Orleans….and I’m crying my eyes out. Just wow, I’m still shaking my head. Great book.

In 1960, I was volunteering with the local history group. We were at “The Rodgers House” in Watsonville, CA. At that time the Rodger family was living in it. Later it became a local museum. At the time I was there we were cataloging various historical items that were in the house. This is how I got to know Esther Steinbeck Rodgers. She was one of John Steinbeck’s sisters. While we were at the house, a truck with a camper on the back pulled into the driveway and out came John Steinbeck and his poodle, Charlie. This is how I met John Steinbeck (1902-1968). The truck and Charlie are on display at the Steinbeck Center in Salinas, CA.

I first read this book in 1979. The book was published in 1962. I enjoyed rereading the book. I was surprised at how little of the book I remembered from my first reading. I remembered the French Canadians picking potatoes and I remembered his love of Montana. My mother was a big fan of Steinbeck and always encouraged me to read him. When I moved here to “Steinbeck Country”, I took my mother around to the various sites of Steinbeck’s books, etc. when she came to visit me. During this process I also became a fan of Steinbeck’s work.

The book, of course, is well written. It was fun to look back at the country and note how it has changed except for the racism. That, unfortunately, has not changed. I am glad I read this book again.

I read this as an audiobook downloaded from Audible. The book is almost eight hours. Gary Sinise does a great job narrating the book. Sinise is an award-winning actor and a popular audiobook narrator.