Stranger on a Train
The book about America de Tocqueville might have written had he spent some time in the nation's smoking sections Using two cross-country trips on Amtrak as her narrative vehicles, British writer Jenny Diski connects the humming rails taking her into the heart of America with the track-like scars leading back to her own past. As she did in the highly acclaimed Skating to Antarctica, Diski has created a seamless and seemingly effortless amalgam of reflection and revelation. Stranger on a Train is a combination of travelogue and memoir, a penetrating portrait of America and Americans that is at the same time an unsparing look in the mirror. Traveling and remembering both involve confronting strangers—those we have just met and those we once were—and acknowledging the play of proximity and separation. Diski has written a moving, courageous, and deeply rewarding book about who we are, and the landscapes through which we have passed to get there.
Reviews
Popular Reviews
Reviews with the most likes.
Jenny Diski endeavours to circumnavigate the United States ...by train. She's not really intent on doing anything more than watch the scenery whip past and smoke. She finds a special place in the smoking car with it's cracked linoleum floor, institutional gray walls and hard plastic chairs. There, along with the outcast, nicotine hungry pariahs she can unrepentantly smoke in peace.
People seem to have other ideas and their lives and attendant stories reach out to her. Diski does a fair bit of literary people watching, enjoying that strange bit of alchemy that renders strangers immediately familiar when you're travelling. Otherwise unremarkable fellow travellers are rendered with warmth and each come with their own unique stories to tell.
While it did win the 2003 Thomas Cook Travel Book Award there's precious little consideration given to the passing American landscape. This is more a snapshot of the distinctly American lives that join Diski on her journey.
I am struggling a bit with this review, as this book was very different from my expectation. Sometimes that is a good thing... but not this time.
I usually find winners of the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award excellent. This book won in 2003. For me however this is not a travel book. In this book travel is the least important element. America is just a setting, only what is seen out the train window when the author breaks eye contact with her fellow passengers, or sits alone in reflection. This book is much more a memoir, and a series of retold aspects of other peoples stories. Often the memoir and the passengers tale link, sometimes they are more random. The train, other than the description of the conditions of the smoking carriage, simply forms a part of the backdrop.
For me, it doesn't help that the theme of the whole book is a glorification of smoking. Almost exclusively, the authors interaction on the train is in the smokers carriage. The author loves smoking - always has, and always will. She describes is with more passion than any other element of this book. It does nothing for me, and the continual describing of it eventually stirs disgust in me. Normally, I can ignore it - you know - up to her, doing that damage to herself in her own time, no issue to me. But it is just so central to this book...
So for travel, 1 out of 5; as a memoir (and don't get me wrong, some of it is quite interesting), 3 out of 5; and for the telling of other peoples stories, 2 out of 5. Just not loving it the way many of the other reviewers seem to. Overall, that lands it at 2 stars.
