Full Description

Trance After Breakfast

A collection of lyrical travel writings from celebrated writer and NPR commentator Alan Cheuse.

Along with luggage and tickets, we always travel with that which it is impossible to leave behind: ourselves, our spirits, our souls. By definition the best travel writing carries us on a soul-journey, the sort of trip that dramatizes how the heart learns about its place in the world.

In A Trance After Breakfast, poetic wanderer and novelist (To Catch the Lightning) Alan Cheuse has crafted a collection that masterfully exceeds such standards. He lures the reader around the world, from Bali and New Zealand to Mexico and back home again to his native New Jersey, making the foreign familiar and the familiar slightly foreign.

Collected from such celebrated publications as Gourmet, the Antioch Review, and the San Diego Reader, the dispatches in A Trance After Breakfast will enchant, captivate, and transport readers.

Table of Contents

Table of Contents

Excerpt

Excerpt

Reviews

Reviews

Publishers Weekly
Novelist, essayist, editor and NPR mainstay Cheuse (To Catch the Lightning, Listening to the Page) compiles a highly literate travelogue from material previously published in Gourmet, the Antioch Review and elsewhere. In “Reading the Archipelago,” Cheuse’s survey of Indonesia-centric literature is so compelling it will make readers want to pick up some Conrad and Melville. The clever “Thirty-five Passages Over Water” covers notable journeys, the parts that come before or after the destination, moving backward in time. “CODA: Two Oceans” evokes the Jersey native’s Atlantic/Pacific memories. The title piece recounts Bali’s atmosphere of spirituality, but isn’t as strong as his reporting from the U.S.-Mexico border at San Ysidro: “the great crossing point, nexus of cultures, nexus of countries, nexus of vision, nexus of borderlands between first world and third”; he’s just as piercing regarding the psychology of those who make the trip across. Though it starts slow, three Mexico narratives prove splendid enough to forgive; Cheuse’s eclectic journeys shine a spotlight on one of the greatest rewards of travel, “to know... something quite valuable that had never occurred to us before.” (June)

Shelf Awareness
Perhaps best-known as one of NPR’s book critics, Alan Cheuse is a multitalented writer, his gift for lyrical travel writing amply displayed in this collection of 11 essays. Because several of these pieces appeared in publications not easily accessible to the casual reader, it’s a gift to find them together in this volume.

It takes a skilled writer to transform the pedestrian town of Cheuse’s birth—Perth Amboy, N.J.—into a subject worthy of close scrutiny. Yet he manages to summon up sharp and poignant reminiscences of his childhood there, early days spent along and on the water for which he confesses a lifelong obsession, best captured in the evocative, almost mystical, essay "Thirty-Five Passages Over Water."

Cheuse moves from Bruce Springsteen territory to more exotic locales like Bali and New Zealand, which is experiencing an influx of tourists captivated by the magnificent scenery of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. He slips seamlessly from the role of travel writer to that of literary critic as he canvasses the literature of Southeast Asia, conversing knowledgeably about writers like Conrad, Maugham and Greene, alongside Java-born author Pramoedya Ananta Toer, who’s doubtless unknown to most Western readers.

The book’s three longest pieces focus on the border region between the U.S. and Mexico. In "The Mexican Rabbi," Cheuse, a Jew by birth but not by practice, offers a perceptive look at the small, struggling Jewish community of Tijuana, one of whose leaders offered him an amount equal to the fee he was to receive for writing the piece to induce him to kill it. That essay is a companion to "Border Schooling," which explores the challenges of the bilingual education at the Colegio Inglés in Tijuana. The third piece of the triptych is "Port of Entry," Cheuse’s extended account of a Saturday night he spent at the San Ysidro boarder crossing, offering gritty journalistic realism in place of the platitudes that infect the current debate on immigration.

Alan Cheuse is a pleasurable traveling companion not merely because of the keenness of his eye but also because of the richness of his vision and his evocative prose. “The best travel writing carries us along on a soul-journey," as he puts it, "the sort of trip that may or may not tell you about the best hotels and the good places to eat but certainly . . . dramatizes how the heart learns about itself in relation to the world, making the foreign familiar and the familiar slightly foreign." He more than meets that standard in this appealing volume.



—Harvey Freedenberg

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Trade Paper Specfications

• Length: 8.00 in
• Width: 5.25 in
• Height: 0.00 in
• Weight: 12.00 oz
• Page Count: 272 pages