Journey to the Land of the Flies and Other Travels - Hardcover

Aldo Buzzi

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0679448101 ISBN 13: 9780679448105

Publisher: Random House, 1996

Synopsis

Aldo Buzzi traveled the world soaking up the experiences, sights, sounds and tastes that have gone into the creation of these delectable diversions. From exotic ports of call like Djakarta, Gorgonzola, Sicily and Moscow, and featuring menus such as roast monkey, cabbage soup, risotto, and 19 types of vodka, this is a book to satisfy both the senses and the mind.

About this title

Review:

Aldo Buzzi does get around. The essays collected in Journey to the Land of the Flies take the author--a former architect and publisher--to such far-flung locations as Moscow, Jakarta, Sicily, and London. Yet these aren't the methodical musings of your average travel writer. Instead, each spot on his itinerary functions as a springboard, from which Buzzi launches all manner of metaphorical flips and somersaults. "Chekhov in Sondrio," for example, represents his take on Moscow. He is obliging enough to furnish a few contemporary snapshots, describing Lenin's tomb and the Easter-egg colors of the local currency. But the real subject of his essay is 19th-century Russia--the Russia of Chekhov, Dostoyevsky, and Tolstoy--which his ample supply of quotations, anecdotes, and trivia restores, quite miraculously, to life. There are delightful riffs on the era's most popular foods (cabbage and vodka), and an aside on the chamber pot, which was referred to euphemistically as "Yakov Andreyich--that is, James, the son of Andrew." Buzzi also fills in the reader on Chekhov's pet names for his wife, beginning with "little cockroach" and culminating with "my little sperm whale." (Talk about an ideal husband!)

Elsewhere Buzzi's method is the same: he relies on his stockpile of sensations and squirreled-away facts to evoke a place, or more to the point, his experience of it. His hedonism almost always includes a comic note. Yet Buzzi is ultimately a kind of light-fingered elegist. Like any epicure with a brain in his head, he cherishes his experiences all the more because he knows that they, too, are bound to disappear. --James Marcus

Language Notes:

Text: English (translation)
Original Language: Italian

About this edition

• Publisher: Random House
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0679448101
• ISBN 13: 9780679448105
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 147