Two years ago, I met a French tourist who explained that when he visits a new city, he makes a beeline for a local shop and buys every edition of George Orwell’s “1984” he can find. I was inspired: What an elegant way to explore, support small businesses and dignify hoarding! More than 30 million copies of “1984” have been printed worldwide since the novel was published in 1949, and 35 of those copies are now mine. They are American, British, French, Indian, Italian, Mexican and Spanish; four are hardcovers, 30 are paperbacks and one is somehow both, or neither.
Like any great invention, I stumbled upon the idea of the hotel-room vacation by accident, nine years ago, after Toony and I arrived in Chania, Crete, for our honeymoon. The “magical Venetian town” I’d read of in a British travel magazine turned out to be a maze of souvenir shops, Irish pubs, and “authentic” Greek tavernas, so described on the doors and menus. Our hotel room, though, was amazing. It had old-world wood furniture, nice balconies with port views and fantastic natural air circulation that I’ve never experienced since. We read, watched TV, chatted, ordered sea-food pizza, I wrote a little, Toony doodled a bit; as the honeymoon came to an end, we realized we hadn’t set foot outside the premises. It was the best vacation ever. The next year we did the same thing in Eilat.
All that summer, I thought I had ventured to Alaska to try on a different way of life, one that tested my self-reliance and competence. I wondered if I’d failed. Now, years later, I believe I was simply searching for a place I’ll clumsily call an anti-home. I mean an antithesis to my own childhood home — for in the backcountry I’d found quiet and stillness and the edge of happiness — but I also mean a place at odds with all notions of home. A place with no safety net, no walls, no sense of enclosure or intimacy or kinship. A place of exposure. It was not so much that I wanted to prove something to others, but that I had a question for myself: Who was I, in a place like that?
Germans love to get naked. They have been getting naked in public for over a hundred years, when early naturists rebelled against the grime of industrialization and then the mass slaughter of World War I.
“Free body culture” — basically bathing the whole body in water and sunlight while preferably also doing some exercise — became the battle cry for a healthy, harmonious lifestyle and an antidote to a destructive modernity.
On the morning of July 4, I left Delhi for Uttar Pradesh to report a story on India’s feverish toilet-building campaign. I was out on the street most of the day, when I noticed ink in my journal was smudged with raindrops. “The monsoon has arrived,” I noted.
The smudged page also contained a fragment of overheard conversation: “We will marry our daughter to you only if you have a foot.” It was the first line of an intriguing story I would never write, because the next day I went for a morning jog in Delhi’s beautiful Lodhi Gardens.
That is really the last thing I remember with certainty. I only learned later that I had, somehow, made my way from the gardens to New Delhi’s Golf Course Colony, several miles away.
This is where a malignant brain tumor, as yet undiagnosed, struck me down and left me thrashing on the ground.
What comes to mind when I say “monster”? Zombies? Vampires? Ghosts? What about Capelobo, Quibungo, or Mapinguari? Therein lies the problem according to Margrét Helgadóttir, editor of American Monsters Part I: familiar Western monsters suck all the air out of the room.
Helgadóttir is clear that her goal with American Monsters Part I, as well as the other books she has edited or co-edited for Fox Spirit Books of Monsters series (on African monsters, European monsters, Pacific Monsters, and Asian monsters), is to redress this colonization of the monstrous imagination by a handful of recurring familiar beasties through a kind of monstrous affirmative action that promotes diversity.
Without giving away what actually happens, consider this: It’s hard to imagine it not being a fun project to discuss this book with people you care about, who also care about you. Because, spoiler: What matters most to the Kois/Smith clan, even more than ambition and being part of the national conversation? Friends and family.
The best scene in the book finds the author riding along a Costa Rican beach at sundown with daughter Harper, their tires making a quiet shhhhhps sound on the sand. “This is so beautiful,” he says. “Will you remember it with me?” “Yes,” she says. “For my whole life.”