10/12/2015
LaSalle, a fiction writer (What I Found Out About Her) and professor of creative writing at the University of Texas, merges literary biography and travel writing, as well as literary criticism and autobiography, in this fresh, insightful collection of nine essays. LaSalle’s method is to travel to and explore the cities in which authors he admires produced their work. The author-city pairings covered include Jorge Luis Borges and Buenos Aires, Gustave Flaubert and Tunis, and Malcolm Lowry and Mexico City. In each piece, LaSalle shows himself to be a smart and open writer with a restless intellect and infectious passion for travel and literature. He discusses a wide range of past and current writers, never lacking for opinions, both negative—he thinks Richard Ford is “a predictable writer”—and admiring, as he is toward Philip Roth and Saul Bellow. A strong sense of place is present throughout, whether LaSalle is in a restaurant in Tunis or a metro station in Los Angeles. The autobiographical passages can border on the self-absorbed, but this tendency is easily offset by LaSalle’s honesty and enthusiasm. (Dec.)
Armchair travelers and literary types will relish the descriptions of both the author, his travels, and the admired writers.” —Library Journal
“LaSalle shows himself to be a smart and open writer with a restless intellect and infectious passion for travel and literature.”—Publishers Weekly
“These are travel pieces … but they use travel mainly as a portal to literary celebration.”—Kirkusl
"It seems like the love of literature might be enough. But LaSalle is trying to do something else in these trips. He’s trying to find meaning, in a Borgesian kind of way." —Austin American-Statesman
"LaSalles's dreamlike sense of exploration through past and present, memory and loss, the mundane and the profound, not only keeps the reader on the brink of discovery but also paints a picture far more vivid than any standard travel narrative." —Ploughshares (online)
"The essays in The City bespeak enthusiasm, optimism, appreciation, energy . . . . LaSalle is that rare writer of supremely readable prose who also has genuine respect for the lyrical." —The Texas Observer
"LaSalle's book is undeniably entertaining, but more importantly, it demonstrates an invaluable inquisitiveness. The City at Three P.M. ratchets up curiosity about the world from a cultural standpoint and also illuminates the realities of politics, war, and various forms of oppression." —The Literary Review (online)
“LaSalle’s stories are full of detail, and he knows how to create a sense of place, be it Buenos Aires, Austin, Texas, Paris, or Boston.”—Atlanta Journal-Constitution on Tell Borges If You See Him
“Peter LaSalle has worked his way deep into the storytelling place. Serious, anomalous, his narratives are set into motion by the obsessions and perturbations of living. There is no model, no recipe—each world is uniquely known and irresistibly defined.”—Sven Birkerts, author of Reading Life: Books for the Ages on Tell Borges If You See Him
“LaSalle’s command of the language is admirable, but even more admirable is his moral vision.”—Dallas Times-Herald on Strange Sunlight
11/15/2015
LaSalle (history, Univ. of Texas; Mariposa's Song) chronicles his travels and explores his own writing as well as the writing of others. Often choosing locations where books were set and written, he visits the haunts of the writers. The book is divided into chapters, often with subchapters, in which LaSalle reflects on various trips and related self-searching and literary studying. Following in the footsteps of such writers as Nathanael West, Jorge Luis Borges, Gustave Flaubert, Saul Bellow, and Christy Brown, he visits libraries, museums, streets, colleges, and bars, while pondering the lives of the authors and the contents of their works. The title can be quite dense at times, with superlong sentences. However, patient readers will appreciate the descriptive prose. Armchair travelers and literary types will relish the descriptions of both the author, his travels, and the admired writers. VERDICT While men might have a better time relating to LaSalle (whose style can be Hemingway-esque at times), this work is recommended for travelers and writers, especially those interested in a deeper look at authors and their books.—Cheryl Yanek, Brooklyn
2015-09-03
A collection of what could be called literary travel criticism. A professor of creative writing with an eclectic publishing career, LaSalle (What I Found Out About Her, 2014, etc.) has been anthologized as a travel writer (a piece from The Best Travel Writing 2010 concludes this volume) and earned praise for his award-winning fiction. Here, he explores terrain where his writing paths intersect, "traveling to a place where a document of literature I love is set and rereading the book there, to see what happens." Written and originally published over a span of four decades, these essays find him contemplating Nathanael West in Los Angeles, experiencing the metaphysics of Borges in Buenos Aires, celebrating an obscure (in this country) Flaubert novel in Tunisia, following the alcohol-soaked ghost of Malcolm Lowry to Mexico. At one point he admits, "to be really frank, I am lost in a moment of wondering what the hell I am even doing on this trip, dodging some personal obligations back home and abandoning my writing for a few weeks; I know I've always used travel as a way to escape responsibility." Yet he often obsesses over the courses he isn't teaching and the fiction he isn't writing while visiting locales far from his professional base of Austin, Texas, and his native Narragansett, Rhode Island. While establishing a bond, even an intimacy, with readers, he projects an air of superiority in his attitude toward better-known writers ("Richard Ford, a predictable writer who many critics tend to take too seriously"), fellow academics, younger females, and the "decidedly not-funny" Jimmy Kimmel. LaSalle exalts "the Flaubertian obsession of elevating prose itself to something close to sacred, the creation of it a visionary, semi-religious experience." These are travel pieces (with the title essay the slightest), but they use travel mainly as a portal to literary celebration. An up-and-down collection of essays on what a fiction writer does when he isn't writing fiction.
