Voyager: Travel Writings

by Russell Banks Narrated by Mark Bramhall

Overview

The acclaimed, award-winning novelist takes us on some of his most memorable journeys in this revelatory collection of travel essays that spans the globe, from the Caribbean to Scotland to the Himalayas.

Now in his mid-seventies, Russell Banks has indulged his wanderlust for more than half a century. “Since childhood, I've longed for escape, for rejuvenation, for wealth untold, for erotic and narcotic and sybaritic fresh starts, for high romance, mystery, and intrigue,” he writes in this compelling anthology. The longing for escape has taken him from the “bright green islands and turquoise seas” of the Caribbean islands to peaks in the Himalayas, the Andes, and beyond.

In Voyager, Russell Banks, a lifelong explorer, shares highlights from his travels: interviewing Fidel Castro in Cuba; motoring to a hippie reunion with college friends in Chapel Hill, North Carolina; eloping to Edinburgh, with his fourth wife, Chase; driving a sunset orange metallic Hummer down Alaska's Seward Highway.

In each of these remarkable essays, Banks considers his life and the world. In Everglades National Park this “perfect place to time-travel,” he traces his own timeline. “I keep going back, and with increasingly clarity I see more of the place and more of my past selves. And more of the past of the planet as well.” Recalling his trips to the Caribbean in the title essay, “Voyager,” Banks dissects his relationships with the four women who would become his wives. In the Himalayas, he embarks on a different quest of self-discovery. “One climbs a mountain not to conquer it, but to be lifted like this away from the earth up into the sky,” he explains.

Pensive, frank, beautiful, and engaging, Voyager brings together the social, the personal, and the historical, opening a path into the heart and soul of this revered writer.

Editorial Reviews

The New York Times Book Review - Joshua Hammer

…a series of pieces that seamlessly combine globe-trotting and autobiography. The title story is the best in this fine collection, a novella-length account of the 60-day island-hopping boondoggle he took through the Caribbean for a glossy travel magazine…

Publishers Weekly

★ 03/21/2016
Although billed as “travel writings,” the 10 introspective essays collected in this volume explore their author’s emotional geography as much as the far-flung lands he visits. In the lengthy title piece, which recounts “a winter-long, island-hopping journey through the Caribbean,” Banks finds occasion to relate the details of his three failed marriages to his travel companion, his fourth-wife-to-be. Acknowledging that the wanderlust that spurs his travels is an outgrowth of his personal tendency to flee from those whose emotional needs he cannot satisfy, he observes, “I could see clearly that my courtship narrative and this peripatetic voyage through the archipelago ran parallel to each other in ways both exculpatory and condemning, the one reflecting, enabling, and explicating the other.” Banks’s descriptions are visually evocative, and his eye for detail is sharpened by the near-spiritual resonance that his travel destinations have for him. Recalling a Zen moment experienced while mountain-climbing in the Andes, he reflects that “one climbs a mountain for the same reason one enters a monastery: to pray.” Whether he’s traveling through the swamps of the Everglades, the former slaving grounds of Dakar, or the Russian settlement of Alaska (which he describes piquantly as “a Chekhov story waiting to be told”), Banks makes a magnificent tour guide for landscapes both within and without. Agent: Ellen Levine, Trident Media Group. (June)

From the Publisher

…[a] fine collection…Banks’s narrative seductively juxtaposes rambles through lush volcanic mountains, white sand beaches and coral reefs with a barrage of memories of the hash he’s made of his private life.” — New York Times Book Review

“…[an] expansive, elegiac reflection on the pleasures and deceptions of travel…[Banks’] clarity of vision and muscular prose are as transporting as a mountain ascent.” — Kirkus Reviews

“… [a] gusto-filled, retrospective anthology…Banks’ warm, probing intellect guides readers on thoughtful journeys…Readers will be hard put to find a more engaging travel companion.” — Booklist

“Banks puts the literature back in travel writing in this extremely well-crafted book.” — Library Journal

“[A] moving collection of travel pieces that rise to the level of literature” — Christian Science Monitor

Christian Science Monitor

[A] moving collection of travel pieces that rise to the level of literature

New York Times Book Review

…[a] fine collection…Banks’s narrative seductively juxtaposes rambles through lush volcanic mountains, white sand beaches and coral reefs with a barrage of memories of the hash he’s made of his private life.

Booklist

… [a] gusto-filled, retrospective anthology…Banks’ warm, probing intellect guides readers on thoughtful journeys…Readers will be hard put to find a more engaging travel companion.

Booklist

… [a] gusto-filled, retrospective anthology…Banks’ warm, probing intellect guides readers on thoughtful journeys…Readers will be hard put to find a more engaging travel companion.

Library Journal

★ 05/01/2016
Novelist Banks (The Sweet Hereafter; Affliction), on the cusp of his fourth marriage, spends the first half of this collection of travel writing telling readers what went wrong with the first three. He does this by interspersing these erstwhile faulty relationships with descriptions of the Lesser Antilles. This is not a logical pairing, but oddly enough, it works. Banks owns up to his past and somehow convinces the woman who is to become No. 4 into marrying him—successfully this time. Between the ups and downs of his past one learns that the Virgin Islands are overcommercialized, Saba is wonderful, and the French side of St-Martin/Sint Maarten is better than the Dutch. The second half of the book includes recollections of a hodgepodge of places: Cuba, North Carolina, Scotland, Alaska, the Everglades, and the Andes and Himalaya mountains. VERDICT Banks puts the literature back in travel writing in this extremely well-crafted book.—Lee Arnold, Historical Soc. of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia

Kirkus Reviews

2016-03-22
Acclaimed fiction writer Banks (A Permanent Member of the Family, 2013, etc.) turns an able hand to nonfiction in this expansive, elegiac reflection on the pleasures and deceptions of travel.The 75-year-old author recognizes the failings of narratives based solely on fading, self-serving memories, yet he cannot resist indulging in recollections from 30 years ago. "A memoir is like a travel book," he writes. "Whether short or long it's a radical reduction of remembered reality and is structured as much by what it leaves out as what it puts in." In the lengthy title essay, set in 1988, Banks and his soon-to-be-fourth wife embark on a wide-ranging odyssey of the Caribbean, one that wakens many ghosts (of wives and adventures past) while conjuring encouragement and despair in equal measure. The author loves the Caribbean and its people but loathes what is happening to the islands to accommodate, then as now, ever increasing hordes of cruise-ship and package-tour visitors, to homogenize distinctive cultures, and to obscure the real history of slavery. Resolution was a principal reason that Banks, who lived for a time in Jamaica, undertook this return journey to the tropics. Written in 2015, the piece is at least as much about Banks' courtship narrative, his personal history, and his regrets as it is about an enviable assignment in the Caribbean. But the frequent self-flagellation occasionally feels excessive. The other essays in the book are less melancholy, offering observations and insights that, despite their ages, seem timeless. After all, the point of travel is knowledge, not topical information. Of the more "conventional" travel pieces here, the most resonant and vivid are those on the Everglades and the author's mountaineering in South America and the Himalayas, the last at age 72. Banks' ecological warnings might strike even the most fervent environmentalist as rather apocalyptic, yet in the best of these pieces, his clarity of vision and muscular prose are as transporting as a mountain ascent.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940170006656
Publisher:	HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date:	05/31/2016
Edition description:	Unabridged

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