Sun After Dark: Flights Into the Foreign

by Pico Iyer

Book Overview

One of the best travel writers now at work in the English language brings back the sights and sounds from a dozen different frontiers. A cryptic encounter in the perfumed darkness of Bali; a tour of a Bolivian prison, conducted by an enterprising inmate; a nightmarish taxi ride across southern Yemen, where the men with guns may be customs inspectors or revolutionaries-these are just three of the stops on Pico Iyer's latest itinerary. But the true...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1400031036
• ISBN13: 9781400031030
• Release Date: April 2005
• Publisher: Vintage
• Length: 240 Pages
• Weight: 0.59 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.2" x 8.1"

Customer Reviews

Iyer really captures the experience of the traveler

If you want a straightforward travelogue or love "package tour" travel, you probably haven't read Iyer's previous books and should skip this one. The later chapters dragged more than the rest of the book, hence, 4 stars. At its best, the book captures the essence of travel as experience--the unavoidable confrontations with self, as well as the opportunities to transcend the mundane, familiar kinds of existence. Iyer spends extended periods in Asia and South America, with stops in the US and Europe. He also relates the experience of going so many places and losing track of place, as well as time. He reflects on change and how our conciousness recognizes it. Like many travelers, he meets interesting people in often unlikely places. He led me to take a deeper look at the Dali Lama and to view Leonard Cohen in a different way. I'd forgotten that Cohen was not only an overrated writer/performer ("Suzanne" was one of the most covered songs of my adolescence and easily one of the most annoying), but also a self-indulgent, mindscrewing, misogynistic jerk. But he appears to have met his match in a Buddhist tecaher and a discipline that takes a deep focus on oneself to the point of getting beyond indulgent self-absorption. The Dali Lama comes across as a well-traveled soul--moving over time, as well as place and culture. Iyer understands the rootlessness, the quest for experience, and the losses that such a life imposes. For people who love adventure and appreciate the adversity of travel, it's a great book.

Brilliant

I loved every page of this book. I think people looking for a run-of-the-mill "travel memoir" will of course be disappointed. However, that isn't the kind of book this purports to be. It's typical Iyer... a little travel, a little philsophy, a little retrospection, a little self-indulgence. It will take you to various places you may never get to visit, remind you of places you have visited, and take you on a wonderful journey through your own thoughts and beliefs.

Classic Pico!

I am Pico Iyer's biggest fan. After his rather spacy and disappointing last novel, I loved this "classic Pico"! I too thought the Leonard Cohen piece was especially amazing and also loved the piece about the Dalai Lama. A very very cool book with lots of beautiful nuggets written, of course, in the most poetic language imaginable. A perfect book for the armchair traveler.

A master of the essay

Pico Iyer's work generally alternates between fiction and collections of essays, and my personal preference is for the latter. You will find these little jewels scattered in magazines ranging from "National Geographic" to the Buddhist magazine "Tricycle". In his best pieces, he can approach the condensed perfection of Orwell.There is not a bad essay in this collection, but two of them particularly stand out. At the beginning of the book is an account of a week spent at a meditation retreat with the singer/poet Leonard Cohen. If you're used to the vapid hagiographies in music magazines, this piece is a drink of cool water. It quotes from Cohen's songs, acknowledges the brilliance of his work, gives an unblinking account of his contradictory personality and details his day-to-day life, all in twenty pages. The effect is that of a camera zooming in from a mile above the Mount Baldy Zen Center all the way down to a wart on Cohen's face, and then slowly pulling back again. You'll have to read the piece yourself, preferably while playing "Waiting for the Miracle" in the background. The other extraordinary piece is "Nightwalking", which describes the surreal experience of jet lag, something the author endures for at least eight weeks of every year. I read it while on an extended air-trip (San Francisco-Hong Kong-Bangalore-Singapore-Seoul-SF in a week) and cannot recall anything on paper describing as accurately an experience I was undergoing at that moment. The walking blankly along thoroughfares at two in the morning, the absurd spasms of emotion, the faces out of Hopper paintings - he has etched a precise portrait here.His gift for metaphor unmatched. Here is a sentence about the British influence: "The..Empire..stands accused of importing straight lines and right angles to a land of curves, of making the forces of Eternity obey a railway timetable." How can one resist such lapidary prose?

Iyer Back on the Map

His best work since "Falling Off the Map." I love the piece on language in India and on Leonard Cohen. He paints his mother (off page in several essays) with elegant brushstroke, and I find myself wanting an essay about her as well. Some of the Buddhist pieces need a tad of editing, but that's a minor complaint.