Pico Iyer on “The Naked Tourist”

Travel Blog  •  Jim Benning  •  06.05.06 | 12:08 PM ET

We noted that Lawrence Osborne’s The Naked Tourist: In Search of Adventure and Beauty in the Age of the Airport Mall earned high marks in Sunday’s New York Times. On the other coast, in the L.A. Times, Pico Iyer also had praise for the book. “Osborne’s premise, in short, is to chronicle a journey through the virtual, simulacrum world that has emerged so quickly that increasingly we can barely tell (or long to tell) one site from another,” Iyer writes. “He decides to sample Planet Tourism, as he calls it, and experience ‘whateverness’ by passing gradually along ‘the Asian highway’ through a series of ever more ersatz places until he arrives at the unadorned treehouses of west Papua, an area kept remote by civil wars and cannibalism. Along the way, he tells us that French playwright Antonin Artaud based his ‘theater of cruelty’ partly upon the intensities of Balinese dance, that boys in Thailand enjoy the legal right to wear skirts to school, and that in Papua pidgin, the pope is known as ‘Jesus Number One Man.’” Iyer observes that Osborne’s writing sometimes echoes Paul Theroux’s: “Osborne is an Englishman of the oldish school, scrupulously crotchety, generally disenchanted and aware enough of worldly realities not to make a fuss about them.”

Tags: Literary Travel


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