A Sense Of Where You Are

From Clancy Martin's review of Geoff Dyer's new book:

This is what I love about Geoff Dyer's work: His feet are never on the ground. But where his younger narrators fight the feeling that they don't belong, the grown-up Dyer embraces it. He makes his home in the unstable elements of air and water. When at the end of "Another Great Day at Sea" he finds himself in the desert of Bahrain, he tries to find some romance in it — but even the beer he's been desperately desiring, all the time he was on board, is dull: "I looked at it, all golden and cold and sweating before I tasted it. It tasted like . . . well, like beer. It was O.K. It wasn't the beer of my dreams, the 'Ice Cold in Alex'beer I'd been longing for." And his thoughts turn to the sailors on the aircraft carrier he's just left. When he arrived he couldn't bear the thought of the two weeks to come; by the time he departed he "had become thoroughly habituated to life on the boat," recognizing that his time on board was simply more stimulating, more interesting than the life to which he was returning. Being "at sea" — being awkward, off-balance, confused, trying once more to fit in when you know you can never fit in — is where Geoff Dyer is most . . . well, if not most comfortable, most himself, most alive.

For more on Dyer, check out his interview with

[Photo Via: R2-D2]