April 29, 2019 Issue

Here’s a New Yorker (“The Travel Issue”) that deserves not a review but a party. It’s layered and loaded with good things, beginning with Lauren Collins’s “Kitchen Companion,” a report on Georgia’s food renaissance. Collins dines at Andria Kurasbediani’s Barbarestan in Tbilisi:

The plates kept coming. There was dambal khacho, a bouncy Georgian fondue; a duck patty with topographical grooves, served with plum sauce; many breads and wines. Plenitude is important in Georgia, where feasting and toasting are cherished, heavily choreographed rites. The meal felt like a food version of one of those movie montages where spinning newspapers keep stacking up on top of one another.

She visits Kasheria, a tripe-soup dispensary. She has coffee with writer Diana Anthimiadou. She visits the Raphael Eristavi House Museum in Kistauri. And she makes quince dolmas with food blogger Tamara Mirianashvili (“The dish was medicinal but luscious, a hot toddy you could eat with a fork”).

Collins’s details are superb: “Andria was wearing a three-piece suit, accented by a scarlet pin that glowed like a pomegranate seed”; “Andria handled the wooden cutting board as though it were a precious violin.” I enjoyed “Kitchen Companion” immensely.

Next is James Lasdun’s “Glow,” a delightful account of his quest to see the aurora borealis. Lasdun writes about staying at an “igloo hotel” near the town of Ivalo, Finland:

A glass-panelled dome loomed over the north-facing end of a single room, with luxe bedding and a complimentary drinks tray arranged below, like the furnishings of a tastefully debauched starship. Slipping under a reindeer-fur coverlet, I found myself facing the first conundrum of northern-lights tourism, which is that the more comfortable your viewing situation the more likely you are to be insensate when the lights appear. I was eager to see them, naturally, but not obsessed. I had a whole week, and, from what I’d read, at the time of my visit there were good odds for a display on most nights. With this comforting thought, I fell asleep.

He joins an ice-fishing safari:

The fishing rods seemed absurdly short and bendy, like something that you might use to win a prize at an amusement park. We squatted at our holes, dipping and raising as instructed. The flat landscape around us was more built up than I’d expected this far north, but pleasant enough under the fresh snow, with the wide sky showing different pinks and yellows every time you looked at it. Now and then, dogsleds carrying tourists hurtled by; each time, we laboriously took off our mittens and glove liners and rummaged for our phones, in order to take photographs.

He attends an Aurora Camp:

The sky showed no sign of clearing, and the Kp-index reading had plummeted. Meanwhile, the temperature had fallen to minus ten degrees Fahrenheit, which turned every gust of wind into a scouring assault. People were pulling up balaclavas and stamping their feet. No surprises occurred overhead, but an earthly one did: a woman suddenly slipped her arm through mine and began murmuring in my ear in Italian. I looked at her, and she gave a shriek: she’d mistaken me, in my snowsuit, for her husband. Peals of unnerving laughter broke from her as we sledded back across the lake. 

On his way to Tromsø, Norway, his taxi strikes a reindeer:

The road was covered with packed snow and the driver was going fast. On a long, straight, desolate stretch, we came over a rise and saw five reindeer galloping straight toward us. The driver cursed in English: “Shit.” I braced myself, felt a slam, and saw one of the animals thrown into the air. It had antlers, and, as the previous night’s guide had informed us, a deer that still had them in late winter was female, and probably pregnant. We backed up and found it lying, dead, in the snow. The taxi was dented but drivable, and after reporting the accident we continued on our way, both of us badly shaken.

Lasdun stays at a “wilderness camp” near the village of Kilpisjärvi, in western Finland:

We rounded a promontory with scrubby birches doubled over by snow, and came to a dark hut, raised up on sled runners, on the ice. An outhouse stood off to the side. It was cozy inside the hut, with a banged-together quality that I liked, though spending the night there still seemed disconcerting. 

Photo by Joakim Eskildsen (from James Lasdun's "Glow")

And he participates in an Aurora Chase:

A second bus, twice the size of ours, pulled into the parking area. I had become highly suspicious of all the apps and meteorological charts that were being consulted, but this time my skepticism was misplaced. A crack appeared in the clouds directly above us. It widened, showing a sprinkling of stars and then the entire Big Dipper. There was a stirring among the photographers: their cameras had started detecting things. After a moment, an oblique greenish bar like the one I’d seen the night before became visible. It grew brighter and denser, then contracted into an oval of emerald light. People chattered excitedly. I was about to warn them not to get too carried away when a streak of brilliant green shot out of the oval, at high speed, and zoomed over our tipped-back heads, corkscrewing across the sky. I almost toppled over while following its trajectory. The green light formed several tentacles, which twisted and writhed together and looped in circles. Astonishment was proclaimed in a half-dozen languages. The circles dropped needles of piercing brightness that travelled, in tandem, around the sky, as if tracing the undulations of a celestial shower curtain.

To write a successful travel piece, one must have an observant eye and a gift for description. Lasdun has both. His “Glow” is perfect.

But wait! We’re not done. There’s another brilliant piece in this week’s issue – Nick Paumgarten’s “The Descent of Man,” an account of his attendance at the 2019 Hahnenkamm, in Kitzbühel, Austria. Paumgarten puts us squarely there, at the base of the Hahnenkamm gondola (“I glanced up and saw for the first time, shadow-blue and telephoto close, the final section of the Streif, where the racers, after soaring off a jump, come hauling across a steep, bumpy, fallaway traverse—legs burning, skis thrashing—and into the final plunge, the Zielschuss, reaching speeds of almost ninety miles an hour”); eating with the U.S. ski team at their training table (“In years past, the team had hired a chef from New Zealand, but here the athletes ate like Bavarian policemen: the hotel served bratwurst, fatty pork, and boiled potatoes and carrots”); in the back of the team’s supply truck (“At six-forty-five the next morning, I crawled over a pile of skis to a spot atop a crate in back of the team’s supply truck—a windowless white van crammed with gear”); in the starter shed at the top of the course:

We removed one beam and stepped inside. During the race, there would be a small crowd inside consisting of a few racers, their coaches, race officials, and whatever aura of extreme anxiety and nervousness envelops them there. The shed, and the holding pen outside—where the skiers stare into space, stretch, stand knee-deep in the snow to stiffen their boots, close their eyes and rehearse the run in their mind’s eyes—constitute the Hahnenkamm’s emotional epicenter, the germ of the mayhem down in the valley. A portion of that clenched mood plummets down the run with each racer, like unexploded ordnance, and detonates amid the pandemonium below, in a kind of steady bombardment of relief and adoration that reverberates for days.

He even skis the punishing course:

The Steilhang exuded the full gloom of a north face at befogged dawn. McBride had told me that this was a “no-fall zone.” I started skidding helplessly across and down. In front of me, Addie Godfrey fell. I went into a full defensive squat—what surfers call the poo stance—as Godfrey’s slide was mercifully halted by the poles of one of the gates. Clattering past, I soon found myself at the fence, still on my feet.

He observes the skiers make their training runs (“I passed undetected through the racers’ waiting area and over to a perch just to the left of the starting gate. One false step and I’d be on my back, hurtling toward the Mausefalle”). On race day, he climbs up the course to watch the skiers (“Halfway up the Zielschuss, I passed through the Matthias Mayer fan club (orange parkas) and the Christian Walder fan club (black parkas), before finding myself in the company of the Ski Club St. Martin, enthusiasts from Switzerland, who were passing around a flask”).

And, of course, Paumgarten being Paumgarten, he explores Kitzbühel’s post-race festivities:

Stately town houses and hotels in mint green, terra-cotta, mustard, ochre, and pink. A fourteenth-century Gothic church. Bogner, Moncler, Lacoste, Louis Vuitton. As a day-drinking backdrop, it was almost comically grand. “Sweet Caroline,” not even the Neil Diamond version, seemed to pop up on every block, a Whack-a-Mole of song. Bands of young men in red-and-white Dr. Seuss hats erupted in drinking chants. Swiss men in white smocks marched in formation, swinging giant cowbells called Trychlers—each bell weighing more than forty pounds—with deadpan expressions, holding them at arm’s length in front of their privates.

I’ve long admired Paumgarten’s work. “The Descent of Man” is one of his finest. Its thereness is extraordinary.

I want to conclude with a brief comment on another piece in this week’s issue – Nicholas Lemann’s “The Art of Fact.” It’s a review of Jeremy Treglown’s Mr. Straight Arrow, a biography of New Yorker writer John Hersey. I relish the piece’s title. The art of fact is exactly what most interests me. But, in my view, Lemann doesn’t do justice to his subject. Yes, he refers to Hersey’s great “Hiroshima” as a “marvel of journalistic engineering.” But he also says,

The relationship between fiction and nonfiction is like the one between art and architecture: fiction is pure, nonfiction is applied. Just as buildings shouldn’t leak or fall down, nonfiction ought to work within the limits of its claim to be about the world as it really is. But narrative journalism is far from artless. 

“Far from artless” seems feeble as a description of great fact pieces like John McPhee’s “The Encircled River,” Ian Frazier’s “Great Plains,” Alec Wilkinson’s “The Blessing of the Fleet,” Janet Malcolm’s “Iphigenia in Forest Hills,” and Nicholas Schmidles’ “Getting Bin Laden,” to name five that come quickly to mind. These superb pieces are as much the achievement of selection and shaping as the finest fiction. Michael Pearson, in his John McPhee (1997), says, “Like any creative writer, McPhee imposes order on his materials to arrive at truth. Materials must be fashioned and shaped.” This is the art of fact.