Innocents Abroad

As noted previously, I use a lot of drive time to listen to Audible.com's audio books. I am currently listening to Innocents Abroad read by a woman named Flo Gibson. (who is pictured to the left of this paragraph)

I am not sure I could read like this. It takes a set of skills to know the author's tone and yet the reading is not supposed to be dramatic, that is not always an easy balance to achieve. Gibson specializes in unabridged books - which I prefer. She has done more than a thousand of them.

In the role of Twain, she is a master. I have never heard Twain's voice (although there are lots of recreations of his voice on the net, the one known recording by Thomas Edison was lost in a fire. But Gibson mixes a slight tone of whimsy and sarcasm into her reading. It sounds like Twain should have sounded reading his own stuff, perhaps without his drawl but with his own sense of self filtered in. I have always imagined how Twain would sound, his writing suggests a particular style and Gibson catches that quite well.

Innocents Abroad was originally penned as a set of travel letters to the Alta California about a trip to Europe and the Holy Land soon after the Civil War. It was before either Tom Sawyer or Huckleberry Finn. The guise of Innocents Abroad began as a chartered steamer to Europe whose original passage was $1250 and was to be a select group of noteworthy individuals. In describing the origins of the trip he uses the kinds of characterizations that Groucho Marx did about private clubs (If they are willing to accept me, I am not sure I would want to join.) Twain has fun with the guide writers of his time in a number of ways. First, he has an almost aw shucks response to most of the European pretentions. It is a good period piece of the exuberance of the American character at the time and perhaps now. Second, he pokes fun at the tourist traps all over the continent. He makes it a practice to count up the number of original fragments of the cross (at one point he suggests that the original nails from the cross that he saw, if accumlated together might be as many as a barrel). Third, he also pokes fun at the customs on the continent - from the lack of soap in France, to the driver in Italy who takes his cigar, to all sorts of other things that an American in Europe might think a bit strange. Each chapter is a vignette with a theme and a point. But Twain clearly wants to have fun and yet debunk the other guide writers. He purposefully avoids the mammoth detail that others use and yet at the same time he is well informed about history and literature and keeps bringing in details to inform this or that site he visits. He is sort of a travel wikipedia with humor.

When I was first in graduate school I decided that I was under-read on literature. As a first year graduate student I had a fair amount of time when I was not doing my studies (International Relations) to read other stuff. That was in part as a result of how good my undergraduate preparation in the field was (at the University of the Pacific) and in part because graduate students took four four unit courses rather than five threes - that gives you some real time. My undergraduate reading, to the extent that I did any, was focussed on economics and political science classics (with some philosophy thrown in). About the only literature I read was in German. (Think Steppenwolf or the Metamorphisis in the original German) So in that year I picked out authors (Twain, Sinclair Lewis, Upton Sinclair, Hesse, Dickens) and would purchase their entire works. The benefit of that approach was that I was able to get a good understanding of how this or that author wrote their stuff. The defect is that when you read a dozen books by Dickens all at once, the characters blend together. Since those first encounters I have gone back and re-read a lot of those books. When you go back a second time, you get some very interesting insights.

If you are going to Europe or the Holy Land, you should pick Innocents Abroad up. OK so also get a Lonely Planet guide but Twain will serve you well. If you want to listen to something good on the flight over - the Flo Gibson unabridged one on Audible is just dandy.