Tropical Classical

by Pico Iyer

In Tropical Classical the author of Video Nights in Katmandu and The Lady and the Monk visits a holy city in Ethiopia, where hooded worshippers practice a Christianity that has remained unchanged since the Middle Ages. He follows the bewilderingly complex route of Bombay's dabbawallahs, who each day ferry 100,000 different lunches to 100,000 different workers.

Iyer chats with the Dalai Lama and assesses the books of Salman Rushdie and Cormac McCarthy. And he brings his perceptive eye and unflappable wit to bear on the postmodern vogues for literary puffery, sexual gamesmanship, and frequent-flier miles. Glittering with aphorisms, overflowing with insight, and often hilarious, Tropical Classical represents some of Iyer's finest work.


From the Trade Paperback edition.

Genres: Travel, Essays, Nonfiction

Hardcover

First published April 1, 1997

About the author

Pico Iyer is a British-born essayist and novelist of Indian descent. As an acclaimed travel writer, he began his career documenting a neglected aspect of travel -- the sometimes surreal disconnect between local tradition and imported global pop culture. Since then, he has written ten books, exploring also the cultural consequences of isolation, whether writing about the exiled spiritual leaders of Tibet or the embargoed society of Cuba.

Iyer’s latest focus is on yet another overlooked aspect of travel: how can it help us regain our sense of stillness and focus in a world where our devices and digital networks increasing distract us? As he says: "Almost everybody I know has this sense of overdosing on information and getting dizzy living at post-human speeds. Nearly everybody I know does something to try to remove herself to clear her head and to have enough time and space to think. ... All of us instinctively feel that something inside us is crying out for more spaciousness and stillness to offset the exhilarations of this movement and the fun and diversion of the modern world."

Reviews

[Janet · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have greatly enjoyed dipping into this substantial collection of essays and reviews from the 1980s and 1990s, sampling the completely at whim--a book review one evening, or a profile of an unknown travel writer, a portrait of New York in Black and White--each revealing another facet of this keen observer's mind and development as a writer. I found the writing far more lush and excitable than Iyer's more recent books about the Dalai Lama, (about whom there are two essays here), his book about Graham Greene, which runs a brief 250 pages, and his slim books on Japan.

In Tropical Classical, we meet the critic and world-traveler as a young man--his paragraphs are deep and dense, each idea fully and energetically tracked down and teased out. Even when the books reviewed are decades forgotten, his analysis is is always fresh and intriguing, his judgements often surprising. An essay I loved compared two books neither of which I'd ever heard of, one by Maureen Howard and the other by Barbara Pym, the former an admittedly beautiful book which he nevertheless disliked:

"Of the two novels, Grace Abounding is undoubtedly the more daring, more exciting, more important; but its knowledge of its own importance and its anxiety about it tend to obscure its intrinsic power. and where Grace Abounding disappoints only because it delivers much less than it promises (or even pretends), No Fond Return of Love satisfies because it provides exactly what it claims. On reflection, th pleasure of glittering soirees may prove less durable than those of teatime chats in modern quarters where words are more innocent and lines less rehearsed."

Here are reviews of books I probably will never read, but about which I'm delighted to hear about, depicted through Iyer's point of view, including Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy ("Jane Austen in Calcutta") and Salman Rushdie's East West ("Pop goes the Culture").

My favorite essay was the title one, "Welcome to the Age of Tropical Classical", an intriguing addition to the ongoing debate about colonialism in literature--illustrated by the work of Michael Ondaatje, Derek Walcott, and Richard Rodriguez. The bedrock of Iyer's oeuvre since the days of 'Video Night in Katmandu' is the vitality of palimpsest culture, or crosscultural hybridization.

He begins by taking about the master's terror of being overrun by savagery, and then presents a more liberating view, that of Rushdie in Satanic Verses: "[Rushdie] gave that trope a spin and saw it in a more liberating light. Imagine, he wrote, if London were to turn tropical. Imagine how the Old World might be revived by the New, and how much brighter the city would become if some "savages" were brought in to educate the nobles."

But then he goes on to present a third voice he calls 'Tropical Classical', embodied in the work of Michael Ondaatje, the poet Derek Walcott and the essayist Richard Rodriguez: "What distinguishes one of them is what distinguishes all: the ability to season high classical forms with a lyrical beauty drawn from the streets and beaches of their homes. To learn from the tradition of Homer and Herodotus and Augustine, respectively, yet to enliven and elevate those dusty forms with the rhythms of Saint Lucia, the colors of Sri Lanka, the love songs of the Latin South. To put sparkling new wine into cobwebbed old bottles, and shake the whole thing up to make it fizz."

The best thing about this essay collection as a whole is that for every book reviewed, more books are referred to--entering Pico Iyer's world, you spot ever more doors that tantalize.

[Manintheboat · Rating 2 out of 5]

Published in 1997, but most of the essays are from the late 80's to early 90's making this book, half of it containing book reviews, VERY dated. A book that does not stand the test of time. Well written, but a waste of time other than as a piece of history.

[Renee · Rating 2 out of 5]

While I enjoy Iyer, the collection of essays really shines a light on his mannerisms and writing habits, not all of which are very enjoyable. Also, the tendency to exotify India and other locales while simultaneously decrying their exotification by troublesome colonists is...problematic. Also not sure what his beef with Salman Rushdie is, but it's there.

The essays from the eighties and nineties mostly seem very dated now, which points to the weaknesses in their writing. A few of the better essays hold up much better, particularly areas under "Squibs" in which he largely writes about writing, technology drift, and about public perception of writers.

[Karla Kitalong]

The book is dated (most of the essays were written in the early 1990s), but Pico Iyer's style, his turns of phrase, and some of his insights, transcend time. I especially liked the Themes section of the book, which includes essays on the comma, Cuba, seasons, death, and "Speakez-vous Franglais?" Off to the Little Free Library you go, Pico.

[Michael Caylo-Baradi · Rating 3 out of 5]

It contains earlier pieces by the author - some very short. Although the pieces are not organized chronologically, you sense the expansion of perceptions, the young writer growing older. I like the book, but not as much as the recents one Iyer had written.

[Christine · Rating 5 out of 5]

He is an inspirational essayist and master of the short form. Racing prose creates sensory experience of the post-modern world he tramps through. My favorite book to read as a writer.

[Megan]

sadly, i abandoned this book in berlin. too much stuff in my suitcase. like chocolate. clear priorities here.

[Sayantan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pico is no doubt a delight to read but many of these pieces are quite out of context now. I think his more recent pieces will be more enjoyable.

[Kes · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a book that is interesting as (a) a piece of history and (b) an example of how to write.

The book is a series of essays, categorised into travel essays, book reviews, themes, and squibs. The first two are mostly from the 1980s and 1990s; reading this in the first month of the 2020s make it appear rather dated and quaint. Early on, there's an essay titled Nepal: Movie Days in Kathmandu (about the production of The Sheltering Sky by Bertolucci - a movie which I had not heard of until this book) which mentions:

And it is the dilemma that every developing country faces - especially a country as destitute and desirable as Nepal: when approached by the affluent modern West, do you take it in or take it on? Neptal has opted for the first solution, and smilingly accepted so much of the outside world that tourism is its largest source of foreign currency; Bhutan, nearby, has chosen the second option, and closed its doors so firmly that in all its history it has seen fewer tourists than visit Dodger Stadium on a single day.

There are also fun factoids, like that of the East India Company: "During its trading days, the Company had never been notably pious: indeed, because of a ruling that forced ships with more than five hundred men to carry a chaplain, the directors had for sixty years sent out vessels with exactly 499 men."

And the book is an example of writing, if you favour long sentences:
On first encounter, the area seemed a vision of the cacophonous dystopia of the future, in which a hundred California dreams collide and each one drowns the others out. Yet beneath the surface, there's a kind of commonness, a shared belief in all of them that the future can be custom-made. This faith is implicit in the immigrants' assumptions - they have voted with their feet in coming here; and it is made explicit, for longtime residents, by the Reverend Robert Schuller, who fills his Crystal Cathedral with hymns to "Possibility Thinking."

I enjoyed the way Pico Iyer reviewed books too; thinking about themes and writing style. The books were really old, though - I hadn't heard of any of them before.

My favourite essay remains In Praise of the Humble Comma. I also enjoyed History? Education? Zap! Pow! Cut! - which talks about the importance of being bilingual "fluent onscreen as well as off". Rather prescient for an essay written in the 1990s.

Other essays worth reading: Perhaps the Best Article on Blurbs I've Written Today - the politics of writing a blurb; and The Ultimate Near-Life Experience, which ends with:

There is nothing any of us can do about death, and there is no virtue in dwelling on it, or trying to penetrate its mystery. In any case, philosophy is famously helpless before a toothache. But there may be some good in coming to death as least as well prepared as we go to our vacations, our driving tests, or our weddings. If I were to die tomorrow, as the old saw has it, what would I wish to have done today? Or, as the Tibetan Sogyal Rinpoche says, "If you're having problems with a friend, pretend he's dying - you may even love him." Especially good advice if that friend happens to be yourself."

[Bob Peru · Rating 4 out of 5]

early pico. along with james woods he is my favorite contemporary essayist.