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Stranger on a Train: Daydreaming and Smoking Around America with Interruptions
Using two cross-country trips on Amtrak as her narrative vehicles, British writer Jenny Diski connects the humming rails, taking her into the heart of America with the track-like scars leading back to her own past. As in the highly acclaimed Skating to Antarctica, Diski has created a seamless and seemingly effortless amalgam of reflections and revelation in a unique combination of travelogue and memoir.
288 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2002
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About the author
Jenny Diski
37 books148 followersJenny Diski was a British writer. Diski was a prolific writer of fiction and nonfiction articles, reviews and books. She was awarded the 2003 Thomas Cook Travel Book Award for Stranger on a Train: Daydreaming and Smoking around America With Interruptions.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 109 reviews
October 10, 2018
This is a laidback travel memoir about two long train journeys Diski took across America (in the late 1990s or early 2000s, I think). It also incorporates memories from her troubled adolescence – she started smoking at 14 and was in and out of mental hospitals at 15 – in which she loved nothing more than to read while riding the London Underground’s Circle line all day long.
I’d previously read and enjoyed Diski’s Skating to Antarctica, and in both travel books she perfects the art of observation: of the landscape, yes, but more often of her fellow passengers and herself. She sees and absorbs so much, even from short encounters, and it was particularly interesting to me to read her reactions to everyday Americans – though I’ve lived outside of the USA for more than 13 years now, there are things she notices that I might still take for granted.
Journey 1: cargo ship from Hamburg to Georgia; train from Jacksonville, Florida to Phoenix to stay with friends. Journey 2: round trip from New York (via Portland, Oregon and Sacramento, then Denver, Albuquerque, etc.) followed by a flight back to London. She loves having a tiny private cabin with a space for everything, but most of her significant meetings are thanks to the almost ritualized trips to the dining car and the smoking carriages on the various trains. Sometimes there’s a prohibition on smoking between certain stops and she has to set her alarm for the next possible time she can get a cigarette. (Ironic, then, to be reading this two and a half years after Diski died of lung cancer.)
There’s a pleasant Geoff Dyer-esque laziness on display here: you don’t have to go somewhere exotic or perform great feats to write a winning travel book; you just have to put yourself in the right place and wait for the stories to come to you. I don’t know if I’d like Diski’s fiction, but I’ll certainly read her essay collections.
Favorite lines:
“An exercise in sensory deprivation, I suppose. To find out what happened when one day followed another, one mile followed another and each was exactly the same as the last.”
“America might look vast on the map, but for many people it’s as small as their local town, beyond which is an uncharted wilderness inhabited by monsters.”
“public sleeping is a kind of revelation, and the observer of strangers asleep is as much a voyeur as someone peeping through a gap in the bedroom curtains.”
I’d previously read and enjoyed Diski’s Skating to Antarctica, and in both travel books she perfects the art of observation: of the landscape, yes, but more often of her fellow passengers and herself. She sees and absorbs so much, even from short encounters, and it was particularly interesting to me to read her reactions to everyday Americans – though I’ve lived outside of the USA for more than 13 years now, there are things she notices that I might still take for granted.
Journey 1: cargo ship from Hamburg to Georgia; train from Jacksonville, Florida to Phoenix to stay with friends. Journey 2: round trip from New York (via Portland, Oregon and Sacramento, then Denver, Albuquerque, etc.) followed by a flight back to London. She loves having a tiny private cabin with a space for everything, but most of her significant meetings are thanks to the almost ritualized trips to the dining car and the smoking carriages on the various trains. Sometimes there’s a prohibition on smoking between certain stops and she has to set her alarm for the next possible time she can get a cigarette. (Ironic, then, to be reading this two and a half years after Diski died of lung cancer.)
There’s a pleasant Geoff Dyer-esque laziness on display here: you don’t have to go somewhere exotic or perform great feats to write a winning travel book; you just have to put yourself in the right place and wait for the stories to come to you. I don’t know if I’d like Diski’s fiction, but I’ll certainly read her essay collections.
Favorite lines:
“An exercise in sensory deprivation, I suppose. To find out what happened when one day followed another, one mile followed another and each was exactly the same as the last.”
“America might look vast on the map, but for many people it’s as small as their local town, beyond which is an uncharted wilderness inhabited by monsters.”
“public sleeping is a kind of revelation, and the observer of strangers asleep is as much a voyeur as someone peeping through a gap in the bedroom curtains.”
July 5, 2015
I am struggling a bit with this review, as this book was very different from my expectation. Sometimes that is a good thing... but not this time.
I usually find winners of the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award excellent. This book won in 2003. For me however this is not a travel book. In this book travel is the least important element. America is just a setting, only what is seen out the train window when the author breaks eye contact with her fellow passengers, or sits alone in reflection. This book is much more a memoir, and a series of retold aspects of other peoples stories. Often the memoir and the passengers tale link, sometimes they are more random. The train, other than the description of the conditions of the smoking carriage, simply forms a part of the backdrop.
For me, it doesn't help that the theme of the whole book is a glorification of smoking. Almost exclusively, the authors interaction on the train is in the smokers carriage. The author loves smoking - always has, and always will. She describes is with more passion than any other element of this book. It does nothing for me, and the continual describing of it eventually stirs disgust in me. Normally, I can ignore it - you know - up to her, doing that damage to herself in her own time, no issue to me. But it is just so central to this book...
So for travel, 1 out of 5; as a memoir (and don't get me wrong, some of it is quite interesting), 3 out of 5; and for the telling of other peoples stories, 2 out of 5. Just not loving it the way many of the other reviewers seem to. Overall, that lands it at 2 stars.
I usually find winners of the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award excellent. This book won in 2003. For me however this is not a travel book. In this book travel is the least important element. America is just a setting, only what is seen out the train window when the author breaks eye contact with her fellow passengers, or sits alone in reflection. This book is much more a memoir, and a series of retold aspects of other peoples stories. Often the memoir and the passengers tale link, sometimes they are more random. The train, other than the description of the conditions of the smoking carriage, simply forms a part of the backdrop.
For me, it doesn't help that the theme of the whole book is a glorification of smoking. Almost exclusively, the authors interaction on the train is in the smokers carriage. The author loves smoking - always has, and always will. She describes is with more passion than any other element of this book. It does nothing for me, and the continual describing of it eventually stirs disgust in me. Normally, I can ignore it - you know - up to her, doing that damage to herself in her own time, no issue to me. But it is just so central to this book...
So for travel, 1 out of 5; as a memoir (and don't get me wrong, some of it is quite interesting), 3 out of 5; and for the telling of other peoples stories, 2 out of 5. Just not loving it the way many of the other reviewers seem to. Overall, that lands it at 2 stars.
August 9, 2016
One of my favourite books.
February 23, 2009
to read and re-read and re-read, especially while travelling. most recently, i re-read this on the beach in miami, eavesdropping on americans. it was a chilly day (by floridian standards), but i was comfortingly wrapped in towels and diski's prose: acerbic, remote, kind and quite funny. her eye for detail is impressive.
September 22, 2016
Jenny Diski endeavours to circumnavigate the United States …by train. She’s not really intent on doing anything more than watch the scenery whip past and smoke. She finds a special place in the smoking car with it’s cracked linoleum floor, institutional gray walls and hard plastic chairs. There, along with the outcast, nicotine hungry pariahs she can unrepentantly smoke in peace.
People seem to have other ideas and their lives and attendant stories reach out to her. Diski does a fair bit of literary people watching, enjoying that strange bit of alchemy that renders strangers immediately familiar when you’re travelling. Otherwise unremarkable fellow travellers are rendered with warmth and each come with their own unique stories to tell.
While it did win the 2003 Thomas Cook Travel Book Award there’s precious little consideration given to the passing American landscape. This is more a snapshot of the distinctly American lives that join Diski on her journey.
People seem to have other ideas and their lives and attendant stories reach out to her. Diski does a fair bit of literary people watching, enjoying that strange bit of alchemy that renders strangers immediately familiar when you’re travelling. Otherwise unremarkable fellow travellers are rendered with warmth and each come with their own unique stories to tell.
While it did win the 2003 Thomas Cook Travel Book Award there’s precious little consideration given to the passing American landscape. This is more a snapshot of the distinctly American lives that join Diski on her journey.
July 19, 2010
How wonderful is this book? Diski's travel across the USA and her experiences with being a smoker were just perfect - and made even more fun to read since I read it on a train myself. Highly recommended!
November 8, 2023
As I read this book I was transported by the narrative. I raced through episodes of travel, the landscapes (physical and emotional) encouraging me to keep page turning. I also found I kept stopping and starting my reading at random points, which is unusual for me. It felt like a full immersion book. A travel book that, effectively, is experience over destination. I loved that it was about strangers brought together across a vast landscape yet an internal adventure of being an outsider, a brief insider and estrangement from life.
I loved the characters encountered in the smoking car. They are journeyers, quirky, offbeat, a cross-section of North America, Diski is masterly at capturing their essence. A dilettante of oddball Americans who are thrown together not unlike the ubiquitous group of office smokers who bond for limited moments then return to the rest of their day.
I loved the characters encountered in the smoking car. They are journeyers, quirky, offbeat, a cross-section of North America, Diski is masterly at capturing their essence. A dilettante of oddball Americans who are thrown together not unlike the ubiquitous group of office smokers who bond for limited moments then return to the rest of their day.
June 9, 2012
Diski is a very self-absorbed writer but her reflections on her life and her interactions (and worries about her interactions) with others are well worth reading, often chiming with and elucidating one's own feelings. Her reserve breaks down when she combines the anonimity of train travel in a foreign country with the shared sin of being a smoker amongst (when she can manage it) other smokers. She builds a handsome collection of personal vignettes from her fellow travellers, usually provoking thoughts about her own complicated and unusual past, especially her childhood and teenage years. While the book scarcely qualifies as a travel book, the journey gives it both momentum and a framework onto which Diski can hang her stories.
did-not-finish
January 3, 2017Love the cover and the title but not the narrator, 100 pages in and still not on the train. I had chosen this for book speed dating so will abandon for other reads.
March 4, 2024
This isn’t really a travel memoir – or at least not a typical travel memoir. Jenny Diski travelled around America on Amtrac trains. She travelled in a circle which was linked to her childhood of getting away from home and travelling on the Circle line (tube) in London through the school holidays reading books as she had nowhere else to go. I really enjoyed this 'part cultural comment' and 'part memoir'. Do not read this if you want to know about American landscape and scenery. Do read this if you want to know about the people she meets (nearly all American) and what they really think of themselves. I’m not even going to mention her smoking, this is a big part of the book as she only really meets people in the smoking compartments of her train (which reminded me of behind the bicycle sheds at school). It was a hugely enjoyable read and I will read it again (prefereably when travelling).
August 26, 2011
I thought this was a great way to explore the least explored. Despite the less-than-encouraging connotations associated with train travel in the US, Jenny still managed a trip that informed her more than the bitter hearsay. Curiosity is all you need to take on the road to make the journey a little more worth remembering!
August 10, 2016
Less about the landscape and more about the interesting mix of people Diski meets on her train journeys. Her insights and observations are so astute and she also reveals details about her own troubled early years.
April 28, 2015
Amazing insight into the USA and mental health great read
August 20, 2019
Muito bom! Volto cá quando regressar à civilização.
August 24, 2015
This travelog/memoir, by a writer for whom travel, ideally, is "to be in or move through empty spaces in circumstances where nothing much will happen," was a lot more successful than you might think. Diski begins the book by describing how, when she was thirteen and unhappy, she would spend the days she wasn't in school riding the Circle Line underground train, smoking and reading an armful of library books. The two American train journeys she describes in this book are similarly circuitous and aimless and solitary, but with better visuals. "I do not feel compelled," she writes, "to bring the world to people, or meet interesting characters, or enlarge my circle of acquaintance. I just want to drift in the actual landscapes of my daydreams." Disavowals about interesting characters aside, Diski does describe her encounters and brief alliances with fellow travelers, mostly within the confines of the grim, penitential gas chambers with which the railroad, like the rest of Wellness America, expresses its disapproval of cigarette smoking.
I read Stranger on a Train mostly because I've been enchanted for a couple of years with Jenny Diski's prose, but also because I myself traveled on the Sunset Limited, one of the lines that figures prominently in this narrative, back in the days when you could still smoke in an Amtrak lounge car. Diski's description of the pleasures and discomforts of being a smoker at a time when the party is most decidedly over is sufficient to have justified the read, but it is the precision with which she nails the agonies of the introvert that really impresses me. Introversion is, it would seem, newly fashionable, but longtime solitaries like Ms. Diski and myself know that it's not just a matter of liking the idea of yourself as thoughtful and a little retiring. It's an orientation toward social involvement in which EVERY conversation has the potential to develop into a hostage situation and Diski, in the penultimate chapter of Stranger on a Train, mines comedy gold from her paranoid fantasies about how her five-day (!) visit with her new friend Bet might morph into a horrific kidnapping "just like [the Stephen King novel and subsequent film] Misery."
I read Stranger on a Train mostly because I've been enchanted for a couple of years with Jenny Diski's prose, but also because I myself traveled on the Sunset Limited, one of the lines that figures prominently in this narrative, back in the days when you could still smoke in an Amtrak lounge car. Diski's description of the pleasures and discomforts of being a smoker at a time when the party is most decidedly over is sufficient to have justified the read, but it is the precision with which she nails the agonies of the introvert that really impresses me. Introversion is, it would seem, newly fashionable, but longtime solitaries like Ms. Diski and myself know that it's not just a matter of liking the idea of yourself as thoughtful and a little retiring. It's an orientation toward social involvement in which EVERY conversation has the potential to develop into a hostage situation and Diski, in the penultimate chapter of Stranger on a Train, mines comedy gold from her paranoid fantasies about how her five-day (!) visit with her new friend Bet might morph into a horrific kidnapping "just like [the Stephen King novel and subsequent film] Misery."
April 5, 2014
What a disappointment. I love the idea of this book--traveling around more or less the circumference of the continental U.S. by train, and writing about it. I would like to WRITE that book (maybe--I might be too much of an introvert). But I would settle for reading it. Unfortunately, this was not really what I was looking for. The writing is lovely and deep and interesting, but the author is way too neurotic to write the book I was looking for, unfortunately. There were interesting parts, when Diski would engage her fellow travelers in conversation--but really, the people she wrote about were nearly all quite odd. I find it hard to believe there weren't more not-so-odd people on the train who nonetheless had interesting stories. I suppose the oddballs are easier to write about, or perhaps she identified more with them. Way more of the book than interested me was dedicated to the author's own history and comparing her tenure on the trains to her tenure in various psychiatric wards. There's nothing wrong with that, I suppose, but not my cup of tea. I would have preferred a more objective, less personal story. That is perhaps my own failing. Thus, three stars rather than the two I am tempted to give it. It's not bad, precisely, just not what I was hoping for.
July 17, 2021
Um livro perigoso para ex-fumadores!
Estas viagens dão e não dão vontade de viajar de comboio pelos Estados Unidos.
Já tinha saudades da sensação de viajar com um livro. É incrível reconhecer em outros o à vontade que existe quando estamos perante desconhecidos e com o tempo limitado.
Estas viagens dão e não dão vontade de viajar de comboio pelos Estados Unidos.
Já tinha saudades da sensação de viajar com um livro. É incrível reconhecer em outros o à vontade que existe quando estamos perante desconhecidos e com o tempo limitado.
April 1, 2017
An amazing book by an amazing writer...RIP Jenny Diski.
March 16, 2023
4,5🌟
Quando parti para esta road trip sobre carris fui convencida que veria uma América diante de mim, como se de um pano de amostras se tratasse, mas foi muito mais que isso.
Jenny, com um cigarro como companhia, quase sempre como "anteparo da nudez social", dá-se a conhecer a si, aos seus pensamentos mais íntimos. A maioria dos seus devaneios acontece nas smoking zones dos comboios inalando vivências e histórias dos que cruzam o seu caminho.
Quando parti para esta road trip sobre carris fui convencida que veria uma América diante de mim, como se de um pano de amostras se tratasse, mas foi muito mais que isso.
Jenny, com um cigarro como companhia, quase sempre como "anteparo da nudez social", dá-se a conhecer a si, aos seus pensamentos mais íntimos. A maioria dos seus devaneios acontece nas smoking zones dos comboios inalando vivências e histórias dos que cruzam o seu caminho.
August 26, 2023
4.5
I just really loved this book - it's about train travel in the USA and also somehow about smoking and also about not really wanting to interact with people despite travelling with lots of other people. Contradictory and engaging.
I just really loved this book - it's about train travel in the USA and also somehow about smoking and also about not really wanting to interact with people despite travelling with lots of other people. Contradictory and engaging.
January 20, 2021
A very different and engaging travelogue around the US. However, after spending so much time in the smokers' lounge on the different trains, I felt I needed nicotine patches by the end of the book.
March 21, 2021
Combination travel by train around America story and memoir that is oddly fascinating. The author's insights and adventures past and present, and desperate to smoke, smoking everywhere.
August 5, 2021
4.5 stars
July 14, 2024
Loved this book - the character studies, her reflection on her present and past and the description of the scenery.
July 27, 2018
Not sure I wd always get along with her, but her experiences, the stories she (involuntarily) collects and her reflections are so brilliant. Also the realisation normal, story-less, people don't exist. I'll definitely check her other stuff. (will post quotations in a remote future)
June 26, 2016
There is nothing quite as illuminating as travel literature about your own country. Diski is British, and she makes strange gaffes like calling the city "St. Paul's-Minneapolis," but has an overall sympathetic ear for Americans. I found it a little bit slow to start, but once I relaxed into it, it was perfect. The meat of it is really a catalog of every strange person and their strange stories, as encountered on Amtrak, especially in the smoking sections (when such a thing still existed--this was the late '90s). Which, really, is dream reading for me.
PS: Introverts will love this. Extroverts and people who plan things will probably get antsy and just think Diski is weird.
PPS: It made me want to smoke. So it may be dangerous reading for smokers who have quit--or nostalgic reading.
PS: Introverts will love this. Extroverts and people who plan things will probably get antsy and just think Diski is weird.
PPS: It made me want to smoke. So it may be dangerous reading for smokers who have quit--or nostalgic reading.
August 26, 2017
Reading this book felt like a long train ride going nowhere, a passenger on an inescapable journey through pages of monotonous ramblings. Just like the writer anxiously awaits her next smoke break or anticipation for the next station; traveling with her through the pages, I found myself eagerly seeking the end of the book for my departure. I appreciate her availability to let the reader in to her inquisitive and sometimes paranoid thoughts, however the effort it took to find any real sense of story left me a weary reader.
November 8, 2020
There's an honesty and a poignance here, and a feeling of tragedy, knowing a little about Diski's life and untimely end. She does not seem to care about dazzling the reader, but she offers a stream of juicy vignettes and musing about herself and her encounters. She spends more time on cigarettes and her addiction than I'd prefer, but this is her book, and in the end I felt uplifted by her fearless reflections and analysis.
November 29, 2015
I'm not sure what is it about it, but I just love travel writing. I have a romanticised notion of train travel and this book fitted perfectly with that. The passengers she met along the way we're so open and their simple stories universal and moving. I do wonder if it would be like that now, more than a decade later. I'd like to think so.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 109 reviews