At the age of 13, Jenny Diski would spend her weekends and holidays
on the Circle Line of the London Underground. She would pick up a
couple of books from the local library, purchase food from the
various station vendors and spend the day going round and round,
reading anything from Nabokov to Poe to Margaret Mitchell. Over 30
years later, she undertakes another circular train trip, this time
round America on a train, from New York to Chicago, Portland,
Sacramento, Denver, Albuquerque, Tucson and finally New Orleans
back to New York. The trains have wonderfully lyrical names such as
Lake Shore Limited, Empire Builder and Coast Starlight and the
landscape travelled through is familiar to us from generations of
films. As an avid smoker, Jenny Diski is one of a dying breed and
the most important carriage in the various trains is the smoking
car. Essentially a person of solitude, Jenny reluctantly gets into
conversations with other smokers, all who have their own lives and
stories to tell. As with her previous memoir, Skating to
Antarctica, the author uses her observations and the stories of her
fellow passengers to reflect on her own life, particularly the
times spent in various psychiatric hospitals. This is not a
travelogue but a memoir of life, of the pleasures of smoking, the
nature of friendships and of solitude, and as such it is thoughtful
and deeply moving. (Kirkus UK)
In spite of the fact that her idea of travel is to stay home with
the phone off the hook, Jenny Diski takes a trip around the
perimeter of the USA by train. Somewhat reluctantly she meets all
kinds of characters, all bursting with stories to tell, and finds
herself brooding about the marvellously familiar landscape of
America, half-known already through film and television. Like the
pulse of the train over the rails, the theme of the dying pleasures
of smoking thrums through the book, along with reflections on the
condition of solitude and the nature of friendship and memories
triggered by her past times in psychiatric hospitals Cutting
between her troubled teenaged years and contemporary America, the
journey becomes a study of strangers, strangeness and estrangement
- from oneself, as well as from the world.
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