Book Review: Travels in a Thin Country by Sara Wheeler
I recently rebelled against my harsh schedule, set by me, and spent several days reading. It’s summer. Time to gear down.
Mainly I read travel books that I had no intention of reviewing. They had nothing to do with the novella that I’m researching, either. I love travel books—I wrote one myself—and I decided I was free to either enjoy the books or toss them aside.
The first review is below.
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My friend Frances and I were talking about a new book by Sara Wheeler, the British travel writer. Wheeler has just published a biography of one of the 20th century’s most famous travellers—Jan Morris: A Life—which the Guardian calls “masterful.”[1]
Frances told me that Wheeler had come to a party at her house in Santiago and mentioned it in an earlier book, Travels in a Thin Country: A journey through Chile.[2]
“I think we got a sentence,” Frances said.
So of course I had to order the book, which details Wheeler’s six-month trip through Chile, north to south (more or less).
Chile is indeed a thin country, as Pablo Neruda points out,[3] and very long. If you picture it laid on top of North America, the country would stretch from Hudson’s Bay to Mexico City, although at most it’s 110 miles wide. The climate extremities are just as far apart. In the north is the blazing Atacama Desert. As you head south, you reach a temperate rain forest (and logging trucks), before the country ends in glaciated Antarctic rock.
Wheeler’s book was first published in 1994, and the fact it remains both in print and in the Toronto library system means people must still be reading it, even if they don’t know anyone in the book.
It’s also true that Thin Country is an entertaining read. It’s heedless, cheeky, sometimes snotty, well-researched and noticeably young. If you’ve been to Chile, it can make you nostalgic for your own trips. If you haven’t, it’s a bit of a primer, and well worth your time.
There’s also the fact I read Wheeler’s book while reading another book I had no plans to write about, and the two bounced off one another in fascinating ways.
The Vulnerable Observer by Ruth Behar is an influential book about the practice of anthropology.[4] Behar is an ethnographer, poet and recipient of a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant. She makes anthropology and travel writing seem like cousins.
“I was drawn to anthropology’s incessant journeys and voluntary periods of exile,” she writes, “its constant movement between places, its desire to find magic and enchantment elsewhere…To live between homes, between languages, made sense to me… That I could pursue this state of in-betweenness as a profession seemed incredible.”
Sound familiar? I was also struck by the connection of travel writing to Behar’s main point. She writes that anthropologists are far from objective observers of the cultures they investigate. Instead, they carry their own cultural baggage into the field, which radically affects what they experience and how they interpret it.
I wondered what baggage Wheeler carried.
That’s part of what kept me reading her book, along with the fact the party our friends Frances and Paul threw isn’t mentioned until page 290. It’s true they get a sentence, although the party gets three paragraphs.[5]
My library copy of Wheeler’s book arrived with a tattered cover, yellowed pages and corrections written in ballpoint pen, pencil and darker ink, apparently by three different people. The most important was on the first map, where the ballpoint person correctly changed a corner of territory pictured at the edge of the map from BRAZIL to PARAGUAY.
The pencil person was more acerbic when pointing out a mistake in a fishing scene late in the book. Wheeler writes that one of her fellow fishers landed a salmon with a “gaffe.”
“No!” Pencil Person writes. “It’s a gaff. A gaffe is what you just committed in print!”
I mention these picky points because the untrained nature of non-anthropological travel writing means one should probably scatter a few grains of salt across the pages while reading it.
There’s also the fact that Wheeler’s trip was partially funded by organizations she advertises throughout the book. In the introduction, she gives a shout-out to the London company that provides her with free lessons to brush up her Spanish before she leaves. She advises others to take their classes, helpfully including their contact info in a footnote.
Later on, a car rental company (named repeatedly) provides her with a succession of free vehicles she calls Rocky I , II, III and IV. Wheeler planned to travel from top to bottom, as I say, but ends up taking a long detour to the deep south. It turns out that she’s landed another freebie, a trip to a Chilean military station in Antarctica.
This can make her book feel oddly modern, like the work of influencers whose podcasts bleed with product placement. I found the advertising a little off-putting, just as I did the errors. But at least Wheeler is honest about it, and her fluid writing carries readers along.
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One question nagged at me throughout Wheeler’s book: Why did she want to be a travel writer in the first place?
Her introduction mentions a couple of reasons for travelling to Chile. Wheeler paddled a canoe up the Amazon in 1985 and had wanted to go back to South America ever since. Then, after finishing a book about Greece, she met a Chilean man at her lido, her local bathing place. He urged her to go to Chile, so she did.
I imagine she also noticed before booking her trip that there hadn’t been a lot of travel writing done about Chile during the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet, which had ended only a few years before. Maybe she saw an opening in the market for a book that would pay for her trip.
Wheeler never mentions what lies at the heart of her wanderlust, whether childhood trauma or, for once, something happy. She remains quite private about her background throughout the book. Yet thrumming though every line is Wheeler’s passionate love of travelling. She’s militantly independent, needs to be going somewhere, can’t turn down an invitation, wants to see everything. She wants, wants, wants, and goes, goes, goes.
Her travels take Wheeler from the Atacama high into the Andes mountains. She gets off the bus at the office of a national park on the shores Lake Chungará, elevation 14,800 feet, which she says is probably the highest lake in the world.
“I walked across to a tiny wooden refuge pointed out by the bus driver. It was run by a genial employee of Conaf, the national forestry service; he was called Umberto, and he said I could sleep on the floor of what purported to be an office. I sat talking to him outside the hut, and almost immediately the salmon pink streak of a flamingo curved above the lake.”
Post-flamingo, Wheeler develops a nasty case of altitude sickness.
“I sat still inside the hut, recovering, and in an attempt to entertain me, Umberto turned to Princess Anne’s signature in the visitors’ book, and asked me if I knew her.”
Wheeler later flies to the island where the real-life Robinson Crusoe was marooned, hanging with fisherfolk who catch lobsters for high-end Santiago restaurants. She relaxes at a plush estate in Chile’s wine country, takes a detour to the hippie-esque island of Chiloe and bumps down the more distant reaches of Pinochet’s southern highway. Later she lands much further south in Tierra del Fuego, where she spends a few days with some lonely coast guards, takes a ship back north and, and—more. Much more.
Wheeler does most of this with miscellaneous male travelling companions, although the exact nature of their relationships are kept behind zipped tent flaps, her unedited account remaining slightly edited. Anthropologist Ruth Behar might have questions about a double standard. Wheeler can call an older woman a crone, but doesn’t ask what the crone thought of her.
I’ve mentioned nostalgia as one reason I enjoyed the book, despite my hesitations. I visited Chile with my family a number of times when we lived in Brazil, wanting to see friends and escape the stifling heat of Rio in January. This was during the 80s and 90s, a bit before Wheeler went there. I haven’t been back since, but stay in close touch with Chilean friends. One just left after a lovely visit.
Over several trips, we went to a lot of the same places Wheeler did, although I’ve never been to the Atacama. Most aren’t that hard to get to. We headed to Chiloe, drove down the southern highway, soaked in some amazing hot springs she doesn’t mention[6], spent time in Tierra del Fuego, then took a ship back to Puerto Montt through the Golfo de Peñas, cattle mooing on deck just as they did when Wheeler made the trip.
We even stayed at one of the southern hotels she visited. The big bumbly horseflies she complains of are indeed very bad there, the tabanas, although they don’t bite, they just buzz you. When we first left the hotel for a walk, our son—who would have been about six—was near tears as he batted them away. It’s a family story, how he decided to be brave and held up his head, marching along while ignoring the buzz.
There’s another difference between Wheeler’s travels and ours, besides the kid. My husband, Paul, was a journalist, a foreign correspondent based in Latin America for the Toronto Globe & Mail. He went to Chile often over a six-year period and got to know a lot of people. We could sit down with Chileans who trusted us, and they’d open up about what they’d been through; what was really going on.
Driving through the countryside one day, a musician friend pointed down a dirt road. “That’s where they took me to prison.” His face went immobile and his eyes sank deep.
Wheeler doesn’t get a lot of the facts wrong, a few gaffes aside. She’s entertaining, as I say, adventurous and admirably prickly. But what’s missing is a depth of emotion—others’ and her own. Wheeler remains so private throughout, the country sometimes feels like a movie set where she stages a series of adventures, playing a part, assuming a persona.
But then, she was young, it’s a fascinating country and to her credit she did a lot. As I closed the book, I found myself thinking that the protagonist of my novella is young, there’s a Chilean character, the story is set during the 90s, and…
Not that I read Wheeler’s book as research for my novella any more than I did to review it.
[1] Jan Morris: a Life by Sara Wheeler, is published by Faber.
The review in the Guardian was written by Charlie Gilmour. You can read it here, and the review contains a link that lets you buy the book. Gilmour concludes, “This is a sensitive, beautifully written, and masterly biography; a huge portrait whose perspective occasionally leaves Morris looking rather small.”
I found it interesting that in his short review, Gilmour found room to make a couple of points about Jan Morris’s children, and includes a quote from one of Morris’s daughters, Suki. “She was a lousy parent who damaged all four of her living children one way or another.”
Parenting seems to be an ongoing preoccupation for Charlie Gilmour. He’s the stepson of rock star David Gilmour and birth son of British poet Heathcote Williams. He wrote about his relationship with both in a lovely book called Featherhood: A Memoir of Two Fathers and a Magpie. I reviewed it here.
[2] Travels in a Thin Country: A journey through Chile by Sara Wheeler is published by Penguin Random House. You can order it here or get it from your local library. If you’re in Toronto, maybe you’ll pick up the annotated copy I borrowed.
[3] Wheeler quotes Neruda’s poem, Descubridores de Chile (Discoverers of Chile) at the top of her opening chapter. “Night, snow and sand make up the form/ of my thin country/all silence lies in its long line.” Some translators render his word delgado as “narrow.”
Wheeler ultimately decides she doesn’t like Neruda very much.
[4] The Vulnerable Observer: Anthropology That Breaks Your Heart by Ruth Behar is published by Beacon Press. You can order a copy here.
[5] Wheeler writes that Paul and Frances “invited me to a party at their home in Santiago on the night of the UK general election. I was very pleased, as, like many others, I was inclined to think that the British public were about to elect their first Labour government for thirteen years, and I wanted to celebrate with people who not only knew where Britain was, but appreciated the significance of this great victory…
“By nine we were quiet. By ten we were depressed. At eleven-thirty I took a taxi home fromm the funereal remnants of what should have been a party. At least God gave us a small earthquake that night, out of sympathy.”