A Book of Migrations: Some Passages in Ireland

Solnit knows a lot and wants you to know it too, as well as reminding you that she knows it! The weight of research, speculation, and interpretation she loads upon her ostensible travelogue does make for a dense collection of interrelated essays about her migrations circa 1993. In light of the past decade, her observations that only once in her stint had she seen a "hurried motion" and how the Irish kept their stereotypically casual pace up and flaunted their easygoing nature against the sin of efficiency now make for an epitaph about this vanishing (as is always the case in Ireland's west it seems) way of life--before cellphones, motorways, and yuppies.

She blends her own background, neither Irish nor Jewish but just American, and Marin County Californian at that being a rarified species, into her reflections intelligently. I do sense much of the time that as an intellectual rather than the more usual adventure-based travel writer, she tends to look down her nose at the locals and the blow-ins both due to her more elevated level of education and scholarship. This does not weaken the insights she often makes, but it does cast her as rather a cool customer, rather removed from her environs.

But such distancing and detachment works to her advantage as she resists the stereotypical itinerary. Tellingly, she makes no effort to visit the Aran Islands, an "indigenous cultural reservation" in her estimation; she eschews the touristed haunts. If you like this, try James Charles Roy's "The Back of Beyond" for another American scholar's account a few but momentously altered years later of his days as a tour guide in the same Irish regions.

This is one of the best books I have ever read. For anyone who has ever been to Ireland or for that matter travelled anywhere at all this should be a marvelous book to read. I love the way she thinks and writes. If I were as well educated and as articulate as Rebecca Solnit, I would write as she does. In the book one minute I'm in Ireland and then back here in the Bay Area on Mount Burdell. I love the way one subject brings her to another and then on from there. She reminds one that we can be in many different places at once...not only the place where we actually are physically at the moment...but in all the places our minds, memories, hearts and souls have been (and have not actually been) and remember. I am going walking in the West of Ireland in two weeks and this is a book I shall carry with me and read for the third time while I'm there. Thank you Ms. Solnit for the gift of your intellect and your spirit.

Rebecca Solnit has a unique ability to bring the nuances of place to the reader's imagination. This account of Solnit's solitary walk across the west of Ireland is at times haunting, beautiful,and wistful, yet I felt it had a tendency to get a bit bogged down in the language of academia and deconstruction. Her interior journeys are as compelling as her geographical ones, however, and anyone who is interested in the landscape of this very unique part of the world will enjoy her tales of the Irish west's land and people.

I found this book to be an excellent read: not only is Ms. Solnit a clear-eyed and perceptive observer, but she's also a good researcher into the historical and personal dimensions of the places she visits, and she generally presents this material very well (although a few times I felt that the background information got between her and what she was seeing). Also, as a native Californian who grew up in the same rural-turning-into-suburban landscape as she did, I found her comments and comparisons very apt; I'm not sure that someone from a different background would find them as relevant, but the material is fascinating and the anecdotes well written. However, I was rather annoyed by the vehemence of her dislike for "New Age types" -- granted, some people who fall under that rubric are easy to scoff at, but in that case I wondered why such a gifted and perceptive writer was wasting her time on cheap shots. Maybe it's that she feels threatened by anyone who doesn't agree with her "political activism is the ONLY way to change the world" viewpoint, in which case I think she needs to examine her own biases! Otherwise, the book is a beautifully written description of the West of Ireland (as a recent visitor to many of the same places, I greatly enjoyed her perspective) as well as a meditation on the nature of travel itself, and I feel it's well worth reading.