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    Stranger on a Train: Daydreaming and Smoking Around America with Interruptions
    Stranger on a Train: Daydreaming and Smoking Around America with Interruptions
    Stranger on a Train: Daydreaming and Smoking Around America with Interruptions
    Ebook298 pages5 hours

    Stranger on a Train: Daydreaming and Smoking Around America with Interruptions

    By Jenny Diski

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    About this ebook

    The book about America de Tocqueville might have written had he spent some time in the nation's smoking sections

    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 she did in the highly acclaimed Skating to Antarctica, Diski has created a seamless and seemingly effortless amalgam of reflection and revelation. Stranger on a Train is a combination of travelogue and memoir, a penetrating portrait of America and Americans that is at the same time an unsparing look in the mirror. Traveling and remembering both involve confronting strangers—those we have just met and those we once were—and acknowledging the play of proximity and separation. Diski has written a moving, courageous, and deeply rewarding book about who we are, and the landscapes through which we have passed to get there.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateSep 17, 2013
    ISBN9781466853089
    Stranger on a Train: Daydreaming and Smoking Around America with Interruptions
    Author

    Jenny Diski

    Jenny Diski is the acclaimed author of numerous works of fiction and non-fiction. Her journalism has appeared theSunday Times, Observer and London Review of Books among others. She lives in Cambridge.

    Read more from Jenny Diski

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    Reviews for Stranger on a Train

    4/5

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    • 5/5
      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!

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      This is a wonderfully-written book. This is the sort of book that you want to lend to friends; you should, however, choose your friends wisely as they might not wish to return it.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Brilliant. The best part is that it actually follows the format of any conventional travel book (conversations with quirky locals) - it's just set in the US...

      1 person found this helpful

    • 3/5
      As a rule I love reading books about train journeys. I have even managed to put up with Paul Theroux's ceaseless and venomous moaning (about anything … in fact, about everything) in his accounts of the various railway odysseys that he has undertaken. Friends even joke about whether my books about train journeys have dust anoraks instead of jackets.I was, therefore, very pleased to find a copy of Jenny Diski's account of a journey by train around the edge of America, and even deferred starting it a couple of times so as to heighten the gratification. That may have proved a mistake.Certainly her accounts of the actual journey were certainly interesting and enjoyable enough, but they were interspersed with a chaotic selection of memoirs of earlier stages of her life when she had been experiencing differing degrees of mental fragility. While many of these episodes were fascinating in themselves, I found the overall melange a little too overpowering, and the increasing frequency with which she took us back to yet another account of her grapple against neurosis came close to triggering some episodes of my own.I was intrigued, however, by her account of the difficulties placed upon any rail traveller who smokes. My own smoking career is conspicuous by its sheer minimality: a few crafty gaspers when I was fourteen (that led to prodigious hacking, wheezing and shifting of phlegm, two or three drags on soggy joints as an undergraduate, and the occasional very noxious cigar at formal dinners nearly thirty years ago. I am, therefore, ill-equipped to understand the torment that Diski must have experienced while travelling on Amtrak as she seems to have been a smoker on an almost industrial scale. She writes with feeling about the stress of not being able to smoke, though I would have been interested to learn what she felt when she did smoke after an enforced break.I think that the book might have been stronger if it had been about a hundred pages shorter, and with rather less of the psychiatric memoir, though I recognise that that might just be a reflection of my own mental fragility expressed as squeamishness.
    • 3/5
      Author Jenny Diski, for reasons best known to herself, decides to tour the circumference of America (or more or less; there’s a big gap in the west coast) by train. But this isn’t a travel book; it’s mainly an account of the people she meets on these trains – mostly in the smoking carriages, and they’re mostly people the rest of us would go out of our way to avoid – partly a reflection on the train service itself, where delays of up to half a day are not only not impossible but are almost expected, and, here and there, an introspective account of her early, troubled and abuse-ridden years. I would actually have preferred a travel book. My mistake.
    • 4/5
      Wonderful book - emotive and poignant, Diski has a way of making even the most minor characters come to life. This book shows that every person has a story, and also that there is more to a person than what one see's on the outside.Beautiful and engaging and a real gem of a book.

    Book preview

    Stranger on a Train - Jenny Diski

    JOURNEY ONE

    Magic Monotony

    One thing follows another. I had just spent three weeks crossing the Atlantic Ocean on a cargo ship carrying 25 tonnes of potash from Hamburg to offload in Tampa, Florida, and then doubling back round the tip of Florida to take on kaolin miles up a wriggly inlet at Port Royal, near Savannah, Georgia. I watched or felt every yard of the 6000 or so miles we travelled at a stately average of fifteen miles an hour. My capacity for staring had developed beyond even my expectations. Conrad writes of ‘the magic monotony of existence between sky and water. Nothing is more enticing, disenchanting and enslaving than the life at sea.’ I sat on a small deck, like a veranda, at the back of the ship, the MV Christiane, and watched the ocean like a vigilante as we passed over it, loath to miss a single wave or trick of the light retexturing the water, so that I had to drag my eyes down to the book on my lap, or force myself to go back to my cabin to work or sleep. Even at night, the rabble of stars demanded to be watched, and how could I ignore the effect of the fiercely shining moon, lighting up a brilliant pathway in the encircling blackness of the surrounding sea? Night-time on deck was special, like being awake in the early hours in a darkened hospital ward and seeing the night nurses sitting at dimly lit desks, or gliding silently about to check on sleeping patients. While I walked on deck, and the majority of the Croatian crew got their rest, one of the officers kept watch on the bridge, and an engineer attended to the gauges in the thudding depths of the ship’s engine room. That someone is awake and keeping watch in a pool of light when night is at its blackest is very comforting.

    After a very short time, when you are travelling so far at such a snail’s pace, and with no urgent need (or in my case, any need at all) to get to where you are going, you become an aficionado of detail. I took on the task of witnessing the sea, as if someone, somewhere had to be constantly alert to its shifts and nuances, and here and now the job was mine. I kept an eye on the window when I brushed my teeth for fear of missing something. It was not a fear of missing dolphins leaping, or whales breaching, or a tornado five miles off withdrawing back into its cloud: though I did chance to see those events as I kept watch. It was a fear of missing all the nothing that was happening. The more ocean I watched, the more watching I needed to do, to make sure, perhaps, that it went on and on and that the horizon never got any closer. But simple witnessing is not easy, and I began to notice, with increasing irritation, my need to describe and define what I observed, when all I really wanted was for the sea simply to be the sea. I found myself constantly thinking of it in terms of something else, as if I were reading it for meaning, which was not what I thought I wanted to do at all. The sea was like shimmering mud, I heard myself think, glossy as lacquer, slate-grey, syrupy, heavy silk billowing in the breeze … it was like this, and then that. It’s true that it did change all the time, but the most remarkable thing about it was that it was always and only like itself, though I couldn’t manage to keep that thought firmly in my mind, which, being a human mind, was also like itself and probably couldn’t help it.

    I devoted myself to keeping track of the smallest changes in the sea, or the weather, or the progress of the incessant painting of the ship by the crew in the futile effort to impede the attack on its metal and wood by the salt, wind and water. Twice a day or more I examined the charts for the current longitude and latitude to check our progress and our exact whereabouts in the middle of the entirely featureless ocean. I wasn’t bored, I was enthralled by the journeying, by the minutiae of the passage of miles and time. I watched our wake elongate behind us, like a snail’s trace, disturbing the sea’s own pattern into a visual account of where we had been in an environment that offered no other clue that we were making any progress at all. But always, in the distance behind the ship, the sea would close over the anomalous agitation, and return to its normal undifferentiated condition as far as the horizon. The frothy turbulence of the wake proved our movement, but the record of it was continually lost, rubbed out by the vast body of water that healed all the scars scored by whatever made its way through it.

    There is never perfect solitude, I’ve learned.

    ‘Always you sit reading or looking at the sea, but you are not unhappy, not lonely,’ said the third engineer, as if he were asking me a question.

    None of the crew could understand why the few passengers they carried would volunteer for such an existence. They were all quite clear that they were seamen by necessity. There were no jobs in post-war Croatia. Captain Bruno Kustera was a great-bellied man, entirely at the mercy of gravity. Everything about him tended downward: his belly, his chin, his jowls and the corners of his eyes and mouth. He made ruefulness his own. ‘Pirate stories made me a sea captain,’ he told me. ‘But now it’s routine. Just back and forth across the Atlantic. But what to do, there is no well-paid work at home. Always I go back and forth looking for work somewhere else. I would like to work in shipping, but on land. No one loves the sea. Do you know anyone in shipping circles in London?’

    I didn’t. He shrugged.

    ‘You know, the Cold War was a wonderful thing. If you didn’t like one, you could believe in the other. Now, it’s all the same.’

    He had been tending a pair of pigeons who came aboard for a well-earned rest, hundreds of miles out in the Atlantic. He made sure there was food and water for them on the bridge, and they lived quite contentedly up there for a couple of days, until a ship passing in the other direction, heading back to Europe, called time on their vacation and they left.

    ‘Why don’t you get a cat?’ I asked, when he shook his head sadly at the loss of the pigeons. ‘What about a ship’s cat?’

    His big eyes drooped. ‘No, it is difficult. An animal has to be owned by one man. And also at sea you always find someone crazy. That one would torture the cat.’

    Towards the end of the trip we waited in a flat desert of sun-blasted water for the local pilot to come and tow us up a creek through the torrid desolation of an alligator-infested swamp to the improbably named Port Royal in South Carolina. Captain Bruno joined me at the rail. There was nothing in sight but the utterly still greenish water, no wind, and the only sound, with the ship’s engines off, was a humming of the saturating heat. I had been marvelling silently that I had at last found myself truly up shit creek without a paddle.

    ‘This looks like the end of the universe,’ I

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