carolyn kellogg

My review of Andrew Mueller’s “I Wouldn’t Start from Here” is in the books pages of today’s LA Times. Here’s a bit:

A droll rock journalist turned travel writer, Andrew Mueller spent most of the first decade of the 21st century heading to places nobody wants to go: Baghdad, the West Bank, Serbia, Beirut, Bosnia, Libya. Australian by birth and Londoner by choice, he’s written about his trips for British newspapers and music magazines.

This book skips over most of the sensuous details of travel writing — exquisitely described meals, enviable hotel rooms — substituting tales of death-defying drivers and detailed descriptions of border checkpoints. Mueller wants to know why conflict is intractable in some regions and not in others. His sardonic, self-deprecating perspective makes for unstuffy company.

I did what I could, but I admit I’m finding it increasingly hard to write about 500-page books in 400-or-so words. If there had been more space, I would have liked to write about the issue of collective responsibility. He never points fingers, but his book brings people in Gaza, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Ireland and Pristina closer to the comparatively fortunate American/British/Australian reader.

There may be no answer to the question why, by circumstance of birth, someone is burying a brother as I’m making eggs. But the question that follows — what do I propose to do about it — is answered, by of all people, by Bono. “Celebrity is silly,” he tells Mueller in New York City, after one of U2’s post-9/11 shows — “but it is a currency of a kind, and if I can spend it, I will.”

Bono has been accused of being overly pious and self-important, but he doesn’t come across that way; rather, he comes across as someone who would really, really like to get a bottle of wine opened.

It is hard today, with a healthy level of cynicism, to find a solid foothold in talking about community and responsibility, words that sound overly pious and self-important. But Bono has a point, and while he’s in a rock star class of his own, we all have some currency. The question is, how do we spend it? Do I write a check to Amnesty? Is signing online petitions about global warming and debt relief enough?  how to stop wage garnishments ? What affect might I possibly have on trigger-happy Blackwater security agents or ancient religious conflicts or my own government’s mixed-up foreign policy? How about I just buy champagne and watch the Oscars?

Which, by the way, I plan to do.

Mueller’s currency comes from his sardonic voice, and his willingness to travel to places that seem uninhabitable. And he spends that currency on the members of the Unrepresented Peoples and Nations Organization.  Skeptical slackers like me should read this book, because they’ll like it, and maybe get something out of it (although I still can’t figure out Kosovo and Belgrade). If I believe in anything, I have to believe that the writing — and the reading — is valuable, worthwhile.

But I do wonder if I’ve got a little bit more currency to spend.