“I want to know who to sue for literary whiplash”

Since I have yet to finish a book in 2010, it’s time to resort to some older reviews I’ve been saving up for just such an occasion.

It’s pretty hard to screw up a travel book. At least that’s what I usually think. Along with historical fiction and, well, just about anything that is remotely tied to Japan, travel is one of my favorite genres to read and I tend to be fairly forgiving. Until I met you, Mr. Wisner, and suffered my way through your second book, which astonishes me considering what a bad writer you are.

Genre: travel writing (Brazil, India, Egypt, Nicaragua, Czech Republic, New Zealand, Botswana, L. A.), memoir

Plot: The author, Franz, got dumped at the altar. He decided to use the honeymoon travel tickets and time to reconnect to his brother. I guess they liked it a lot, and they started visiting other countries, supposedly to get a feel for what the non-American world thinks of love, marriage, and relationships. I say supposedly because it was obvious that the author cared less about communicating cross-culture issues than he did about recording his courtship and marriage to his current wife. A great idea for a memoir, sure, but a crappy way to execute a travelogue.

Structure: I don’t even think this book had any discernible structure to it. At times I wondered who was at fault here—the editor? The author? The mysterious brother who showed up and disappeared again rather randomly? Someone dropped the ball here, because these were the most randomly organized chapters I’ve ever read, and I want to know who to sue for literary whiplash.

Execution: I wanted soooo much to like this book. Truly, I did. It had a wonderful premise, but unfortunately, a terrible time executing that idea. It was that highly flawed execution that really did it in for me. Here then, is my long list of complaints:

First of all, the book is incredibly confusing in the beginning, jumping around in time and not even bothering to have a thematic reason for doing so. That was just plain annoying, and should have been a huge red flag.

Second, yes, I heard you wrote another book. I get it. STOP ADVERTISING YOURSELF IN YOUR OWN WORK. It would make a used car salesman blush. Not cool, dude. Not cool.

Third, this book was actually two good ones crammed into a single mediocre one. If it had been solely a memoir about a guy who likes to travel a lot and managed to fall in love with his total opposite, that would have been one thing. Likewise, if it had really been about learning what other cultures have to say about love, it would have been excellent. Instead, by trying to do both, it failed miserably at each. The sections about his love life I found maddeningly inane, and the chapters about what the book touted to be about were irritatingly short and shallow. For example, India and weddings. Wow. That would have been a fascinating study with all the different religions, rituals, traditions, etc. But what did the author talk about? Arranged marriages and corny pick-up lines, and some quasi-intellectual sounding reflections that were not based on anything other than his feelings at the time. And the chapter on New Zealand? I learned basically nothing, except that the author felt nervous proposing to his fiancée – oh, how unusual.  I felt like I learned nothing that couldn’t have been gleaned from National Geographic, or for that matter, better travel writers.

Fourth, a word about self-deprecating humor:  it’s good when use sparingly (see, for example, J. Maarten Troost). It’s horrendously emo and off-putting when overused (see this book).

Fifth, I didn’t really appreciate the white-man’s-burden-like condescension for all the religions he encountered.  The only thing I dislike more than Unitarianism is snobby Unitarianism.

Sixth, and finally, I failed to understand the relevance of some of the bizarre side-topics that emerged, like the plight of single women (a fair issue, sure, but what does that have to do with marriage customs around the world?) and the state of gay bars around the globe. It just reiterates what I said earlier – sloppy structure.

Now, ok, to be fair, there were a few (read: two) things that the book actually did well on: first, the author did actually articulate an emotional journey that started with a very cynical “love is dead and we killed it” attitude to an optimistic “love is here and we make it” one, and that does take a certain level of skill to communicate. Second, the chapter towards the end about the lessons Americans can learn from the world on marriage (“Love Lessons from Abroad”) actually did contain words of wisdom.

Theme: how Franz Wisner got Tracy to marry him, even though he’s a pathetic loser who visits gay bars in every country he goes to, presumably trying to get people to buy his first book.


Read this if you’re Edward Cullen, because you’ve got infinite time to waste on what can only be considered a needle-in-the-haystack, there’s-something-good-here-I-know-it excuse for a book.

1 out of 5 stars

Other works:
Didn’t you hear? He took a honeymoon with his brother and wrote about it.


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Oh my, where do I even begin. There are soooo many better travel books out there. J. Maarten Troost, Elizabeth Gilbert, even Ewan MacGregor, just to name a few. Chances are if you just randomly pick a travel book about anywhere written by anyone, it’s 92% likely to be better than this one.