A Rotten Person Travels the Caribbean: A Grump in Paradise Discovers that Anyplace it’s Legal to Carry a Machete is Comedy Just Waiting to Happen
Admin | Jun 15, 2010 | 5 comments
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Product Description
“If you look at a map, you will see that the island chain known as the Caribbean, or, to confuse you, the West Indies, lies between Florida and South America and resembles a string of gems or possibly drool.” And so begins author Gary Buslik’s tale of tropical adventure. Each chapter of this often hilarious and sometimes poignant travelogue recounts another island-hopping, culture-clashing crisis that pits the homesick author against falling coconuts, hospitals that remove wrong organs, insects as big and dangerous as stealth bombers, ticket agents that put him on hold for hours, mysteriously calculated currency exchanges, over-proofed rum, livestock, singing Rastafarians, garbage-bin sex, peanut-crazed children, Idi Amin, flesh-eating monkeys, dentists, cricket, steel drum bands, and the French. Fortunately, even when making fun of his West Indian hosts, the curmudgeonly author’s essential good nature and devotion to his wife twinkle through, and in the end his stubborn geocentricity gives way to a heartfelt appreciation of his island hosts.
Filed Under: Travel Books
Although this book certainly is rip-roaringly funny, Buslik does himself a disservice by considering himself first and foremost a comic writer. There is a misleading modesty here, because Buslik is a highly skilled prose stylist: a master of controlled language, tone, and the ability to invoke deep emotions, felt and remembered long after the last page. The essays in this collections are occasionally played just for laughs but more often set readers up with humor and endlessly silly digressions, only, at the finish, to spring powerful emotional traps. The final piece, “Where Satan Works,” is nonstop hilarity for eleven pages, only to end with the saddest and most spot-on observations about 9/11 I have ever read. This may be the best writing ever about that horrible day. His poignant “Flow,” “Nasdaq 5000,” “Weed Killer,” and “Sometimes It’s the Other Way Around” are literary feasts. Don’t kid yourself: this author is not only a keen observer of human behavior but of human nature. The publisher might be selling this book mainly to tourists now, but my guess is that in a few years they’ll be selling it to University English departments.
Rating: 5 / 5
Writing funny stories is hard work. I know as I attempt it in my writing. My idols are Dave Barry, PJ O’Rourke and Carl Hiassen and now you can add Gary Buslik to that list. It is easy to sit in a bar and tell a story, everybody laughs and slaps you on the back. Bars have an endless supply of semi inebriated less than scholarly types, who will laugh at almost anything. Try writing the story down and you are faced with a cast of intellectuals who keep track of things like quotation marks and indents (whatever that is), they talk in terms of “first person” and “present tense” words that have never been uttered in bars. The point is humor is hard to write and seldom turns out funny. Every story in this book is, “beer spewing out of your nose” funny. You will find yourself laughing so hard; people will come up to you to find out what in the hell is so funny.
Some will take offense to the depiction of certain nationalities and religious groups. Get over it, it’s humor, the over the top depiction of Europeans and local Islanders is intentional and adds to the humor. I don’t think any intelligent reader finds the exaggeration of stereotypes anything more than amusing. I share Gary’s love of the town of Plymouth on Montserrat and found the reference in the book to be quite touching. The story Papa’s Ghost adds a great touch to the Hemingway legend. Pick up this book a bottle of rum and enjoy the trip, beats the hell out of the hockey playoffs.
Rating: 5 / 5
There wasn’t enough room for me to thrash about the breakfast table as I read this book. Truly one of the funniest books I have ever read.
Rating: 5 / 5
I bought this book at the airport, on our way to Jamaica, thinking I’d read it poolside once we got there. I made the mistake of glancing at the first page on the plane, so it never made it to the pool. I couldn’t put it down either on our flight or in bed that night. My husband wanted to know why I kept laughing out loud and, for that matter, why I was more interested in this book than in him. I told him he’d find out. This book is not only hilarious, it totally nails the dynamics of a couple on vacation. It sets just the right tone for a good time with the one you love. I not only would recommend this book to anyone, I did. On our flight home, half our group had their own copies, and flight attendants wanted to know why everyone was in stitches.
Rating: 5 / 5
Although these are billed as “true tales,” the essays in this book have a fictional tension that keep you turning the pages. We care about the narrator and his wife, despite their mutual spite, with each essay-chapter pitting them against one antagonist or another–often themselves. What’s more, the entire book has a novel-like structure, insofar as the narrator changes–for the better–from the beginning to the end. In the first stories he seems no more than the stereotypical “ugly American,” mocking his wife and island locals, always managing to get the last laugh. The stakes are low at first–in the first piece he just wants a night of lovemaking, and in the second he wants nothing more than to get on a plane and come home. But as the book progresses, his stakes get progressively higher and less superficial, so that by midpoint he finds himself in the midst of real life-and-death geopolitical and even geological crises. More humbly now, he begins to express a greater and more sincere appreciation of his wife and local characters, islands, and customs. One middle piece, “Weed Killer,” is a tragedy of Shakespearean dimension, and “Flow” is a monumentally moving tribute to the old-time West Indies. “Papa’s Ghost” is a bittersweet portrayal of Hemingway’s life in Cuba. At the very end of the collection, the narrator has come to a profound understanding of, and gratitude for, not only the differences between people and cultures but their–our–oneness. The collection ends with the narrator in a completely different mindset than at the beginning, with the author having brought him–and us–to that final epiphany slowly, seamlessly, and with great skill.
Some readers will enjoy this book only for its humor–which is a treat–but more literary-inclined readers will recognize the metaphoric tale of personal growth and how that becomes a call for tolerance in, to borrow from one of Buslik’s own essay titles, “an uncivil age.”
Rating: 5 / 5