Writing on the fly

Bogotá airport, immigration form in hand. Tourist, migrant, businessman? Andrés Neuman ponders the descriptors, unsure which to tick. He opts for the second. ‘I’d like to be a migrant.’ The decision is telling, and frames much of what follows in this curious, delightful, if disjointed book.

Neuman is hot property in contemporary Latin American literary circles. A former winner of Spain’s prestigious Alfaguara Prize and the National Critics Prize, he is tipped (by Roberto Bolaño, no less) to be one of a select ‘handful’ to take up where the ‘boom’ generation of Márquez, Cortázar, Fuentes and Borges left off.

His widely acclaimed novel Traveller of the Century (his fourth book, but the first to be translated) propelled him to the attention of the English-speaking world. Suitably, given the title, it also sent him on a breakneck book tour of Latin America and the Caribbean, which he describes in How to Travel Without Seeing. The book covers 17 capital cities in total, from Buenos Aires to Miami (the de facto centre of the new Hispanic world) with a chapter devoted to each.

Some writers thrive on book tours; others resent the time away from their desks. Neuman appears to be split between the two. At times, he seems excited by the adventure of it all — visiting the pre-Columbian Mexican city of Teotihuacán, say, where for the only time in history philosophers ruled priests (‘naturally, they disappeared’). At other times, you sense he’d rather be anywhere else than on the road. Checking into endless hotels, he amuses himself by developing an unorthodox system for grading them. Caracas Palace, Venezuela: ‘Hotel environment: oil-rich Stanley-Kubrick. Reception style: phantasmagoric.’

This is not a conventional travel book by any means. ‘If I was going to travel on the fly,’ Neuman reasons up front, ‘I would write that way also.’