Sun After Dark : Flights into the Foreign

by Pico Iyer

Release Date: 06 April, 2004

Edition: Hardcover

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A master of the essay

Pico Iyer's work generally alternates between fiction and collections of essays, and my personal preference is for the latter. You will find these little jewels scattered in magazines ranging from "National Geographic" to the Buddhist magazine "Tricycle". In his best pieces, he can approach the condensed perfection of Orwell.

There is not a bad essay in this collection, but two of them particularly stand out. At the beginning of the book is an account of a week spent at a meditation retreat with the singer/poet Leonard Cohen. If you're used to the vapid hagiographies in music magazines, this piece is a drink of cool water. It quotes from Cohen's songs, acknowledges the brilliance of his work, gives an unblinking account of his contradictory personality and details his day-to-day life, all in twenty pages. The effect is that of a camera zooming in from a mile above the Mount Baldy Zen Center all the way down to a wart on Cohen's face, and then slowly pulling back again. You'll have to read the piece yourself, preferably while playing "Waiting for the Miracle" in the background.

The other extraordinary piece is "Nightwalking", which describes the surreal experience of jet lag, something the author endures for at least eight weeks of every year. I read it while on an extended air-trip (San Francisco-Hong Kong-Bangalore-Singapore-Seoul-SF in a week) and cannot recall anything on paper describing as accurately an experience I was undergoing at that moment. The walking blankly along thoroughfares at two in the morning, the absurd spasms of emotion, the faces out of Hopper paintings - he has etched a precise portrait here.

His gift for metaphor unmatched. Here is a sentence about the British influence: "The..Empire..stands accused of importing straight lines and right angles to a land of curves, of making the forces of Eternity obey a railway timetable."

How can one resist such lapidary prose?

Iyer Back on the Map

His best work since "Falling Off the Map." I love the piece on language in India and on Leonard Cohen. He paints his mother (off page in several essays) with elegant brushstroke, and I find myself wanting an essay about her as well. Some of the Buddhist pieces need a tad of editing, but that's a minor complaint.