Completely Fascinating Essays, 11 May 2005

By	A. Ross (Washington, DC) - See all my reviews

The first profile, "Arlette and Madame Perruche", is also the shortest piece in the book. It's an 8-page sketch of the friendship between an elderly Russian ballerina and a homeless woman in the south of France. The brief piece gives a deep sense of the power of generosity and friendship. Another elderly Russian woman is the subject of the second profile, "Cooking With Madame Zoya." Here, the subject lives in New York and is renown for her authentic Russian cuisine, catering for massive parties from the tiny kitchen of her Washington Heights tenement. The mini-biography over twenty pages is compelling in its own right, but what it really does is make one reflect upon how every old person around us has rich stories to tell if we are willing to listen. The final profile gives the collection its provocative title, and is about a wildlife biologist in northern California and his unlikely friendship with a group of strippers. Like the first profile, it's about a very unlikely friendship, and Hansen spends 35 pages trying to get at what makes it work.

The six travel pieces span approximately thirty years of Hansen's life and are utterly unique and compelling reading. In "Life at the Grand Hotel", Hansen is working on a shrimp trawler off the Australian coast in 1974. In only a few pages he very effectively sketches what life on a shrimper is like, and then Cyclone Tracy hits. This was a horrific storm in which several other trawlers sank, some 16 people died at sea, and Hansen's home port of Darwin was leveled. Barely making it through the storm, the boat lays up at Thursday Island and a shaken Hansen is drawn to the nexus of social life there, the Grand Hotel. This becomes his home for the next several months, and his tales of the wild people and antics there are quite funny. This is the kind of story that will make the reader want to run away from home and embark on strange adventures. It's also a postcard from the past, as globalization has clearly reached in and tamed the island since then.

"Listening to Kava" is a 15-page piece that would be very much at home in one of the more interesting travel magazines. In it, Hansen journeys to Vanuatu to learn about the rites that revolve around the kava root, which is central to native culture there. It's no-holds-barred experiential journalism as he gets whammied by the powerful hallucinogenic effect and lives to write about it. "Life Lessons From Dying Strangers" is an oddly funny and spiritual piece from 1977. Hansen was in Calcutta and wanted to send several steamer trunks of various Asian artifacts he'd collected back home in San Francisco. Alas, the Indian bureaucracy was more than his match, and a task that should have taken a week turned into months of frustration. As part of alleviating that frustration, he offhandedly wandered into Mother Teresa's hospice for the dying poor, and found spiritual calm through volunteering. Those with a spiritual bent will probably find this the most compelling of the essays.

"Night Fishing With Nahimah" also dates from 1977, however here Hansen is in the Maldives, embarking on a rather dubious scheme to smuggle dried fish to Sri Lanka. The appetite for this delicacy is such that it's apparently a lucrative endeavor, and his machinations require him to journey to outlying islands to purchase his stock directly from fishermen. Fascinating adventures ensue, including near death from hepatitis, a surprising lesson in local sexual customs, a stay in a remote village, and most importantly a one night affair with a beautiful native woman. Again, this is the type of essay that makes one want to run off and try something crazy.

"Three Nights on the Mountain" recounts how Hansen was hired in 1991 to travel to Borneo to help a Texan search for his wife's engagement ring, lost when she died in a plane crash on a remote part of the island. The man came across Hansen's book "Stranger in the Forest: On Foot Across Borneo" and wouldn't take no for an answer. The trip is brief, but very eerie and poignant. Finally, "The Ghost Wind" is about a tall-ship race from San Francisco to Los Angeles in 2000. Hansen talks his way onto a creaky rustbucket Indonesian naval training ship which against all odds, mounts a serious challenge to the ultramodern Japanese entry. This last essay ends things on an emphatic upbeat note.

Hansen is a brilliantly talented writer, able to bring the reader not only into his physical world, but into his emotional world. It's rare that travel narratives are able to accomplish this without feeling false or descending into mawkish sentimentality, but Hansen pulls it off. But most importantly, he has incredibly interesting stories to tell -- this is a collection whose stories will stay with the reader for quite a long time.

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