The acclaimed, award-winning novelist takes us on some of his most
memorable journeys in this revelatory collection of travel essays that
spans the globe, from the Caribbean to Scotland to the Himalayas.
Now
in his mid-seventies, Russell Banks has indulged his wanderlust for
more than half a century. “Since childhood, I’ve longed for escape, for
rejuvenation, for wealth untold, for erotic and narcotic and sybaritic
fresh starts, for high romance, mystery, and intrigue,” he writes in
this compelling anthology. The longing for escape has taken him from the
“bright green islands and turquoise seas” of the Caribbean islands to
peaks in the Himalayas, the Andes, and beyond.
In Voyager,
Russell Banks, a lifelong explorer, shares highlights from his travels:
interviewing Fidel Castro in Cuba; motoring to a hippie reunion with
college friends in Chapel Hill, North Carolina; eloping to Edinburgh with his fourth wife, Chase; driving a sunset orange metallic Hummer
down Alaska’s Seward Highway.
In each of these remarkable essays,
Banks considers his life and the world. In Everglades National Park, this
“perfect place to time-travel,” he traces his own timeline. “I keep
going back, and with increasing clarity I see more of the place and
more of my past selves. And more of the past of the planet as well.”
Recalling his trips to the Caribbean in the title essay, “Voyager,”
Banks dissects his relationships with the four women who would become
his wives. In the Himalayas, he embarks on a different quest of
self-discovery. “One climbs a mountain not to conquer it, but to be
lifted like this away from the earth up into the sky,” he explains.
Pensive, frank, beautiful, and engaging, Voyager brings together the social, the personal, and the historical, opening a path into the heart and soul of this revered writer.
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