Following up on Antonia’s interesting post about ‘Costa Rica’s bold environmental move’, I’d like to point anyone interesting in visiting Costa Rica to a book giveaway being running over at Traveling the Green Way’.

There’s a copy of Explore Costa Rica by award winning travel writer Harry S. Pariser up for grabs. This comprehensive guide of all things Costa Rica is a must for anyone considering visiting Costa Rica.

Want to win it? Head on over and leave a comment before 22nd August 2008.

When I closed Preeta Samarasan’s first book, Evening Is the Whole Day, I sat for a time, watching my tea grow cold and watching my son chew on a polished bit of cedar wood, and tried to figure out what I was feeling. After a time (and rescuing of small black cat from being bonked by said cedar wood), the word floated by: gratitude.

Samarasan is a new writer on the scene, and her densely woven story is not only steeped in Malaysian history, culture, turmoil, and richness, but is written by a woman who knows what it is to write. And when you’re inundated daily by hundreds of slapdash, self-indulgent travelogues and truly crappy bestselling novels, a well-crafted book by a new writer is not only like breathing clean air after years of pollution, it gives one hope for a literary future. And for that I am grateful.

Knowing this was Samarasan’s first book, and wary of the accolades comparing her writing to Salman Rushdie and Arundhati Roy, I read it carefully, looking for weakness and derivation. I found none. Instead, what I found was a narrative that reminded me far more of Isabel Allende’s earlier books than these other two world-class writers. Samarasan’s story is more accessible than Rushdie’s, and her structure is more organic and satisfying than Roy’s.

Like Allende, Samarasan laces family tragedy and mystique with the larger political and social tragedies in Malaysia’s recent history. But her focus remains more tightly on the family in question and its troubled members, a focus peculiarly satisfying. The Indian family at the center of the story are dealing with struggles both personal and political: a father whose political/social ideals fall to pieces when riots overturn his and his colleagues’ dreams of progress and equality, and whose personal hopes fall apart when the meek woman he marries turns out to be shallow and sexually frigid; his wife, who couches herself in irritable anger and petty revenges the more her children and mother-in-law show up her less agile mind and humbler background; the children themselves, caught between parents whose misery at their failed marriage rains a constant acid atmosphere on their upbringing, and who are too intelligent not to feel it. And there is the servant Chellam, ill-used, misunderstood, bewildered, and eventually thrown back to her drunken father and desperately poor family.

Most of the story is seen poignantly from the eyes of six-year-old Aasha. This gentle girl, friendly with ghosts and worshipful of her older sister, aches for love and has so many disappointments to bear that she wrings my heart. By the end of the book my maternal heart wanted to shower her with love and affection.

But it is the atmosphere of Malaysia that makes the family’s story live. Although Samarasan moved to the US when she was in high school, it is clear that her early life in Malaysia enriches every particle of narrative, backed by careful research and her continued contact with her hometown. The descriptions are rich and the narrative style speaks of a writer confident in her voice: “The night before Uma leaves for America is so hot that people wake up drenched in their beds. At dawn the sparrows are neither seen nor heard,” begins the last chapter. “By nine o’clock, leaves, flowers, hair, spirits, resolve, and biscuits left on breakfast tables are turning limp. Butter melts. Men sit under ceiling fans with their knees wide apart, wiping their backs and bellies with the cotton singlets they’ve pulled off.”

I read those lines with relief, knowing that, in the last chapter, Samarasan’s writing would not falter. Just as strong at the end as at the beginning. And I was grateful. I’ll be keeping an eye out for this talented author in the future.

(Evening Is the Whole Day is out in hardcover in the US, Canada, and the UK.)

Hopefully you’ve checked out this month’s issue of Perceptive Travel, where we have a fun excerpt from the latest book by Rory MacLean. Mr. MacLean’s books have always been easier to find in England than here, but that is all being remedied now with some U.S. releases of his back catalog.

To celebrate this development, we’re giving away two of his new U.S. reissues on Taurus Park Paperbacks:

Stalin’s Nose: Across the Face of Europe - This was his debut, a tale of moving across the land between Berlin and Moscow only weeks after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

The Oatmeal Ark: From the Scottish Isles to a Promised Land - A fictionalized account of following in a family’s footsteps from Scotland through the watery routes across Canada. Perhaps it’s too early to call it a classic, but the rave reviews and a preface from Jan Morris tell you this one’s a keeper.

If you live in the U.S. or Canada, you can win these for yourself. Just put a comment below answering these two questions. 1) Where are you traveling to next? 2) Why there?

Put in your correct e-mail address in the right box when commenting (nobody will see it but us) so we can notify you if you’re a winner and get your mailing address. Good luck!

There’s a great round-up of travel stories plus book and music reviews in the latest edition of Perceptive Travel Magazine.

Rory MacLean writes about Sun–bathing with Ghosts in Cassadaga. Cassadaga is located in central Florida and while it doesn’t really sound like my kinda place, it’s fun reading about anyway.

Dave Lowe is one a different spiritual trail in Death’s Prediction and Disaster, By Way of Dharmsala.

On a lighter note, Tim Leffel wanders Western Canada Through the Eyes of a Child,  David Lee Drotar checks out Dial–a–Bird, and Bruce Northam explores the Boomerang Hieroglyphics on the Nile.

Plus a great collection of travel book and music reviews…

And don’t forget to enter the newest giveaway as well. This time you have the chance to win one of TEN Perceptive Travel Coolmax moisture wicking t-shirts courtesy of the fine folks at CoolClothingUSA.com. Five will be given away to newsletter subscribers and five to people who are just joining us. If you’re in the latter camp, send the e-mail confirmation of your sign-up (as in a fake address will do you no good) and your mailing address to remarkable [at] perceptivetravel.com. See the box at the top right of this page to sign up. We’ll pick five at random by the end of July.

Happy reading this Independence Day weekend…

I’ve got a bug for old travel books recently. There was Jan Morris — not an old book, but with many older essays in it — and before her Wilfred Thesiger, who makes me wish I could have been an Englishman stationed in Arabia before the Brits and French went in and carved it all up to make weird new countries like Iraq and Iran and basically screw up the rest of the century. It would have been nice to see the land before borders were dropped at the whim of imperialists.

And now I’ve gone further back, to Afanasy Nikitin’s Voyage Beyond Three Seas. Although Nikitin wrote his book in the mid-1400s, my edition is an imaginatively illustrated hardback published in the Soviet Union, complete with request from Raduga Publishers for readers’ “opinion of this book, its translation and design and any suggestions you may have for future publications.” Forget being nostalgic about the world of exploration before the advent of “adventure travel,” that line made me nostalgic for a time when, supposedly, publishers actually cared about the quality and content of what they printed.

Nikitin was a merchant in the 15th century who set out from his native Tver (now located between Moscow and Petersburg) for the reported riches of India, and is supposedly the first Russian ever to have reached India. Evidently, according to the publishers, India and Russia have always had a special connection: “Since olden times the peoples of the two great countries have lived in friendship, showing a keen interest in each other.” Which might explain why the two countries consistently produce more genius mathematicians than the rest of the world combined.

As a travel book, Voyage Beyond Three Seas leaves a lot to be desired by modern standards. There is little dramatic element, and descriptions of vast lands zip by so fast that I had to pull out an atlas and a guide to old city/country names to figure out where in the heck Nikitin had landed this time. Taken in the context of its audience, likely other merchants looking to make the arduous journey across seas and mountains, its descriptive power was considerable: “And near Ceylon precious stones, rubies, rock crystal, agates, amber, beryls, and emery are found. … The harbour of Pegu is not small, and it is mostly Indian dervishes there.”

Your eyes could glaze over reading too much of that kind of listing, combined as it is with enumerations of various fighting forces and servants and retainers and elephants of various leaders and warlords. Like I said, little dramatic element. But reading between these lines, and paying attention, you realize that Nikitin suffered massive hardships in his endeavors to trade the riches of India with the riches of Russia. From being attached and plundered by “pagan Tartars” to becoming madly depressed over his “sinful” decision to give up his “true faith” of Russian Orthodoxy for Islam, you get the impression that Nikitin dragged himself over the seas and land by pure force of will, often hungry, always lonely and desperate to return to Russia, very often nearly losing his life. (Note: the conversion to Islam is unclear, but scholars studying the text have concluded that he very likely did, explaining why he constantly referred to his “sinful voyage.”)

Compare this with the over-hyped experiences of travel writers who throw themselves into possibly life-threatening situations (or at least physically endangering themselves) and then can’t wait to rush home and write about it. Lacking introspection as well as true observation, these books and articles have to hinge themselves on adventure travel because the days of true exploration are over, which, as I’ve mentioned before, can leave a sadder literary landscape.

With a background of a home they will assuredly return to, most travel writers who follow this path fail to reach the desperate pitch of a muted and untrained 15th-century resident lost and hungry in a foreign land, who dragged himself home mile by mile and died before making it back to his hometown. The irony is that, when true adventure was possible, it wasn’t held to be admirable or desirable. Further irony — it’s almost depressing to know that in 2006 an Indian organization retraced Nikitin’s journey … by driving in SUVs.

Nobody sold Nikitin a package tour to India, touting hobnobbing with natives, and the risks he took were not to alleviate a privileged white boy’s malaise, but to expand the glory of his home country and bring something of the outside world back.

Of course, it’s debatable whether real exploration or adventure travel is more desirable. The former very possibly does more damage than the latter, as adventure travel has a vested interest in preserving wilderness and culture. But the writing is another thing entirely. It’s hard to take seriously so much of our modern adventure travel, written as it is with so little knowledge and historical context, when compared with the adventurers and explorers of bygone ages, people with a thirst to learn about a reachable speck of foreign lands, not just the limits of their physical capabilities.