Probably my favorite essay in Rotten Person is its least humorous: “Papa’s Ghost.” On a trip to Cuba, the author seeks out some of Ernest Hemingway’s haunts, which is a favorite activity of American writers visiting Havana. He learns that Hemingway’s masterpiece The Old Man and the Sea is believed by Cubans to be the story of Gregorio Fuentes, now quite an old man, and he pays the ancient mariner a visit. It is a respectful piece, either out of reverence for Hemingway or Fuentes, and one that suggests the author isn’t quite the grump he pretends to be. I enjoyed re-reading that one.
One of the sources of humor in the collection is from its endless digressions. Sometimes the digressions have digressions. These are mostly pointless detours from the main thrust of the essay, but are generally funny, in part because of the pointlessness. In “My Military-Industrial Complex,” for example, the author is in Cuba standing in line at the airport behind a Canadian, which prompts — as a result of a fishing trip — a three-page diversion into his fondness for Canadians and a particular hockey player, at the end of which the reader has surely forgotten what the essay was about in the first place. But never mind. It’s funny to digress, apparently.
Travel writing, I’ve always felt, is enjoyable because it informs. It may also transport the reader to distant places, familiar or unfamiliar. I’m not sure I want to visit Gary Buslik’s Caribbean, though, and I can’t say that anything I learned in the book equips me to do so. But then this isn’t your ordinary travel writing. This is just for yucks. Lots and lots of yucks.
A Rotten Person Travels the Caribbean: A Grump in Paradise Discovers that Anyplace it's Legal to Carry a Machete is Comedy Just Waiting to Happen
Gary Buslik
Travelers’ Tales ($14.95)
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