Wait Until Evening

About the Book

One day in a particularly subterranean mood, I checked out several travel books from the local public library. I had chosen them as they involved places I had been, and I was curious to see what the author´s reactions had been. A quarter of the way through the first one, I put it down, and said to my self: "Hell, I can do better than that!" That, primarily, was the genesis of Wait Until Evening.

Being a travel writer is much different than being a writer writing about travel. Virtually anyone can write about visiting someplace -- even a postcard counts -- but it´s tough being a writer writing on any topic, much less travel, and tougher still to be good at it.

In fact, what is travel writing? For the working writer, it might be a newspaper or magazine article about the color and clamor of the Iron Market in Port-au-Prince, or ice-skating on a winter´s night in the main square of Amsterdam. Or, it might be a book like mine. For the reader, it´s an opportunity to learn about a new place, either with an eye to possibly going there, or just to enjoy some armchair traveling (a marvelous phrase: swaying across the rushing landscape, hands clinging tightly to worn upholstery). Reading a good story is almost like musing over a painting, wondering what it would feel like to be actually there, feeding grapes to wood nymphs by neo-classical ruins, or bounding high on a wave under a summer sky. Travel writing has been with us since the Iliad and the Odyssey. Chaucer took us along on the Canterbury Tales, Coleridge gave us an ancient mariner -- a sea adventure -- and Boswell tailed Dr. Johnson around the Hebrides, lovingly recording the great man´s every sniff and snit, and not incidentally, leaving us a colorful portrait of life in eighteenth century Scotland that in more remote areas, in some respects, isn´t all that different today.

The first real novel, Don Quixote, is essentially a travel story. The English, who seem to combine a predilection toward travel with good writing, followed the classical Spaniard with their own picaresque tales, from Defoe, Fielding and Smollett, among others.

So what is a travel story? No more than the writer´s impressions, I would submit. He or she might have lived in a place long enough, or have done a thing long enough, or maybe even just researched something long enough, so that they know it, know it perfectly and naturally, know it so that they may ultimately write about it with such confidence and knowledge that it´s theirs, always keeping in the mind of course, the goal of making it real for the reader - even if the thought is as ephemeral as Shelly´s wisp of cloud. Gabriel Garcia Marquez wrote about Hemingway´s "relentless power of appropriation." Everything Hemingway saw, Garcia Marquez said, even if only once, became his once he wrote about it. He appropriated these things simply by mentioning them, Garcia Marquez explained. How does a travel story evolve? Well, take up a large serving of research, stir in personal experience and let it simmer. This mental soufflé might rise immediately (I once wrote a long two-part magazine article about India on the plane home from there), or the pot could bubble for years. Ideally, a writer brings a unique perspective to a certain place or thing, then writes about it in such a way that the reader will be entertained, or learn something -- or possibly -- hopefully -- both. It can also be used to make a point: Swift was never a Lilliputian, but Gulliver´s Travels seems real enough, and he used it to lambaste contemporary government.

Conversely, the late British writer Bruce Chatwin tramped the wilds of the Argentine, poking into corners that interested him. His travelogue, In Patagonia, is a brilliant and witty account of an untamed region, dotted with disparate communities and foreign cultures, all trying to fit into an unforgiving environment. Re

About the Author

Ken Taylor is a travel writer with a knack for breathtaking description that journeys us through the world to its magical places. No other writer has been able to capture these destinations with such a personal flare, making the reader feel that they are his traveling companion. You enter the story with the writer and come out the other side feeling like you been there hundreds of times before. His first book is a compilation of his experiences traveling the world, and the sometimes hilarious stories that will make you want to visit, or better yet, hope he could take you along on his next trip. He lives in Rye, NY, near three of his children, who still are not sure their father wasn’t really a spy, and the family dog, Lester. --Kerry Taylor Christensen