Dominic Green

World Traveller Plus

White Sands: Experiences from the Outside World

By

Canongate 233pp £16.99 order from our bookshop

Connoisseurs of modern autobiography will recall Freaky Dancin’, the memoirs of Bez from Happy Mondays, especially the scene in which our hero, having taken ecstasy for the first time, experiences his consciousness opening ‘like a tap-it-and-unwrap-it Chocolate Orange’. Here, Bez confirms empirically Wittgenstein’s statement that the limits of language are the limits of the world.

I think of Bez’s enlightenment whenever I taste a slice of Terry’s Chocolate Orange, and also when I get to gorge on a new collection by Geoff Dyer. No sooner does Dyer tap and unwrap some strange experience at one end of the world or the other – the Northern Lights, or Gauguin’s Tahiti – than the whole thing falls apart. The original object of the journey dissolves before his eyes and the narrator’s personality shatters into shards. 

Sign Up to our newsletter

Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.

Follow Literary Review on Twitter

  • Last Tweets

    • 'It would be nice to think that women will achieve equal pay in my lifetime, rather than to watch gloomily as stati… ,
    • In 1660, two of the signatories of King Charles I's death warrant fled across the Atlantic to New England. But were… ,
    • Howard Jacobson's sixteenth novel is 'a love story of sorts, one characterised not by physical desire or even conta… ,
    • 'The sudden immersion in the new and unfamiliar can lead people to write with a rare lack of self-consciousness' P… ,
    • 'Pools bend the rules. Clothes slip off, skin glistens, consciousness heightens. A dreamlike scenario unfolds' Jam… ,
    • 'Although he surely didn’t know W H Auden’s theory that every high C proclaims human freedom and our capacity to tr… ,
    • RT : With beginning tomorrow, we've uncovered a 1997 article from the archive reviewing 'Golf Dream… ,
    Follow Us