Review: A Nice, Honest, Travel Memoir
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 09 26, 2012
Fred Schäfer's "Travelling With Maria" is a collection of fine anecdotes about travelling, love, and shared experiences.  The book follows the adventures of Fred and his wife Maria as they make their way through India and then establish a life in Australia.As a traveler myself, I could relate to many of Fred's stories about problems with immigration, less than clean hotels (with bed bugs), and the quest for a good place to settle down.  I especially enjoyed the last few chapters about the adventures with Steve, a jovial character who has suffered a series of ailments which rendered him delightfully quirky.Something about the narrative led me to think from the beginning that the book was going to end on some kind of tragedy.  There was a certain reflective melancholy to the text as if the author was searching for meaning in his reflections.  I'm pleased to report that the book didn't end on some kind of sad revelation, but it did drift a little bit.There are a lot of great stories in this book, but I would have liked to see them come together a little bit more to produce a kind of overarching theme.  Everything is related, and the stories do fit together to form a larger whole, but I think I needed a bit more guidance from the author as to what all these reflections meant.  As I write this, I find myself suspecting that perhaps there was some sort of tragedy that prompted the writing of this book, but from which the author decided to spare the reader.Still, there is an honesty to this book which I enjoyed, and  Schäfer is a nimble and effective story teller.  He uses dialogue effectively, although at times I would have liked more of the stories to be told through dialogue rather than traditional narrative.This is a pretty small, independent book.  It's exactly the type of thing people who rail against corporate art and the establishment should be reading.  If you're one of those people, you owe it to yourself to give it a look.