I’m setting aside The Innocents Abroad about halfway through. Maybe I’ll come back to it; maybe not. It’s not holding my attention. Every time I pick it up, I read about a page and then think of something else I’d rather be doing.
The book is based on a series of 50 newspaper articles Twain was commissioned to write in 1867 by a newspaper that paid for him to take an extended cruise and tour of “Europe and the holy land.” Each section is basically his report on what he did that week: visiting the Colosseum in Rome or the Rock of Gibraltar, for example.
I reckon if I’d been reading it back then as a weekly serial, I’d have kept at it. I find Twain amusing, but in small doses. His humor has a mean streak that wears on me after a while.
Part of what I found tiresome is that a lot of the book is dedicated to the sort of details that might have been difficult to come by in 1867 but can now be looked up by anyone who cares on Wikipedia: the height and floor area of famous buildings, detailed descriptions of landmarks, and so on. We learn, for instance, that “The Coliseum is over one thousand six hundred feet long, seven hundred and fifty wide, and one hundred and sixty-five high. Its shape is oval.”
Twain was a lackadaisical researcher, and sometimes it feels like he was struggling to fill the agreed word count for the week. We learn of St. Peter’s Basilica, for instance, that “it is estimated that the floor of the church affords standing room for--for a large number of people; I have forgotten the exact figures. But it is no matter--it is near enough.”
The book is also a bit heavy on the racism for my tastes. Of the Azores, for instance, we learn “The people lie, and cheat the stranger, and are desperately ignorant, and have hardly any reverence for their dead. The latter trait shows how little better they are than the donkeys they eat and sleep with.” He later saw some Moorish women without their burquas and commented, “I am full of veneration for the wisdom that leads them to cover up such atrocious ugliness.”
I started Innocents a few months ago, but set it aside to read Typee by Herman Melville. Both are travelogues that made their authors famous, but Melville’s has aged far better. Part of the reason is that Melville describes a culture - Polynesian tribal society - that I knew nothing about and that no longer exists, so it felt unfamiliar and new - truly foreign. By contrast, Twain focuses on tourist attractions like museums, parks, parades, and churches, which are pretty much the same today as they were back then. I have nothing against such institutions, but I've seen enough of them that extended descriptions no longer hold my attention.
This review is probably unduly negative. The book isn’t really that bad, but I’m in a foul mood and feel like complaining. And Twain is hardly in a position to complain - both because he also wrote unduly negative things when he was in a foul mood, and because he’s dead.