Neither Here Nor There: Travels in Europe

by Bill Bryson 

Paperback, 254 pages

Published March 28, 1993 by William Morrow Paperbacks (first published 1991)

I was in a shallow, prompted in part by the decision to trash an essay I’d spent half a day on, and I needed something to lift my spirits. I looked up from my laptop and there, on top of one of the stacks of books on my credenza, was the pleasant image you see above: the cover of my old copy of Neither Here Nor There, by Bill Bryson.

I’ve re-read Bryson’s books before. (I read this one for the first time about two years ago.) They were all Heath-bar pleasurable and chock full of interesting facts. Neither Here Nor There, published in 1991, turned out to be considerably lighter on the interesting facts. But it was fully satisfying in giving me the pleasure I was seeking.

It’s both a travelog and also a collection of wry observances. But most of all, it’s a comic novel about a smart and funny and ultimately very charming character named Bill Bryson.

Bryson grew up in the heart of America, and then spent 15 years living in and writing about England before he set off on a partly nostalgic, partly adventurous journey from Hammerfest, Norway to Istanbul, Turkey. In between, we learn in Neither Here Nor There, he got into all sorts of small jams and pickles, half of which were due to the discrepancy between a large and spirited appetite for romanticized adventure and a relentless habit of penny pinching his every commercial encounter.

It’s a very funny book. I was barely three chapters into it and I could feel my mood moving up from a 5.9 to a 7.9, which is almost impossible even with the most precise combination of drugs and alcohol.

One of the particular pleasures of the book, besides the Scrooge-precipitating mishaps, is Bryson’s relationship with a second fictive character, a friend who reappears in flashbacks to earlier adventures in Europe, the pseudonymous Stephen Katz. (Katz reappears prominently and hilariously in several later books.)

As mentioned above, the distinguishing difference between Neither Here Nor There and the earlier Bryson books that I’ve read is that it’s short on facts. It’s also skimpy on the comical conversations that so many of his other works are rich in. To compensate, there is a plenitude of hilariously prejudiced observations about the cultural characteristics of every nationality he encounters.

This last bit was not much commented on when the book was published, but has been widely criticized in recent, more politically correct, years.

For me, that made the experience of Neither Here Nor There even tastier.

From Good Reads: Bryson brings his unique brand of humor to Europe, whether braving the homicidal motorist of Paris, being robbed by gypsies in Florence, attempting not to order tripe and eyeballs in a German restaurant, window-shopping in the sex shops of the Reeperbahn, or disputing his hotel bill in Copenhagen. Bryson takes in the sights, dissects the culture, and illuminates each place and person with his hilariously caustic observations.

From Kirkus Reviews: Bryson’s crankiness could have proved amusing – after all, Mark Twain’s did in Innocents Abroad – but the humor here is meanspirited and juvenile.