Traveling, and more, with Pico Iyer

"Sun After Dark: Flights Into the Foreign." By Pico Iyer. Knopf. 223 Pages. $22.95.

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In a detached ode to jet lag, Pico Iyer describes the sensation as "like watching a foreign movie without subtitles ... I can't follow the story, the arc of character, but something else - that inflection of a hand, this unregarded silence - comes through to me intensely."

And in crisscrossing the globe in "Sun After Dark: Flights Into the Foreign," the reader gets the same feeling from Iyer's essays - the same strange dissolution of reality and intimate fixation on its scattered pieces.

The essays span Iyer's travels during the past decade to some of the most unlikely locales: from a Zendo retreat in the San Gabriel Mountains near Los Angeles to an English cemetery in Aden, Yemen, and to a "Tibetan" cafe on Easter Island on New Year's Eve. But as incredible as Iyer's travels seem, the collected details are what make the accounts so impossibly real and so essentially human.

"Bolivia," Iyer writes, "stands apart from all your theories and ideas, much as the Indian women, with their boxes of Windows 98 and books by the Dalai Lama, sit apart from the future that saunters past them in the street."

Like so many passages in the book, this market scene displays both Iyer's razor-sharp sense of irony and his careful and subtle knack for bringing it to the reader. And his skill is especially felt when he finds himself in particularly gray areas of the world: at the frontier between privilege and poverty, of tradition and progress, or of the past and future.

Maybe most compelling, and certainly most unsettling, is Iyer's account of the sprawling Angkor Wat temple complex in Cambodia. Sown with land mines from the days of Pol Pot, Iyer's Angkor is haunted by contraband peddlers, amputees in broken wheelchairs and little girls with cataracts playing with monkeys on strings. With unforgiving sincerity, he writes, "Angkor was the shrill whine of cicada bells issuing from the trees, and the little girl who put a pink water-pistol in her mouth and pulled the trigger."

One of Iyer's favorite topics seems to be Tibet, and Lhasa, the "eastern Las Vegas" that is its capital. Formerly associated with Shangri-La, the mythical city now crowded with bars and casinos is a perfect example of Iyer's preoccupation with the double lives of people and places caught between opposing worlds. After describing the Western tourism industry in cosmopolitan Lhasa, he writes: "We go to Tibet, often, to be transported, and so, inevitably, we are (as we might not be if we saw and heard the same thing in Wisconsin); 'Tibet' is the name we give to whatever we wish to believe, or can't quite credit."

Iyer was born in England to Indian parents, and his take in India's "Hindlish" (or Englian, or Indlish) is as hilarious as the tongue itself. Commenting on the subcontinent's creative butchery of the English language in public signs (in a country where most cannot read), Iyer says it's tempting to think "the Empire never left. ... it just settled down in a backstreet in Madras, and started to tell its story from the other side."

Ostensibly, the book is a collection of travel writing. But with a chapter dedicated to singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen's new Buddhist practices and another to grandmothers in a Japanese park near Iyer's home (as well as one each for the works of writers W.G. Sebald and Kazuo Ishiguro), one realizes this is not exactly true.

And, though Iyer's essays may sometimes read like field studies on the ills and oddities of globalization, that would also be an oversimplification. One slowly realizes the book reads more like a study on the ubiquity of foreignness: foreignness with one's world, one's society and, ultimately, with one's self.

As Iyer writes in the introduction, "I know in my own case that a trip has been successful if I come back sounding strange even to myself; if, in some sense, I never come back at all, but remain up at night unsettled by what I've seen."