Just to be fair, I should confess: travel literature is definitely not my genre of expertise.  So I trusted the tastes of the Globe Corner Bookstore employees when I chose The Geography of Bliss, a charming and perplexing book about traveling to the world’s happiest countries in the hopes of arriving at an enlightened understanding of happiness, mapped out in travel narrative form.

Eric Weiner’s search creates an intriguing premise, especially since Americans as a nation and humans as a species have evolved a deep obsession with achieving (and maintaining) happiness. A quest for happiness, then, seems like it would be at the top of all of our to-do lists–and the convenience of someone else already completing a quest for happiness and reporting the results? Perfect. It’s like a frozen microwavable dinner of zen. Okay, Mr. Weiner: tell us the secrets to attaining happiness after traveling to ten different countries with varying happiness levels, according to the World Database of Happiness.

The results: (spoiler alert) There aren’t any secrets.

Hold on, Mr. Weiner.  You’re not going to change our lives? Your journey across the world didn’t reap one single solution, didn’t answer the question of what makes people happy, how Americans should change our lives (say, by working fewer hours or eating less processed foods?), or explain why we should all just move to Thailand and not worry about anything?  You didn’t have any personal revelations about changing your own life? You didn’t turn a cartwheel in the palm of God’s hand (à la Elizabeth Gilbert in Eat, Pray, Love)? But Mr. Weiner, we were trusting YOU to explain EVERYTHING about happiness. What a disappointment.

Okay, I’m joking.

I actually really enjoyed reading The Geography of Bliss quite a lot, and thought that Weiner succeeded in weaving a fascinating and multi-layered reflection about the nature of how people are satisfied or dissatisfied with the places in which they live.

However, the reason for my jocular intro is not that Weiner deceived us into thinking that he would answer all of our questions about happiness–it’s that apparently, many of his readers wanted him to. There are good reviews out there, but critiques I’ve read of Geography struck me as comical because they him from all angles: he used too many experts, he didn’t use enough. He didn’t spend enough time in each country, he did too many interviews, he did too few. But I think these all boil down to a dissatisfaction of certain audience members because it seems that they were expecting a coherent, resounding conclusion about happiness–precisely the very thing that Weiner quickly discovers will elude him throughout his travels.

The strength of this book lies in its conscious and even cheerful realization of a doomed mission: of course there’s no answer about what the happiest country is, or how we should make ourselves happier, but the existence of a multitude of plausible options can be cause for celebration.  As a result, each new place organically raises issues that Weiner uses his very capable journalistic chops to address.  For example, his escapades in Thailand lead him to this line of thought:

When you get down to it, there are basically three, and only three, ways to make yourself happier. You can increase the amount of positive affect (good feelings). You can decrease the amount of negative affect (bad feelings). Or you can change the subject. This third option is one we rarely consider or, if we do, dismiss it as a cop-out. Change the subject? That’s avoidance, we protest, that’s cowardly! No, we must wallow in our stuff, analyze it, taste it, swallow it, then spit it out, swallow it again, and talk about it, of course, always talk about it. I’ve always believed that the road to happiness is paved with words. Nouns, adjectives, verbs, if arranged in just the right constellation, would enable me to hopscotch to bliss…. The Thais have a different way, the way of mai pen lai. It means “never mind.” Not the “never mind” that we in the west often use angrily, as in “Oh, never mind, I’ll do it myself” but a real, just-drop-it-and-get-on-with-life “never mind.” Foreigners living in Thailand either adopt the mai pen lai attitude or go insane.

My main critique is that Weiner could have developed the characters in each locale further; rather than stepping back to give characters and interviewees room to breathe and inhabit the page, he cut interviews in broad strokes to sketch an anecdote or make a point. While this technique works well in punchy, short articles, I believe that in books (even those told in 10 parts), readers want a characters to live and breathe with more nuance. Also, after six different-yet-similar interviews, one expat really does come to resemble another, and they became mouthpieces for Weiner’s own observations.

But in the end, I enjoyed Weiner’s experiences and found myself reigniting a wanderlust to go to such places as Iceland, Thailand, and yes, even Moldova (one of the unhappiest places in the world). And despite being a self-proclaimed “grouch,” Weiner is a charming traveling companion.  He is lighthearted about what conclusions he does draw, and not without a sense of humility–which, in the case of making generalizations about happiness, is a refreshing change.

Tags:   Book Reviews · Geography of Bliss · kim · Travel WeekNo Comments