Lost on Planet China

Travel

Print length: 304 pagesBroadway, 2008

Description

After earlier comic travels in the South Pacific, Maarten Troost turns his attention to China, crossing a country whose scale and rapid transformation resist easy conclusions. His route runs from Beijing and Shanghai to the Gobi Desert and the hinterlands of Tibet, with detours through Mao’s mausoleum and a crowded ascent of Tai Shan. Along the way, Shanghai traffic, unfamiliar foods, and bewildering restaurant menus repeatedly expose the gap between expectation and experience. The mishaps provide the memoir’s humor, but Troost also looks beyond export imagery and consumer stereotypes to consider the cultural distinctions and contradictions of a vast society in motion. The result is both an outsider’s journey and an encounter with complexity that refuses to become a simple travel lesson.

Reading profile

About this profile

Collected’s assessment, not reader ratings. Complexity runs from 1 (least demanding) to 5 (most demanding).

Writing: How much attention the sentences and language require.
Ideas: How much interpretation or abstract reasoning the book asks of you.
Structure: How much you need to keep track of speakers, timelines and connections.
Background knowledge: Prior knowledge needed to follow the book, beyond what it explains.
Emotional intensity: Emotional pressure, from gentle (1) to intense (5). Separate from difficulty.

Writing style

Conversational · Descriptive · Witty

Pace

Brisk

Tone

Humorous · Irreverent · Reflective

Structure

Chronological nonfiction · Episodic

Focus

Atmosphere · Ideas · Voice

Emotional intensity

2 / 5

Reading complexity

1–5 · higher means more demanding

Writing: 2 / 5
Ideas: 2 / 5
Structure: 2 / 5
Background knowledge: 1 / 5

Themes

CommunityIdentityKnowledge and truthNature and environmentTransformation

About J. Maarten Troost

J. Maarten Troost is a Dutch-American travel writer and essayist whose books turn prolonged encounters with unfamiliar places into conversational narrative nonfiction. He usually makes his own confusion and physical discomfort part of the evidence, moving from comic mishap to descriptive observation and then to questions of history, politics, or cultural misunderstanding. In The Sex Lives of Cannibals, two years on Tarawa supply a tight domestic frame for scenes of heat, scarce food, failed utilities, and bureaucratic absurdity, while also opening onto the Battle of Tarawa and ill-fitting foreign aid. Lost on Planet China adopts a wider, more mobile structure. Its crowded cities, remote regions, meals, and transit problems register a country whose scale and rapid change defeat easy summary. The later Headhunters on My Doorstep complicates Troost’s established method. Following Robert Louis Stevenson through the South Pacific, he retains the logistical comedy of travel but folds it into a sober account of addiction, family, and the limits of escape.

Book details

For the print edition listed above.

Publisher: Broadway
Language: English
ISBN: 9780767922005

Keep your books and notes in Collected for iPhone.

Apple Books is a service mark of Apple Inc. iPhone is a trademark of Apple Inc., registered in the U.S. and other countries.