Like Iyer himself – and very much like the author Graham Greene, the ever-elusive subject of his not-biography – 'It's not memoir and it's not biography.' More negatives appear in the scenes from the book, as Iyer struggles to explain to his Japanese wife, Hiroko, the purpose of the eight-year project that had generated such huge, smothering piles of paper in their home. 'It's not really non-fiction and it's not quite fiction,' he says helpfully. The Man Within My Head, a hybrid creation sufficiently original as to be indefinable – a book its author describes most easily by what it is not. What excites him today, Iyer adds, 'is trying to generate new forms, to create new countries on the page.'Īs vague as it may sound, that is exactly what Iyer has accomplished with his latest book, 'Writing is more of an adventure than travel for me now,' says Iyer, greyer and balder at the age of 55than he was during his last visit to Toronto – a city where he claims to be 'culturally more at home than any place on earth' – but still as precise, disarmingly attentive and fearsomely articulate as ever in his soft-spoken, Oxbridge-inflected manner. More than ever, he sticks close to 'home' – with Iyer, the concept is never merely geographical – in what he considers to be a still-medieval corner of rural Japan. Video Night in Kathmandu, and who has since penned more than half a dozen books of restless seeking, geographic and spiritual, all the while supporting his peripatetic existence with a steady revenue stream from erudite articles with exotic place names for leading English-language publications, has finally settled down. Iyer is a stylist with an eye for strange things that doesn't keep him from feeling the humanity in exotica.Pico Iyer, the consummate traveller who wrote a pioneering guidebook to the global village almost 25 years ago with

seems to be one of languid illegality''-and when encountering the ``cold and science-fictive beauty'' of Australian twilight. Similarly, he is both critical and amusing in pieces about Cuba and Paraguay-where the ``governing principle. Iyer persuasively mocks what he sees, yet also looks on it as a rather charming aberration. The point of this? To consider, at close range, the identity of countries that exist in relative isolation, or did until recently, undiluted in their ``solitude, remoteness and seclusion.'' For example, in ``My Holiday With Kim Il Sung,'' he journeys to Pyongyang, a city that appears to be the personal property of the North Korean president-as are most of the people who live there, more or less willingly. Time journalist Iyer ( The Lady and the Monk ) has written on travel before, but in this collection of essays he steps out to face extremes of geography, imagination and culture, visiting places that most of us haven't-Bhutan, North Korea, Iceland and five others.

Abandon by Pico Iyer