Having traveled with Iyer so enjoyably to Cuba, Kyoto, Kathmandu, Ethiopia, Brittany, Iran and Bighorn, Wyo., it is now the reader's pleasure to go on a journey with him to another territory: his obsession with the work of the late Graham Greene and what it means to be an outsider.
"Hauntedness" is a recurring theme in the book. Iyer writes: "Yet if I were really to want to learn about hauntedness--those people who seem so to shadow our footsteps that we can never be sure if they have slipped into our lives or we have just stepped into their imaginations."
Both Greene and Iyer are citizens of the world, but that doesn't mean that they are at home wherever they roam. Quite the contrary: having one foot in each world--at home and abroad--can be disorienting at the very least, even when one travels by choice.
"Slipping in and out of identities would be what kept Greene alive, officially and otherwise, all his life," Iyer explains. He was a shape-shifter, bipolar and bifurcated about God, relationships and his father. Iyer, in examining Greene's relationship with his father, comes to a new, unexpected understanding of his own father.
Iyer loves Greene, the man and his work, and his deep understanding and appreciation of him make both men and both writers seem to inhabit one another, weaving stories in and out of their experiences. --Valerie Ryan, Cannon Beach Book Company, Oregon