{"id":462,"date":"2018-12-31T12:23:39","date_gmt":"2018-12-31T12:23:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/?p=462"},"modified":"2018-12-31T12:23:39","modified_gmt":"2018-12-31T12:23:39","slug":"lone-star-book-reviewsby-michelle-newby-nbcccontributing-editor-47","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/?p=462","title":{"rendered":"Lone Star Book ReviewsBy Michelle Newby, NBCCContributing Editor"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/div>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/span>Michelle Newby<\/span> is contributing editor at Lone Star Literary Life, reviewer for Foreword Reviews, <\/span>freelance writer, member of the National Book Critics Circle, and blogger at www.TexasBookLover.com. Her reviews appear or are forthcoming in Pleiades Magazine, Rain Taxi, World Literature Today, South85 Journal, The Review Review, Concho River Review, Monkeybicycle, Mosaic Literary Magazine, Atticus Review, <\/span>and The Collagist.<\/span><\/p>\n

Lone Star Book Reviews
of Texas books appear weekly
at LoneStarLiterary.com<\/a><\/span><\/h1>\n
\n
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Clara Bensen\u2019s<\/span> 2013 Salon.com article entitled \u201cThe Craziest OKCupid Date Ever\u201d\u00a0 was read by more than half a million people. The story of her luggage-less adventure attracted major national and international attention, with coverage in USA Today<\/span>, and appearances on The View<\/span> and Fox News. No Baggage<\/span> has also been optioned by New Line cinemas.<\/p>\n

Clara and her partner, Jeff, have made four subsequent no baggage trips, to South America, the Caucuses, Scandinavia, and Japan. She lives in Austin, Texas.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

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<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n

<\/a><\/span>MEMOIR\/TRAVELOGUE<\/p>\n

Clara Bensen<\/span><\/p>\n

No Baggage: A Minimalist Tale of Love and Wandering<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

Running Press<\/p>\n

Hardcover, 9780762457243 (ebook also available), 288 pgs., $26.00<\/p>\n

January 5, 2016<\/p>\n

Clara, a smart, observant introvert,<\/span> a \u201cnice girl who played by all the rules,\u201d was raised in an evangelical household terrified of Sartre. She had a crisis of faith and then, Sartre-like, an existential crisis. Recently surfaced in wonderment and determination from two years of a nervous breakdown, Clara is starving for life.<\/p>\n

Intent on the \u201cunconventional life,\u201d Jeff is intense, charming, and either adventurous or reckless, depending upon your tolerance for risk, with a tendency to allow \u201cplayful disruption\u201d to escalate into heedless exhibitionism. His motto is \u201cWe\u2019ll see.\u201d As in, where are we staying tonight? \u201cWe\u2019ll see.\u201d How are we getting from Budapest to Sarajevo? \u201cWe\u2019ll see.\u201d<\/p>\n

No Baggage: A Minimalist Tale of Love and Wandering<\/span><\/a><\/span> is a hybrid of memoir, travelogue, and psychological and philosophical rumination on the American condition in a time of rapid transformation. After meeting in Austin, Texas, through OKCupid and dating for a month, Clara and Jeff bought plane tickets to Istanbul and return tickets from London for a three-week trip through Europe. They used Couchsurfing.com to lay their heads at night\u2014\u201cno hotels, no reservations, no itineraries,\u201d relying on serendipity, synchronicity, and the kindness of strangers. The \u201cno baggage\u201d in the title is literal\u2014Clara and Jeff took only the clothes on their backs. It is also figurative in that they were in the midst of a relationship experiment\u2014no traditional commitments\u2014trying to travel without emotional baggage.<\/p>\n

This free-form, tour-bus-free travel initially leaves Clara unmoored, but she finds her stride. It allows them to meet diverse and fascinating people: an Iranian tree-planting bicyclist, a Greek translator with a broken heart and passion for modern dance, a Hungarian film critic, a Turkish fisherman. These connections inform Clara\u2019s awareness as she riffs on history, politics, religion, international relations, and economics, with literary allusions referencing John Muir, Lewis Carroll, Gabriel Garcia M\u00e1rquez, Sylvia Plath, and Diogenes. Her imagery brings famous landmarks to life, describing the minarets of Istanbul as \u201cstacked like upturned teacups\u201d and the inner basilica of the Hagia Sophia as a \u201cgilded orange sliced in half.\u201d The thermal spring-fed bathhouses of Budapest have \u201cenough pools for a Dr. Seuss poem: indoor pools, outdoor pools, hot pools, cold pools, mineral pools and wave pools.\u201d<\/p>\n

This trip is Clara\u2019s challenge to her wounded psyche, a sort of shock therapy to come to terms with the fundamental uncertainty of life by deliberately choosing the unknown. \u201cOh, you know, I\u2019m feeling paralyzed by the human condition,\u201d she writes candidly and humorously of her mental illness, \u201cand I don\u2019t know what to do except curl into the fetal position like a frightened pill bug.\u201d Clara struggles with the ambiguities of the relationship as she and Jeff test \u201cwhether it was possible to love without grasping.\u201d The \u201cmodern\u201d experiment is alternately empowering and like a toddler with too many choices and not enough structure.<\/p>\n

No Baggage<\/span> is about exploring potentialities through journeys: those you take on planes, trains, and automobiles, and those you take through mental illness, friendship, and, maybe, love.<\/p>\n

* * * * *<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Michelle Newby is contributing editor at Lone Star Literary Life, reviewer for Foreword Reviews, freelance writer, member of the National Book Critics Circle, and blogger at www.TexasBookLover.com. Her reviews appear or are forthcoming in Pleiades Magazine, Rain Taxi, World Literature Today, South85 Journal, The Review Review, Concho River Review, Monkeybicycle, Mosaic Literary Magazine, Atticus Review, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-462","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/462","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=462"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/462\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=462"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=462"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=462"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}