ALL THE WAY TO THE TIGERS

Morris chronicles her journey to India, where she sought a tiger and found herself.

The author, who has won the Rome Prize in literature and the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for fiction, has published multiple novels, story collections, and travel memoirs, including the acclaimed Nothing To Declare. At first blush, her latest seems rather thin and underrealized, its time-shifting format a distracting affectation. Soon, however, readers will acknowledge that this approach propels rather than disrupts the narrative flow even if some of Morris’ impressionistic asides seem like random thoughts. The author recounts her devastating ankle injury in 2008, arduous recovery, and the 2011 journey to India that took her all the way to the tigers. This last is a mostly uneventful tale, defined by a raging bronchial infection, bitter cold, and long periods of disappointment in the jungle. But Morris uses these longueurs to travel within, pondering the challenging relationship she shared with her parents, youthful self-doubts, old demons, and her not-always-seamless emergence as a writer. These passages arrive with disarming candor. Though the accounts of her travails preparing for and finally traveling in India seem rather ill-humored for a veteran globe-trotter like Morris, the savvy travel writer generally shines through. Her descriptions of the villages and cities on her route are characteristically honest, observant, and striking. Her reports on the nature of the Bengal tiger, as well as conservation efforts to restore its numbers, add to our understanding of the animal and its place in the human imagination. For Morris, the restless child who became a restive traveler, the adventure is always about seizing the moment, impermanence, and escape. "Real travelers, like real writers, move through the world like a child,” she writes. "With a child's sense of wonder and surprise. To move as if you’ve never been somewhere before, even if you’ve been there a thousand times.”

Even when Morris is not on her A game, she still manages to convey her passionate longing.