The great Chinese thinker Lin Yutang once asked, “What is patriotism but the love of the food one ate as a child?” This arresting question challenges the status of patriotism as an aspirational virtue by reducing it to nostalgia while simultaneously affirming the primacy of “home” to our senses of self. Our places of origin are intrinsic to our identities, a fact that is thrown into sharp relief when we venture into new territories. (As Confucius—another great Chinese philosopher—memorably observed, “wherever you go, there you are.”) The subjects of some recent Indie titles find themselves confronting home truths in distant lands, gleaning fresh insights from unfamiliar contexts.
In Michael N. McGregor’s The Last Grand Tour (2024), Joe Newhouse, an expat American tour guide operating out of Munich, ferries a fractious group of tourists—who all work for the same Portland, Oregon, video game company—across the Alps. Initially disdainful of the squabbling crew, the divorced and depressed Joe comes to appreciate his charges as they, like he, “revel in European culture while approaching the open road as a pathway to liberation or a flight from responsibility.” Our reviewer praises the “smart, elegant prose” that “sparkles as it evokes the tawdrier side of tourist glitz.”
Journey Through the Spanish Civil War, Deborah A. Green’s 2024 English translation of S.L. Shneiderman’s 1938 account of the conflict (Krig in Shpanyen), records the Polish journalist’s reactions as he traversed a country “caught between vibrant normalcy and incessant violence.” The author’s sensitivity to the suffering of his subjects (from a culture so different from his own) and clear-eyed assessment of the war’s implications underscore the universality of the human experience across national borders. Our reviewer pronounces the work “a powerful record of courage, brutality, and suffering.”
Brian Ray Brewer’s The Diving God (2024) follows the downward spiral of Bob, an American who flees to Mexico as an impending divorce threatens financial ruin. He finds himself drawn to undertaking ever more dangerous excursions in the foreign locale; ultimately, he connects with a young local boy who wants the older man to teach him how to dive. Their deepening friendship and Bob’s embrace of his new surroundings open him to previously unexplored possibilities for reinvention. Per our reviewer, this redemption narrative is “well crafted and often beautifully written, in the vein of Somerset Maugham and Graham Greene.”
In SOS Podcasts (2024), memoirist Rosamaria Mancini charts her real-life struggles to assimilate after relocating from New York to the rural German hamlet of Geilenkirchen. Feeling isolated (she didn’t speak the language), repelled by the local cuisine, and generally adrift, Mancini found solace in podcasts; the sound of voices speaking English in her headphones helped the author feel reconnected to world. A relatively new medium, podcasts have eased the boredom of long drives and menial chores for millions of dedicated listeners—Mancini’s account highlights the form’s unexpected utility as a lifeline to the familiar in ways amusing and poignant. Our reviewer observes that in Mancini’s voice, “universal subjects (including bad weather, religious faith, childbirth, and not fitting into a group) become compelling and entertaining.”
Arthur Smith is an Indie editor.
