As life’s most precious truths are revealed in fiction, aspiring and inveterate travelers alike would be well served to immerse themselves in Richard Scott Sacks's World of Worlds, an arresting exposition of the uncertainties, surprises, and revelations that come to those traveling far from home. While the book's 15 stories are set from the late 1960s to the early 80s, their value is not as time capsules, but rather in timeless themes that have always confronted strangers in strange lands. As a journalist, diplomat, and wanderer traversing four continents across four decades, Sacks knows of what he writes. He delivers crisp, insightful prose that keeps the pages turning. His characters are genuine and their predicaments are representative and realistic.
On one level, World of Worlds spotlights a fascinating array of geographic settings from Chicago and Detroit to Chamonix and Delhi, though African venues predominate — all different worlds within our world. Sacks conveys a sensuous, authentic feel of each place. The reader is choked on dust, mired in mud, and drenched by rain. Tedium yields to danger, and scenery ranges from mind-numbingly mundane to awe-inspiring. Exotic foods delight and revolt. Transport is an ever-changing character unto itself — inconvenient, often perilous, and as elemental to understanding a place as it is to getting there.
More significantly, the stories illuminate the constant and often unrecognized tensions of starkly different personal worldviews that animate our world — again, worlds within a world. Tensions typically play out among those trying to bridge the chasms between different cultural perspectives. Traveler and native alike struggle to communicate and understand each other. Misplaced assumptions corrupt communication, cementing misunderstanding, often despite the best of intentions. Racial and tribal dimensions permeate many encounters. We see two kinds of outsiders — hose with naive notions of "noble savage" native hosts, and those with condescending or suspicious attitudes. Each exploits in their own ways, witting or not, in realms of business, romance or seemingly simple tourist encounters. Some differences simmer between those sharing a culture — clashing perspectives of fellow travelers or debating students, for example — an underappreciated complication for unpracticed travelers. Contradictions within cultures and individuals confound throughout.
Especially insightful are Sacks's sensitive elaborations of native perspectives that travel guides cannot begin to offer. Many stories highlight natives' motives and attributes that are obscure to visitors: their imperative to impress outsiders and overcome assumed prejudices, their overestimation of any visitor as a person of influence and power, their curiosity about the unfamiliar, their deeply ingrained cultural priority on generosity to strangers. Romances between native and outsider — as in “The Coast Holiday” — are suffused with exhilarating excitement of the moment, complicated by the consequences of real world cultural differences.
One story — “The Bribe”— offers a particularly enlightening examination of clashing perspectives on what Americans view as corruption and many others accept as stabilizing conventions of reciprocal social obligation. Perhaps most poignant are the temporal dimensions of most relationships between visitor and native, whether in love, business, or innumerable tourist encounters: no matter how intense or bonding a relationship is, its boundaries are limited by the temporariness of the visitor's presence. One day the visitor will be gone — a factor that usually holds more significance to the native, who nearly always realizes it before the visitor does, with implications for both. The native must stay, making the best of whatever the relationship was in the context of an inescapable native world. An outsider who does choose to make a life in a foreign land may end up alone, not fully a part of either their old or new homes.
Sacks perceptively explores the motives of the traveler, which become a lens for understanding the travel experience. His characters are not formulaic; we meet inquisitive students, jaded journalists, greedy grifters, and direction-less drifters. We learn that the impulses to travel are varied and often more complicated than apparent. Some travel to, seeking a destination or excitement; others travel from, escaping a place or circumstance. As many stories reinforce, the 'whys' of one's travel invariably affect the 'whats' of the ensuing travel experience.
"Detroit is for Dreamers" stands out as a meditation on the conflicting priorities of travel, and the sometimes compelling reasons to stay home. "In the Mountains Above Chamonix" suggests that those seeking solitude paradoxically must rely on others, a nettlesome fact for the many misanthropes, fugitives, and loners out on the road. Echoed in other stories, "At the Border" dramatizes another undervalued distinction: the foreign passport as a talisman that confers on visitors presumptions, privileges, and protections that no native can ever enjoy.
Many of the stories are unsettling, often filled with danger and proliferating risks. But the author infuses them with a healthy degree of optimism — not a Panglossian confidence that all turns out for the best, but an appreciation that uncertainty is the birthplace of discovery and confronting risk yields life lessons. As in real life, many stories conclude not with a clear climax and denouement, but rather with continuing unresolved dramatic tension. No right and wrong. No judgment. Just a clearer understanding of what's happening and why, with hubris frequently yielding to humility.
The rewards of any overseas experience should include discoveries about our place in the world, our relationship to others. To this end, World of Worlds is invaluable both as preparation for any intending overseas traveler and as a thought-provocation for veteran globetrotters who think they understand the world.