News from the North

Arrival in the Third World is always discombobulating, especially when the world in question is a mere hundred-minute flight from Miami. Across the turquoise, cloud-shadowed Caribbean; a quick descent over silted river mouths and sardine-packed tin-roof slums; and out into the sundrenched heat of Toussaint Louverture International, airport code PAP for Port-au-Prince, Haiti's sprawling, sweltering, seething capital, the poorest and most violent city in the entire Western Hemisphere. Arrival The streets of a new city are always alien and intimidating, and tenfold so here. Fortunately my friend L. was there to meet me at the airport with her on-loan driver Xavier, a courtly fortysomething man who piloted us in his seriously weathered Toyota Corolla through a city that at first was all slum. Potholed, mud-puddled streets; packs of feral dogs prowling waist-high mounds of trash; mangled, skeletal remains of ancient car crashes, thick with rust; stores set in rotting concrete buildings,

Translations are somehow much cooler than original texts. At least if you wrote the original text. At least if you're me. I'm not totally sure, but I think they just might be playing up the Burning Man angle. It's a full hundred pages longer than the English trade paperback. I guess German is a bulky language. Or maybe it's just chock-full of soup scenes.