A Tramp Abroad (1880)

Depending on how you count them, this is Mark Twain's third or fourth travel book, in many ways a direct sequel to his first, The Innocents Abroad. Once again he is "abroad" in Europe, but this time the focus and scope are much tighter, staying close to the Alps in Germany, Switzerland, and Italy. The idea, the joke, is that it's a walking tour—a tramp. But Twain and his traveling companion, Harris, more often take trains and other transportation. The caliber of the jokes gets better than that and I have to admit a lot of this book struck me as funny, sometimes in obvious ways which work anyway. I also have to admit a lot of it isn't funny. It's mostly anecdotes and stretchers, with scenery. Harris sometimes figures into them. Overall, Harris is not very useful to the narrative. At one point Twain dispatches him to a destination he claims not to want to visit himself and asks him for a full report. Harris's report is a somewhat opaque joke full of random foreign terms in unrecognizable languages like Choctaw. Really it is a chance for Twain to make fun at length of writers who use foreign terms in their work. It may (or may not) be a reasonable target, but the passage is strained and goes on trop long. A Tramp Abroad could well be another Twain I read so you don't have to. If you like his previous and better-known forays into travel literature—The Innocents Abroad and Roughing It—Life on the Mississippi is the one I'm not sure how to classify—then you might enjoy some of the best parts of A Tramp Abroad. It's patchy at best, but Twain's easy gait, studded with lots of little jokes, keeps it rolling along. I don't happen to be very interested in the Alps myself, but the mountain scenes tend to be the most interesting. It makes sense that Twain and his publisher would go for a sequel to The Innocents Abroad, given that it remained Twain's bestselling book all his life. He was nothing if not practical about the business of selling books. Still, it's dogged by the problem of most sequels, as merely a pale reproduction of the original.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic. (Library of America)