This is a wonderful, brilliant, eccentric book - not a travel log -- but truly a
dérive, a wandering through a portion of reality in search of self -- and the self and searcher, a man of such honest and tender and, indeed, unsentimental sentiments.
The richness of anecdote and observation -- social, psychological, erotic -- like beautiful landscape -- an oriental Claude or Poussin -- to which Richie himself compares the Inland Sea -- surprised me. I had expected something much slighter.