Marci Shore's The Taste of Ashes: The Afterlife of Totalitarianism in Eastern Europe is not a travel book, yet all I could think was: this is the future of the genre. When travelers – most of them far less prepared history- and language-wise than she was – visit faraway places, they may write different books, but will mention dutifully many of the same things. They may not meet, as she did, the director of minority culture at the Romanian Culture Ministry, but like her, they will have absolutely no idea why such personages are jokes and you have to get those jokes. And when Futurists commit suicide...well, that's not a joke but it is irony, and you have to get irony too. Miss Shore, who was born around 1972, seems not to have got anything at all. Wherefore my own negative litany.

Don't mention that you're vegetarian. The authoress happened to be in New York City when she got word that a certain Polish historical figure was, contrary to published information, alive…and in New York City himself! She phoned the guy. He was 100 years old, perfectly lucid, and happy to talk. His wife was cooking supper – would the young lady like to come over and join them? Miss Shore demurred, announcing she was vegetarian. You go girl.

Don't mention NGO's. There's something just plain wrong about small faceless groups that imagine they have sovereign powers. At least modern NGO's don't have uniforms, salutes, or weapons. But only sheer pomposity keeps them from active malice.

Don't mention fascism. Because almost nobody honestly says what fascism is. Here is what fascism is: "totalitarianism we don't like." As opposed to "totalitarianism we do."

Don't mention socialism. Because people who are against the freedom to fail are also against the freedom to succeed, and will never do either.

Don't mention intellectuals or the intelligentsia. Because if you're the sort of person who is impressed by these people, you're probably also the sort of person who angrily denies that intelligence is even measurable. How does that work?

Don't mention shrilling lesbians. I will concede their wailings made for a striking descant to the chronic gear-grinding among Communism, Polishness, and Jewishness. But truly, a Venn diagram would've been a lot more helpful. You say travel books don't have Venn diagrams? I say it's time to break the rules.

Don't mention Europe. Because you'll mention all of the above.

I understand that all these Don't's could be taken as fatally obstructive. If you travel to a place and in that place, folks speak of these things, shouldn't you the traveler report it? Minimally, I'd say. A sentence. A paragraph (or Venn diagram, or Punnett square), absolute tops. I think travel books should be as much entertaining as informative, and when your subjects get tedious, you've got to sidle past that and just make them interesting. There are, still, lots of ways. What's their idea of a socially acceptable ethnic joke (among the many they undoubtedly have available)? Would you sell them arms (and how would they pay)? Could you make the rent sharing a house with them? Can you imagine them still living with their parents?

At the same time, you have to make yourself interesting. In any travel book, the travel writer is a significant if not substantial part of the story. It's the reason I thought The Taste of Ashes could pass for a travel book: its writer is living in it. She didn't quite "swamp it with a dreary cargo of fashionable abstractions" (to steal a phrase from a real travel book, Jonathan Raban's Old Glory), but the impulse to proud ideological hygiene was clearly there, and if Czechoslovakia had had green energy and single-stream recycling, we would have heard about them. I fear we will, from someone, soon, for which reason I have taken the extraordinary measure of criticizing books which haven't even been written yet.

(9/21/13)