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A Buffoon with a Head as Round as the Planet Itself,
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My brother gave me this book for my birthday yesterday, as I’ve been a fan of Ricky, Steve & Karl since their XFM days. I’ve actually finished the book already; it was that funny, I couldn’t put it down!
It was a good, interesting, &, in its own unique Karl-type way, insightful read. To those readers familiar with the trio, & who haven’t watched the TV series, it quickly becomes clear that Karl’s small production unit are colluding with Ricky & Steve to set Karl up in situations which they know will irritate him – e.g. getting him to film with a gay man on a nudist beach in Brazil.
In each country, Karl generally stays or travels with a local resident, most of whom are incredibly poor. Despite their hardship & daily circumstances (one delightful young man in India, Ashek, lives in what is essentially a garage), these people are extremely generous with their time & hospitality. In some cases, however, these parts of the book left me rather saddened for some of those who opened their homes to Karl – he was so rude & offensive to them. In one case in particular, Karl mentions how he pushed some food into the face of an elderly Chinese lady whilst shouting at her (in her own home, after she & her family had welcomed him in & cooked for him), just because she was trying to encourage him to try a bit of a different dish and this irritated him.
Plus, Karl was never actually that impressed by the Wonders – I hoped he might have ultimately learned to appreciate something, as there was a quote from his last wonder (Machu Picchu) at the beginning of that chapter in which he said “Magnificent. I’m speechless.” So I thought that he might have actually gained some kind of new understanding from his experiences – but on reading the chapter, you find that he was just spouting it to Steve Merchant so that he could get out of the trip a day or two early. Somehow, it left me with a vague feeling of disappointment that a man who has experienced some of the world’s most amazing treasures & cultures willingly persists in ignorance & disdain for much of what he encounters.
That said, it is definitely a book worth reading, with several laugh-out-loud moments, & offers a uniquely in-depth look at some of our world’s most incredible people & places (as well as Karl’s misadventures with the various toilet facilities of each country…).
Karl really is just a simian buffoon with “a head like a f**king orange”, but he certainly makes for a fascinating travelling companion.
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|Very Funny,
Karl Pilkington is both an idiot and a genius – again. He’s able to make the most banal instances interesting, and at the same time ignore the big events. For instance, he devotes the same amount of pages to questioning the sexuality of his Brazilian tour guide and complaining about what’s for tea as he does to Christ the Redeemer.
This book is a genuinely fun travel guide and personal diary. There are colorful hand-drawn maps, transcribed phone conversations with Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant, and gorgeous pictures of the Seven Wonders and, better yet, the local geography, architecture, and people of each place Karl visits. The thing that excited me the most was the fact that there’s so much new, fresh material in this book. I suppose it would be hard to travel the world and NOT find something new to say. If you’re worried that this is just another compilation of Karl’s greatest hits, don’t be – by my count, Auntie Nora only comes up once and I don’t recall him even mentioning the paper round he had when he was a boy.
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|Ignorance is Bliss,
I bought this book roughly a week or so after the TV series finished and whilst watching the show I came to realize what Stephen Merchant said about dear Karl is true, “He’s just a simple, ignorant, English bloke”… or something like that. And Karl is ignorant, completely unaware of how stupid or racist what he says is, and its simply one of the funniest things to read. Reading the “Travel Diaries” I couldn’t help but find every word funny, everything he believes to be true is just laugh out loud funny and to view the world from his perspective is simply a treat. If you loved the series and every stupid little thing Karl has said, then you’ll love the book, which is a much better, in depth look into the strange, hilarious mind of Karl Pilkington.
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