Off the Beaten Track

December 5, 2014

An engaging Memoir
Off the Beaten Track is a memoir of long time travel writer Frank Kusy, author of the AIA Seal of Excellence winner Rupee Millionaire. Kusy’s experience as a writer shows in the fluid, vibrant prose he uses to describe his travels in Asia in the seventies. This is an engaging story full of anecdotes that have you smiling and shaking your head at the antics of the young Kusy.

The difficulty in memoir writing is to find a thread that unifies the story in the way that the plot does in fiction. Generally, real life isn’t as dramatic as fiction, and in unskilled hands, it’s easy to lose a reader if the account of a person’s life wanders aimlessly. This would be particularly easy to do in a travel memoir, but Kusy has worked skilfully with his material and used the thread of his efforts to both secure and avoid getting a wife in the same way that a fiction writer would use a plot. Though the various anecdotes are interesting in themselves, without this emphasis, they would not provide such a satisfying whole. We want to read to the end to see how young Frank’s bumbling efforts at romance turn out. Frank is an endearing character and his perspective on the world and efforts to live as a Buddhist add another layer of interest to the memoir.

The other theme, as the title suggests, is his desire to get off the beaten track, and the events that thwart his attempts to really experience Asia without a whiff of tourists provide further interest beyond a mere account of his travels. Though not as dramatic as Rupee Millionaires, it’s still a great read, especially for anyone interested in travel in Asia. Highly recommended.

The editing is excellent. My only misgiving was that I would have liked the author to have gone more deeply into some aspects of his journey; for example, the ceremony when the Joju Gohonzon was enshrined in the main temple in Jakarta. No doubt the author has his reasons for staying clear of it, but I felt it was a missed opportunity to go deeper into the culture.

All up Kusy is a very talented memoir writer and this book should be enjoyed by a wide variety of people.