{"id":46644,"date":"2025-09-06T04:44:07","date_gmt":"2025-09-06T04:44:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/46644\/"},"modified":"2025-09-06T04:44:07","modified_gmt":"2025-09-06T04:44:07","slug":"not-enough-humanity-to-merit-authors-sorrow-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/46644\/","title":{"rendered":"Not enough humanity to merit author\u2019s sorrow \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

Greyhound<\/strong> <\/p>\n

Author:<\/strong> Joanna Pocock <\/p>\n

ISBN-13:<\/strong> 978-1-80427-138-4 <\/p>\n

Publisher:<\/strong> Fitzcarraldo Editions<\/p>\n

Guideline Price:<\/strong> \u00a314.99<\/p>\n

In 2023, author Joanna Pocock boarded a Greyhound bus, retracing a trip that she had made 17 years before. Although the landscape has changed, the phantoms remain, like the ripped-out public telephone that leaves the \u201cprints of the old one, the wires, the holes in the wall\u201d. Greyhound is a travelogue and a ghost story, a map of the US<\/a> overlaid with the spectre of its past.<\/p>\n

Pocock\u2019s country is saturated with Edward Hopper colours and Jack Kerouac, as well as legacies of lynchings and factory lines. She details how grim the current state of public transportation is, with bus-stops moved to locations impossible to reach by foot, dependent on apps that exclude \u201cthose who aren\u2019t \u2018in the system\u2019\u201d. A passionate environmentalist (\u201cPlanting seeds is in fact one of the most rebellious acts of resistance out there,\u201d she declares), she describes strangled birds, oil spills and the stench of faecal matter from cattle pens. <\/p>\n

Finally, there\u2019s technology, with cellphones eradicating casual conversations with strangers. This means Pocock herself talks to hardly anyone. Although terrific in conveying the often-surreal dialogue around her, she rarely participates, sitting in Ohio absorbed in the details of a toxic waste incident 200 miles away. Ironically, Greyhound is packed with rabbit-holes of research, a signifier of the modern world the author deplores.<\/p>\n

[\u00a0Surrender by Joanna Pocock: toes the thin line between beauty and horror wonderfullyOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

Among the road-trip chroniclers Pocock mentions are expat journalist Irma Kurtz and French feminist Simone de Beauvoir, who, like the Canadian-born, London-based author, were once female outsiders aboard a Greyhound bus. However, they seem more fun than Pocock, a frugal, cautious traveller beset by middle-class, white-woman guilt. \u201cI have had \u2013 in material terms \u2013 a relatively comfortable life,\u201d she explains, \u201cBut how important is comfort when it relies on extraction and exploitation for its existence?\u201d When Kurtz and de Beauvoir are enraged by injustice, they engage with it, buying rounds in bars where they probably shouldn\u2019t venture. Pocock, on the other hand, is so obsessed by the plastic packaging on her bagel, she isn\u2019t curious about her waitress. <\/p>\n

Disillusionment is a hallmark of the great American roadtrip story, but it must be accompanied by joy, adventure, and above all, individuals. Unfortunately, Pocock\u2019s journey, as she writes, \u201cwas subsumed by the existence of so much suffering around me\u201d. In the end, although she so beautifully conveys the bleakness that is our world, there is not enough humanity in Greyhound to merit her sorrow. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Greyhound Author: Joanna Pocock ISBN-13: 978-1-80427-138-4 Publisher: Fitzcarraldo Editions Guideline Price: \u00a314.99 In 2023, author Joanna Pocock boarded…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":46645,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[266],"tags":[359,18,117,19,17,107],"class_list":{"0":"post-46644","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-books","9":"tag-eire","10":"tag-entertainment","11":"tag-ie","12":"tag-ireland","13":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46644","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=46644"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46644\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/46645"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=46644"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=46644"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=46644"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}