Honorable Bandit: A Walk Across Corsica
by Brian Bouldrey
University of Wisconsin Press. 296 pages $26.95
THIS DEEPLY FELT, humorous, and extremely wise book is a remarkable achievement. In Honorable Bandit: A Walk Across Corsica, author Brian Bouldrey takes the reader on a queer journey across Corsica, but even more takes us on a charged—at times Dantesque—journey that explores nuanced corners of life, loss, and love: our most intimate infernos, purgatorios, and paradisos.
The book bounces along with vigorous and joyous language, much like the rhythmic poetic downhill step he beautifully describes: “Walking has a prosody: when I walk downhill, the legs do dactyls (for the unschooled: one long stride, two doorstop jambs, a stressed syllable and two unstressed: ‘dithering,’ ‘wearying’—’Corsica’).” The confluence of prosody and foot-falls fills Honorable Bandit with an exquisite poetic sensibility, but also, from the outset, with an epigraph from Edward Lear, Bouldrey savors the playful and cheeky use of language. This is great fun but also helps us spelunk deeper and deeper into his world. What a moving (multiple meanings there!), soulful (oh god, more multiple meanings there too!), and wonderful book about living and walking. It was a joy to read.
This epic walk across the lunar landscape of Corsica provides Bouldrey with a red-hot template to take us where he will. I felt such trust for the writer as he followed the confluences and tributaries of his memories and associations. Perhaps the strongest of these side trails is “the Rake’s Progress,” which is one of the most moving AIDS memoirs I’ve ever read, razor-sharp in its specifics and sensibility. Rather than ever seeming like digressions, they are charged and writerly leaps into the most intimate spaces of the book. I love this deep current of the “meander” in the book—the Meander being a winding river in Turkey, after all—and having that wandering take us to places like the AIDS memoir section is so important.
In a lovely tip of the hat to the Divine Comedy journey that lives in Honorable Bandits, the end of the book has a feeling of Paradiso, as our two travelers find the perfect place of rest at the end of the trail. Bouldrey has become a different man: “The Bouldrey we have sent to Corsica is not the Bouldrey they have returned to us.” And the reader has changed too. One personal note of high praise is that Honorable Bandit made me want to go on a long walking journey myself. The book also made me recall that for my eighteenth birthday I walked about 250 miles in the Sierras here in California with my oldest brother. I think he was conceiving it as a rite of manhood; mostly we talked about Russian literature as we walked!
Any book that calls us to deep knowledge of ourselves and also manages to make the reader want to get up and walk across Corsica is doing something very right. I suppose we all have to imagine our own personal Maquis, the elusive, haunting Proustian smell of the spiny scrub plants of Bouldrey’s island. I hope that Honorable Bandit will find a large readership among the community of walkers, gay readers, and those drawn to a literary, dactyl-filled journey.
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Tim Miller is a solo performer and the author of Shirts & Skin, Body Blows, and 1001 Beds.
