Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life
2015
- biography
- surfers
- nyt:combined-print-and-e-book-nonfiction=2015-08-09
- surfing
- journalists, biography
- voyages and travels
- cloth or hardcover
- biography / autobiography
- personal memoirs
- special interest - adventure
The story
Surfing only looks like a sport. To initiates, it is something else entirely: a beautiful addiction, a demanding course of study, a morally dangerous pastime, a way of life. Raised in California and Hawaii, Finnegan started surfing as a child. He has chased waves all over the world, wandering for years through the South Pacific, Australia, Asia, Africa. A bookish boy, and then an excessively adventurous young man, he went on to become a writer and war reporter. Barbarian Days takes us deep into unfamiliar worlds, some of them right under our noses -- off the coasts of New York and San Francisco. It immerses the reader in the edgy camaraderie of close male friendships annealed in challenging waves. Finnegan shares stories of life in a whites-only gang in a tough school in Honolulu even while his closest friend was a native Hawaiian surfer. He shows us a world turned upside down for kids and adults alike by the social upheavals of the 1960s. He details the intricacies of famous waves and his own apprenticeships to them. Youthful folly -- he drops LSD while riding huge Honolua Bay, on Maui -- is served up with rueful humor. He and a buddy, their knapsacks crammed with reef charts, bushwhack through Polynesia. They discover, while camping on an uninhabited island in Fiji, one of the world's greatest waves. As Finnegan's travels take him ever farther afield, he becomes an improbable anthropologist: unpicking the picturesque simplicity of a Samoan fishing village, dissecting the sexual politics of Tongan interactions with Americans and Japanese, navigating the Indonesian black market while nearly succumbing to malaria. Throughout, he surfs.
What it’s like
Long, unhurried sentences move through sun-cracked reef water, salt-stung skin and the cold grey hour before dawn, with the prose carrying the sensory weight of a writer who has spent a lifetime half-submerged. The texture is reflective and observant, a voice that alternates rueful self-deprecation with precise description of wave shapes, swell charts and the rough hospitality of distant villages. Its vibe is wistful and restless, with a rainy-afternoon, armchair-travel feel: the kind of book to read slowly over several evenings, or to carry on a long-haul flight when you want to be somewhere warm and far away. Pacing is episodic and digressive, shifting between boyhood in California and Honolulu, a psychedelic afternoon on a Maui break, and months of wandering through Polynesia, Indonesia and beyond, so each chapter feels like its own small voyage. Emotionally it is candid and bittersweet, following a young man's appetite for danger and belonging as he learns, slowly and not always gracefully, what it costs. Intensity is moderate: there are dangerous surf sessions, a brush with malaria and some drug use, but no gore and little sexual content, with the violence mostly the sea's own indifference. For readers who love immersive travel writing, memoir with real humility, and the ocean as a character.
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