"Honorable Bandit," by Brian Bouldrey

This was commissioned to appear in San Francisco Chronicle in 2007, but was killed because of space constraints.

A Walk Across Corsica
"Honorable Bandit," by Brian Bouldrey
Reviewed by Dewey Hammond


It has been said that anyone can write a great memoir. No matter how mundane you think your life may be, within everyone there are great stories waiting to be brought to life. Brian Bouldrey’s “Honorable Bandit: A Walk Across Corsica” leaves the impression that many of his stories are still waiting.

The author spent two weeks walking north to south across the French island of Corsica. The mountainous region is a hiker’s paradise in the Mediterranean Sea: plenty of trails, beaches, scenery and a roller coaster of challenging ascents and descents. Bouldrey chose to hike Grand Rondonnee Number 20, one of the region’s most famous treks.

Two weeks on GR20 should have afforded him plenty of material from which to craft a great book, or at least a good one, but the travelogue-memoir falls flat. Mostly this is because the writing is terrible, which comes as a surprise considering that Bouldrey teaches creative writing at Northwestern University.

He litters the text with unnecessary exclamation points, parentheses and italics, and his conversational tone, which sounds like it belongs more on a gossip blog than it does in a published book, is annoying and ineffective. But at least his favorite literary convention is clever, and by “clever” I mean “also terrible.” Throughout the book he leans shamelessly on the tired ‘by this I mean that’ crutch:

“…by pigskin I mean football…”
“…by ‘his,’ I mean ‘hers’…”
“…by subtle I sometimes mean unsubtle…”
“…by dog, I mean Grace, my dog…”
“…by a “new” sort, I mean, of course, a very old sort…”

But the most disappointing part of “Honorable Bandit” is not lazy writing. It is that Bouldrey unveils so little of the island’s history, people and culture. By the end of the book, he hasn’t revealed much more about Corsica than that it is the birthplace of Napoleon Bonaparte, that its landscape suffers ongoing brushfires, and that the word “vendetta” stems from the country’s storied history of revenge killings, after which murderers would flee into the same brush where today hikers don boots.

Partly this is because the author doesn’t speak French, which means he resorts to observing in silence while life on the trail swirls around him. “In truth, mostly I don’t understand,” he writes. “Sitting night after night with other guests in these gites is like getting clues to a mystery. I listen along, fill in unrecognizable words with a sound…hoping to piece together the meaning later.”

Ashamed to be American, Bouldrey pretends on the trail to be Canadian. After a wild pig gets too close to his bottle of wine, he jokes, “If that pig so much as makes the wine ripple in the bottle, I am going to open up a can of imported Canadian whoop-ass on him.” When he knows or suspects that other hikers are aware of his citizenship ruse, he avoids these hikers at all cost. “While it took days to shake the view of Calvi, it is only fifteen minutes after I’ve been exposed as un-Americain to the Pyrenean couple before we lose sight of the old ski lodge. It might have taken twenty minutes if I had not begged Petra to run for her/my life.”

His failure to embrace his American roots ironically prevents him from fully enjoying his Corsican adventure. Had he spent less time in isolation, perhaps he would have been able to more fully expose the beauty of Corsica, but instead “Honorable Bandit” is a cursory snapshot buoyed mostly by poorly written and questionably relevant anecdotes: He writes about Thanksgiving dinner with his “agreeable” Midwestern family; he remembers an old boyfriend who contracted AIDS and died; he recalls watching a prison riot from the top story of a nearby public library, and even his prison-riot story is a snoozer.

The author suggests that his epitaph should read, “Tends to Ramble,” a suggestion supported by this awkwardly phrased run-on sentence: “I can hide (or, more likely in my case, forget) the maps, I can wear the local sports team colors, I can eat the entrails of animals (my people—and by my people, I mean English speakers—call such stuff ‘offal,’ and aurally, that’s an apt word, while ‘sweetmeats,’ not is not) with a good helping of wine.”

He hikes GR20 with his friend Petra, who is a sassy middle-aged German woman who sometimes wears lipstick when she hikes, which Bouldrey makes it a point to emphasize: “And then—listen up, all of you extreme sports dudes and Men’s Journal and Stubborn Pack Mule Monthly readers, for this is important—she applies the lipstick.”

Most of his observations lack insight. “Shoe leather will mysteriously fly apart (I’m not kidding: this happened to me) when you only need it for one more day.” And nearly all of his jokes miss the mark. “Cavemen didn’t have to deal with freakin’ jet lag,” and they “never got to call home after getting gored by a mammoth.” Fortunately for cavemen, they also never had to read “Honorable Bandit.”