Surf epic Barbarian Days is bestseller in US
Paris, July 17: William Finnegan tested the patience of his publisher in the 20 years it took him to write his remarkable memoir of his lifelong obsession with surfing, Barbarian Days.
“I gave up a couple of times, but she always believed,” the laconic American writer said.
Her zen attitude paid off. The book has been heaped with awards including a Pulitzer prize and become a runaway bestseller, with former President Barack Obama among its many fans.
The New York Times called it a classic, the “finest surf book ever”, and up there with Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild as an account of what happens when “ideas of freedom and purity take hold of a young mind and fling his body out into the far reaches of the world”.
Mr Finnegan’s youthful odyssey “as a weird frontier guy” in search of the perfect wave took him from the Los Angeles suburbs to the jungles of Java and apartheid South Africa, surviving on his wits and the kindness of strangers.
Sports Illustrated, not normally prone to literary eulogising, declared that “reading this guy... on waves and water is like reading Hemingway on bullfighting, William Burroughs on controlled substances and Updike on adultery.”
Such praise surprised no one more than Mr Finnegan, who spent his childhood between the beaches of California and Hawaii, where his father worked as a producer and union fixer twisting arms to get television series like Hawaii Five-O made.
“I had visions of people throwing the book across the room because they couldn’t bear another description of a wave,” he said and added, “But people who’d never surfed in their lives told me they completely went with it.”
Still more were taken with his limpid style and lightly worn sea lore, such as how ancient Polynesian mariners navigated not only by the stars but by dipping their testicles in the briny. “Strange but absolutely true,” Mr Finnegan insists.
Now 65, the distinguished war correspondent and New Yorker magazine journalist had kept quiet about his surfing side “until well into middle age”, knowing that his years as a surf bum, a species not renowned for their intellectual acuity, might sit awkwardly with his writerly ambitions.