Geoff Dyer is one of the exciting international authors coming to the 2014 Open Book Festival happening in Cape Town next month.
His latest book, Another Great Day at Sea: Life Aboard the USS George H.W. Bush, is “the definitive work of an author whose books defy definition”. It chronicles Dyer’s experiences on the USS George H.W. Bush as he navigates the routines and protocols of “carrier-world,” from the elaborate choreography of the flight deck through miles of walkways and hatches to kitchens serving meals for a crew of five thousand to the deafening complexity of catapult and arresting gear. Meeting the Captain, the F-18 pilots and the dentists, experiencing everything from a man-overboard alert to the Steel Beach Party, Dyer guides us through the most AIE (acronym intensive environment) imaginable.
Read an excerpt from Another Great Day at Sea:
We were going to be flying to the U.S.S. George H. W. Bush from the Navy base in Bahrain on a Grumman C-2A Greyhound, an ungainly propeller plane. There was nothing sleek or speedy about it. The sky was doing what it always did at this time: waiting for the sun to show up. The temperature was pleasant; a few hours from now it would be infernal. Sixteen passengers, all but two Navy, gathered around the back of the plane to listen to the safety briefing. Our luggage had been weighed and taken away for loading. I had had to hand over my computer bag, because when we landed on the carrier—when the plane touched down and hooked the arresting wire, the “trap”—we would go from a hundred and forty miles per hour to zero in a couple of seconds. The “trap”—the first of many words that I would hear for the first time.
Get to know Dyer with this interview by Matthew Specktor for the Paris Review:
INTERVIEWER
The first thing I’d like—
DYER
Excuse me for interrupting, but—at the risk of sounding like some war criminal in the Hague who refuses to acknowledge the legitimacy of the court in which he’s being tried—I have to object to the parameters of this interview.
INTERVIEWER
On what grounds?
DYER
It’s titled “The Art of Nonfiction.” Now I could whine, “What about the fiction?” but that would be to accept a distinction that’s not sustainable. Fiction, nonfiction—the two are bleeding into each other all the time.
INTERVIEWER
You don’t distinguish between them at all?
DYER
I don’t think a reasonable assessment of what I’ve been up to in the last however many years is possible if one accepts segregation.
Book details
- Another Great Day at Sea: Life Aboard the USS George H.W. Bush by Geoff Dyer
EAN: 9780307911582
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Image courtesy of Dyer’s website