There’s a notion that reading a good travel book makes every reader want to pack his bags and follow suit. For me, reading about the writer’s journey is enough, the keener the writing, the more palpable my ‘outsourced travel’. Having explained this strange relationship I have with travel and travelogues, it should be easier to understand why Buzz Aldrin’s book, Magnificent Desolation: The Long Journey Home From the Moon, is so precious to me. Aldrin describes the moonscape early on in the book: “In its starkness and monochromatic hues, it was indeed beautiful. But it was a different sort of beauty than I had ever before seen. Magnificent, I thought, then said, ‘Magnificent desolation’…” Apollo 11’s actual eight-day journey to the moon and back covers less than a fifth of the book. But it is the journey that follows after his return to Earth that turns this travelogue into something rare. After the moon, what next? Adrin describes his inner turmoil while thinking about the days, months, years ahead again as ‘magnificent desolation’. His battle with depression and alcoholism becomes the real journey that reads like being lost in a polar landscape. Magnificent Desolation provides a rare view: of the tyranny of returning home.
Indrajit Hazra is a writer and journalist whose latest book is Grand Delusions: A Short Biography of Kolkata.