Camino al Este: Crónicas de amor y desamor
Javier Sinay
NON FICTION | 2019 | 318 pages
Travel was not a priority for Javier Sinay. But one day in 2017, he packed a few things in a bag and took off on an extravagant adventure: a trip from Buenos Aires to Japan, crossing through all of Europe and Asia by bus, train, boat, and plane. The reason? A woman named Higashi, his partner, who was spending that entire year in Kyoto dedicated to studying the traditional tea ceremony…
He decided that a few conventional visits—flying to Japan, spending some time there, flying back—would not suffice. And so, he envisioned a route and threaded each one of its phases with the same question. If he was capable of going to find a woman on the other side of the world, what horrifying, marvelous, unexpected things are people capable of doing for love? That is how this chronicle of his trip came about, a chronicle that is also the story of a German congressman’s gory obsession with his secretary, the story of a Russian policeman who never got over his wife’s infidelity and turned into a serial murderer and rapist, the story of a Chinese man who looks for a boyfriend for his daughter in the parks of Beijing, the story of a young man who gets paid by women for a bit of conversation in Tokyo, and the story of Sinay—who, at the beginning of the book, doesn’t find traveling particularly appealing, but then finds himself transformed into a potential nomad, entranced by the idea of perpetual movement.
Read an adapted excerpt in English in Asymptote here.
RIGHTS: spanish PLANETA | italian GRAN VIA EDIZIONI
“Over the course of five months, Javier Sinay embarks on a trip to try and clarify the enigma that is love. And what he discovers throughout the 330 pages of his book is that he can’t do this without reconstructing the foundations of the societies and cultures in which each love grows, develops, and dies. (...) Everything takes on a new meaning when it serves to explain how love is conceived in each latitude. Including the Baroque and desolate landscapes he describes, and even he and his partner themselves: everything becomes a narrative piece to try and explain love.”
“Sinay embraces a first-person that makes the reader feel comfortable with the confessions from a story that knows how to be both intimate and universal.”
“‘There are few trips that don’t know their words from the beginning,’ Caparrós affirms. It is impossible to know how true this holds for Sinay, but it is possible to deduce it from the effectiveness of the structure, the solidity of the investigations, the precision of his ideas, and, above all, the loving celebration of his journey to Higashi, which means ‘East’ in Japanese.”
“In love with his girlfriend and his profession, he crunched the numbers and made a bet: he’d go find her, and record his trip backpacking through Europe and Asia in a chronicle that portrayed the different kinds of love he would encounter on his journey. The result is an excellent book. To find out how the love story with Higashi went, you have to read Camino al Este (Tusquets): a work about falling in love, falling out of love, companionship, and loneliness.”
“The book combines mileage with the author’s personal love stories, which, like all of ours, contain happiness, disappointment, coexistence, and ruptures. These passages have the effect of giving an emotional approach to a terrestrial encounter.”
“Javier Sinay is one of those journalists that we are all proud of.”
“And I can’t tell you how much I enjoyed your beautiful essay on Borges and Basho and Hearn (so beautifully translated, too): that exquisite paragraph about walking, the reference to “wind and silence,” the line about “distance being a chasm” in haiku: sublime.”
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