Dave's Book Blog: "Stranger on a Train" by Jenny Diski

Friday, 9 January 2026

"Stranger on a Train" by Jenny Diski

This delightful travel-book-cum-autobiography won the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award and the J R Ackerley Prize for Autobiography in 2003.

It has some awesome moments but structurally it rather rambles. For example, it starts with her travelling on a cargo ship to America. Then she embarks on a train journey from Savannah to Tucson, Arizona where she is meeting a friend. Then she has another journey from New York in a counter-clockwise circle around America back to New York, although the account of this journey peters out on the final leg somewhere in South Carolina. Throughout, her account of the journey (mostly the characters she meets in the smoking carriage) repeatedly lurches into autobiography.

Nevertheless, the book is enjoyable because of the things she discusses, such as a friend dying of cancer which prompts her to compare the non-existence of before birth with the non-existence after death and find both equally horrid. She also discusses politics (she is far more left-wing than most of the Americans she meets), mental handicaps and illnesses, the solipsism of sleep, and smoking (a lot). She has the ability to make the reader since old ideas from a new perspective.

There are also some very funny moments, such as when a teenager complains about the notice warning about "live tracks" on the ground that tracks can't be alive: “I mean, like, live tracks. What's that supposed to mean? ... do they think people would really believe the tracks were alive? Like, how stupid do they think people are? You know, like rails are made of metal, how can they be alive? Only people and animals are actually living. Everyone knows that. Live tracks. Isn't that incredible?” (Journey Two: Live Tracks)

Selected quotes:

“I hate neat endings. I have an antipathy to finishing in general. The last page, the final strains of a chord, the curtain falling ... living happily ever after; all that grates on me. The finality is false, because there you still are, the reader ... left out of the resolution of the story that seduced you into thinking yourself inside it.” (Circles and Straight Lines)
“A great-bellied man entirely at the mercy of gravity. Everything about him tended downward: his belly, his chin, his jowls and the corners of his eyes and mouth.” (Journey One: Magic Monotony)
“I found myself thinking a good deal about the condition of not yet having been born ... a state of non-existence which we had all already not-experienced. ‘So you've already not been. How was it for you?’ ... ‘It didn't bother me at the time.’ ... But the more I thought about it, the more I tried to use the time before my birth as an idea to make death more tolerable, the angrier I became at having been excluded from the events that occurred in history, which is what we call the period before our personal arrival on the planet.” (Journey One: Magic Monotony)
“We may try to console ourselves that death is not the end of the world, but it's the fact that it isn't the end of the world that is so blindingly difficult to cope with.” (Journey One: Magic Monotony)
“America might look vast on the map, but for many people it's as small as their local town, beyond which is an uncharted wilderness inhabited by monsters.” (Journey One: Only the Lonely)
“The humiliation of being caught is what has kept me relatively docile and law-abiding all these years, because although the desire to transgress rules simply because they exist no longer amounts to a compulsion, I still experience an innate and unresolved dislike of authority in any form.” (Journey One: When You’re Strange)
“The sky is vast and vacuously blue, the empty deserts at sunset threaten the spirit with theirs scrubby grey-green dying light, the rivers wind from bare trickles in parched Earth to thunderous rushing torrents, the canyons dismay and dizzy you as you stare down into them and try to make out the bottom, the mountains loom in anthropomorphic shapes of things seen best in dreams, the grasslands and wheatfields wave like an endless syrupy ocean tickled into motion by the breeze.” (Journey One: Too Much To Ask)
“Life on a train, in a circumscribed space with a group of others all with our lives on hold ... is also the way of the boarding school, the convent, the prison and the psychiatric hospital.” (Journey One: Too Much To Ask)
“The ghost of good-looking on his wrecked features.” (Journey One: Too Much To Ask)
“You're the wrong kind of retard.” (Journey One: Too Much To Ask)
“When you've lost everything because of the booze, you only have the booze left to comfort you.” (Journey One: Too Much To Ask)
“The blue, we like to believe, is a place apart from life, a separate realm where the discontinuities exist, queuing, or more likely jostling, for their moment to drop on an unsuspecting world. The bolts from the blue manifest themselves in unscheduled knocks on the front door, the phone ringing late at night ...” (Journey One: By the Time I Got to Phoenix)
“How strange it is during childhood that we are told it is rude to point, that is, to point out what is pointedly different, to remark on the remarkable, to notice the noticeable. Don't look, my mother used to say, whenever there was anything worth looking at.” (Journey Two: Live Tracks)
“What you discover, when you first spend the night with someone else, is that, whatever the quality of togetherness the sex might bring you, the quality of separation and utter aloneness when the one of you that isn't you is asleep it's unlike anything else in the world. People sleep alone, no matter that you are in their arms or they in yours. They go away when they sleep to a private place surrounded by overgrown briars and walls of unconsciousness as impenetrable as stone. ... It's a private truth. There are some between people. The solipsism of sleep is one of them.” (Journey Two: Live Tracks)
“Even those you live with are alone sometimes and retain momentary secrets. You can't watch all the time.” (Journey Two: Live Tracks)
“He sank his teeth and most of his face into one of the most evil-smelling microwaved hotdogs it was ever my misfortune to have waft my way.” (Journey Two: Expending Nerve Force)
“When I was growing up in the centre of London, I never saw young people sleeping on pavements. It didn't happen until Margaret Thatcher was elected.” (Journey Two: Expending Nerve Force)
“A tired-looking woman with a body that had broken free of its youthfully contained voluptuousness.” (Journey Two: Expending Nerve Force)
“Silence and food in company is a very bad combination in my view. ... the only thing I managed to think at these monkish meals was how no one was talking and however everyone had their own special, and increasingly disgusting, way of shovelling food into their faces.” (Journey Two: Just Like Misery)
“So far as I could see it [baseball] was rounders but so slow it made cricket look like an extreme sport.” (Journey Two: Just Like Misery)