Future historians may look back on the four decades between 1980 and 2020 as the heyday of international air travel. No doubt many factors ranging from the relatively stable price of fossil fuels to the increasing integration of the global economy contributed to the steady rise in Americans visiting foreign countries during this time. Though never explicitly mentioned, these factors form part of the backdrop for Derrick Credito’s international adventure, The Year of the Tsunami, published by Wandering Bohemian Press in 2022.
The Year of the Tsunami follows the journey of Wes Levine, a nomadic scribe with the aspiration of completing a Torah in honor of his deceased grandparents who fled Europe during the Holocaust. The real motivation behind Wes’s wanderlust, however, is something more universal, so much so that Joseph Campbell assigns it one of the stages in his Hero’s Journey: “atonement with the father.” Wes’s father, Stanley, set out on his own multinational adventure when Wes was 16, and Wes has been trying to find him ever since.
When the story opens we meet Wes in Bangkok, one of many ex-pat English teachers who uses their native fluency to gain employment in Asia. He quickly flies off to New Zealand, where he works on a kiwi farm, and then to Amsterdam, where he secures a position as a Sofer, sponsored by a British friend he meets in New Zealand.
In Amsterdam, Wes’s tale charts a decidedly dualistic trajectory. He begins the lofty, spiritual labor of scribing a Torah at the B’nai Havurah Kehilat synagog, even as he falls in love with a housemate who moonlights as a sex-worker in the city’s red-light district. He embraces Amsterdam’s laissez-faire drug culture while taking painting lessons from the tormented, prostitute-stalking artist occupying the studio space beneath his room. Before the end, Wes will find himself performing sex acts for money in front of a voyeuristic trafficker he meets in a hotel bar.
In their various ways, the characters Wes encounters try to pigeonhole him, close his essentially “open book” personality on a particular page that suits them. But Wes is a difficult character to pin down. Though his father is Jewish, his mother is Catholic. Diasporic wandering and eclecticism are both in his blood. He easily passes through realms, sacred and profane, without passing judgment. It is that very quality that attracts so many to him, and, ironically, the quality they most want to change.
It would be easy to characterize The Year of the Tsunami as a 21st century bildungsroman, with a main character trying to find his place in a global society polarized by extremes of fascistic conservatism and permissive liberalism, but that would ignore the ways that Credito attempts to dismantle the skeleton of patriarchy and sinews of capitalism that have framed the genre for the past 200 years. Wes does not really change in this story, just as the virtues he displays—compassion and tolerance—have remained unchanged for millennia. It is society that needs changing, and throughout the novel there is a roiling apocalypticism, a sense that the change is coming.
Without giving away too much, it seems fitting that The Year of the Tsunami ends with a cataclysmic event, a disaster that erases the very discoveries that fate and coincidence had so recently bestowed upon Wes. He is left with only the here and now. Both rapture and disaster await us all. We can neither seek them out or escape their impact. All we can do is compassionately participate in the present moment. This is the truth that lies at the moral center of The Year of the Tsunami.
Those same historians studying the global travel phenomenon of the last four decades will note the profound drop off in 2020. The COVID-19 pandemic is largely responsible, but so is a worldwide shortage of pilots, and increasing awareness of the massive contributions of global tourism to climate change. We seem to be heading into a world less traveled. In such a world, a novel like The Year of the Tsunami will have increased value, partly for its fantastic portrayal of the exotic and far away, but also for its poignant emphasis on the value of here and now.
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Well worth the read.
A story of promises, travel, self discovery, trials and tribulation. Add in uncertainties, love, dangerous underworld, survival. I really enjoyed this book and highly recommend it.
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A story of promises, travel, self discovery, trials and tribulation. Add in uncertainties, love, dangerous underworld, survival. I really enjoyed this book and highly recommend it.
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- Lynne ChanningReviewed in the United Kingdom on December 7, 2022
A fantastic read, best book i've read in a long while
