A collection of assorted short pieces from the 80s and 90s that mostly fall under the general heading of "travel-writing", even if their geographical scope is a bit smaller than the title suggests: all but the last few short pieces inn the collection deal with Austria and its immediate neighbours. We visit a Hallig off the North-Frisian coast, and a number of unusual villages in Austria and Bavaria; we go on a bus tour with a bunch of die-hard royalists on their way to celebrate the 90th birthday of ex-empress Zita; we head for Częstochowa in the middle of the Jaruzelski martial law period; we glimpse a South Italian village in the best Carlo Levi tradition; and we ramble off with the author into a discussion of television and what it means to the people who watch it. And then, at the end of the book we get a few historical miniatures (Mehmet at the gates of Constantinople, Daedalus in Knossos, Akbar in Fatehpur, ...) as well as the truck-ride into Surabaya that the title promised us.

Ransmayr doesn't do anything very surprising with this kind of subject-matter, but he has the good journalist's instinct for picking out a few characteristic local people and their stories to provide a framework for the things he wants us to know about the place he's discussing. The writing at its best is tight and compelling — and, where appropriate, also very funny, e.g. in the Hapsburg piece — but there are a few pieces where he seems to have no very clear aim in view, e.g. the essay on television. I think he's at his most interesting when he's talking about how small communities work in the modern world, and the conflicting pressures they are under to create jobs, protect the environment, or entertain visitors. ( )