The sun. The sea. The many-hued blues of the waves and the water. I cannot remember another book which has so absorbed my senses as William Finnegan’s “Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life.”

The crashing of waves on his ears. The birds. The boats. The banter of surfing friends.

The taste of the salt-water and the icy arctic winds off Montauk on Long Island.

With Finnegan we journey to the world’s premier surfing waters. Honolulu. Fiji. Madeira. Australia. Guam. And on.

Of course, it is winter and I am in slushy Toronto. Not so cold today. Snow lined streets hush the din of traffic.

The traffic inside Finnegan’s memoir is the dialogue with the rocks, the sandy-bottomed bays, the furious energy of the sea. And the speed of gliding down a 20-foot swale in the ocean.

There is day and to my surprise there is night riding. It sounds pretty dangerous.

And to what end?

Finnegan never comes out and says what exactly he loves about surfing. Is it the speed? Is it the thrill of danger? Does he love the sea? It frees him from having to compete in the schoolyard. We never find out exactly what it’s all about for him.

He sure doesn’t want to be a nine-to-fiver.

At one point in his adolescence he admits that the thrill of meeting beach girls was a driving force. Somehow he confuses his devotion for surfing with his girlfriends’ devotion to him. He’s a little surprised when women leave him but not that much.

He eschews calling surfing a sport and hates the popularization of surfing when it impinges on his freedom or safety or the sense of exclusivity. ( )

5/5 ( )

I enjoyed the New Yorker excerpt, but had thought that that was plenty. But the book has so much more. It is really good, but a bit too much for me. ( )

A love story to surfing. I thoroughly enjoyed it. I had the peasant experience of reading the book on holidays in Fiji, surfing Cloudbreak every day. Hearing about staying on Tavarua with no one around, and Restaurants all to yourself sounds magical. It’s hard to walk away without wanting to surf Honolua Bay, Cloudbreak, Restaurants, Paul do Mar, Jardim do Mar, Kirra, and even Long Island and San Fransisco. ( )

“Everything out there was disturbingly interlaced with everything else. Waves were the playing field. They were the goal. They were the object of your deepest desire and adoration. At the same time, they were your adversary, your nemesis, even your mortal enemy. The surf was your refuge, your happy hiding place, but it was also a hostile wilderness—a dynamic, indifferent world.”

The author has been obsessed with surfing since he was an adolescent in the 1960s. This book is a memoir of his surfing adventures and their impact on his life. He travels to many parts of the world, including Indonesia, Oceania, Australia, South Africa, and Portugal. He surfs where he lives in the US – Hawaii, California, and New York. This book is well-written and provides lots of local color for countries around the world. The author features several of his fellow surfers and eccentric characters.

There is a vast amount of information contained in this book of the many factors that impact the decision to go out into the elements, such as currents, wind direction, wave types, and reefs. It gets extremely detailed in places. He explains surfing techniques, boards to use in differing conditions, and the surfing culture.

His obsession seems to be partly based on the endless search for the perfect wave and partly on the exhilaration of living life at the edge of danger. It is a book of journeys around the world and journeys in life. It is a story of “man against the sea” and knowing how far to push one’s own capabilities. His descriptions of surfing fiascos are riveting. He almost drowned several times. In these sections, I found myself holding my breath to find out if he would make it, even though he obviously survived to write this book.

This is not a book about surfing competitions. Nor is it about finding the largest waves. It is about how an obsession with surfing that accompanied the author in each of six decades of his life. Pick this one up if you enjoy stories about extreme sports or adventuring.
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