Cheap Are You Experienced? (Book) (William Sutcliffe) Price

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Customer Reviews of Are You Experienced?

What do backpackers do all day?
Like many British school leavers from his country, Dave feel heshould go somewhere dangerous before he starts at university. India isnot his choice though, he merely follows Liz who he hopes to have sex with. What follows is a well-written satire on Brit backpackers in India. Dave suffers from the heat, gets stoned...etc. etc. I guess it wasn't too awfully difficult to write this book - just go round a Students' Union in England and tape the stories people tell: Everything was "amazing" of course, and the travellers come back a completely different person - though what exactly makes it amazing and in what the character change consists of would be asking too much. Sutcliffe is excellent on the pointlessness and shallowness of it all.

Somewhere in the middle of the book, Sutcliffe has Dave meet a journalist who tells him: "it's not hippies on a spiritual mission who come here any more, just morons on a poverty-tourism adventure holiday. Your kind of travel is all about low horizons dressed up as open-mindedness." Dave with all his would-be cynicism is a perfect example of this class of travelers.

Some cheap shots cost the book its fifth star. If you loved to hate the post-hippies in Alex Garland's "The Beach", you should go for "Are you experienced?"

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Excellent
I started reading this book at 9PM. I finished at 1AM. I had school the next day.

The book is the first that, for me, has actually been 'unputdownable'. Dave the narrator is an excellent character reminiscent of Blackadder in his sarcasm, which makes you identify and side wth him through all of his troubles. The bitingly sarcastic, cynical edge he whole thing has is superb, and the metamorphoses that the characters undergo totally believable. The only thing I would criticize is the overly neat coincidences, but other than them the book is flawless. Worth buying whatever the cost. I have read this about five times in the past year. Excellent novel.

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JUVENILE (ATTEMPTS AT) HUMOR, UNINSPIRED STORYLINE.
Picked this up on a whim at an airport, seeing the glittering reviews on the book's cover from big tyke publications (NYT, LA Times, Publisher's Weekly). They said this travelogue to India was "funny, very funny" or "hilarious", yada yada.

Sadly, the book is not only extremely unfunny, it also is an idiotic novel. Chapters after chapters brim with juvenile attempts at humor, cuss words and all.

The theme is grounded on discovering India with a supposedly foreign eye, which could have made for a great pretext for some intelligent cultural barbs (and they can be quite funny, India lends itself to quite a bit of ethnic humor), but it is just plain uninteresting. For instance, Indian-isms such as "curd" (yoghurt) are described in painfully unfunny style between the novel's main protagonists.

One wonders what so many reviewers have found entertaining about this bland travelogue. Want to know India? Pick up William Dalrymple. Want to read funny/witty travelogues? Pick up Bill Bryson or Eric Newby.