These experiences have produced a significant body of reporting and four books (one on Mozambique, two on South Africa, and 1998’s Cold New World: Growing Up in a Harder Country, about the darker strains of teenage life in the US). An award winning journalist and staff writer for the New Yorker since 1987, the brunt of Finnegan’s work has found him embedded in zones of turmoil: wars in Mozambique, South Sudan, El Salvador apartheid and socio-political upheaval in South Africa. It takes a skilled writer to craft engaging prose from the “you-had-to-be-there” experiences and Finnegan’s credentials speak for themselves. At its best, Barbarian Days reveals the surfing experience as more than the sum of its tropes, not as a lifestyle, but as life itself. Thus, the most striking quality of William Finnegan’s recent memoir, Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life, is the author’s ability to dig deep (sometimes very deep) into his lifelong existential love affair with surfing while keeping the romantic-metaphoric impulse at bay. To be fair, it is easy to romanticize something you love (other guilty parties: food and travel writers). Ignoring the insular texts, the romantic approach of “surfing as _” is not inherently flawed, but suffers when the chosen metaphor becomes a device for the author to avoid the task of translating a unique bodily experience to text worth reading. There are of course, excellent surf writers- Matt Warshaw, John Severson, just about anyone published in the Surfer’s Journal-and an expanding canon of surf literature.
Most surf writing is esoteric and insular-only of interest to surfers-or an overly-romanticized take on surfing as nature/lifestyle/religion/etc., or a combination of both. While this is great for surfing itself, it has lukewarm literary consequences.
That all of these definitions are more or less true says as much about the way we make sense of our physical experience as it does about the allure of wave riding. It depends on whom you ask, but no one is necessarily wrong. Surfing is: a sport, not a sport, a lifestyle, a religion, a commune with nature, an art, a craft, a science, a transcendental experience, the best natural high. Surfers are a fickle lot: millions of people singularly obsessed with something that has been around for thousands of years, who do not really agree about anything.
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