Whereabouts: Notes on being a Foreigner

A Scottish-born writer based in the Dominican Republic here brings together seven of his pieces that originally appeared in the New Yorker, remarkable stories about his experiences in Spain, Latin America, Scotland and New York. The subject matter ranges from the lives and works of Borges, Neruda, Gracia Marquez and Jimenez, to learning a foreign language, to the differences between living in a home of one’s own and living in the houses of other people. Reid also discusses his reasons for choosing to live under the Spanish dictatorship, toward which he had a strong antipathy. Being in Spain always felt much more like belonging to a conspiracy against the regime than like condoning it. The best known of these essays is Digging Up Scotland, a long account of the author’s return in 1980 to St. Andrew’s on the North Sea with his son Jasper and friends to find a box they had buried in 1971.