by JULIET WATERS

Sun After Dark opens with an essay that for the first few pages reads almost like a parody of the sort of "global soul" travel writing Pico Iyer has become - intentionally or not - associated with.

Iyer arrives at a Zen monastery where he's greeted by "an older man, stooped a little and shaven-headed, in tattered black gown and woolen cap and glasses. He extends a hand, gives me a bow and, picking up my case, leads me off to a cabin…" This man is "probably thirty years older than most of the fresh-faced young men and women in attendance: yet as they walk around the tree, at top speed, he seems at least thirty years stronger, too." And of course he is a curious mixture of ancient and modern "his ragged gown, I notice is held together with safety pins. The small Technics synthesizer in the next room is unplugged." Fortunately, just when you start to think you've read this same essay possibly 100 times in each of your past lives, there's a twist. This humble man is Leonard Cohen living in a monastery just outside of L.A. and serving as "cook, chauffeur and sometimes drinking-buddy to a 90-year-old Japanese roshi."

Since the publication of Video Night in Kathmandu, Iyer has become best known for finding something weirdly familiar in the foreign, the natural side effect of globalization. His latest collection takes a sharp turn, striving instead with the first essay to find something weirdly foreign in the familiar. (This may work particularly well for Montrealers who have read the standard Leonard Cohen profile enough times now for one Jewish Montreal writer to have dubbed him Leonard Groan.) Throughout this collection of essays there seems to be a common project: to play with our notion of just what is "foreign" in a world where staying in one place now seems to be the most foreign and uncomfortable state of being for us.

Iyer will be in town next week for Blue Metropolis, and it's hard to think of an international author better suited to this festival's eclectic charms. Just as you're never sure exactly what you're going to get from a Blue Met panel comparing the literary traditions of Quebec, Scotland and Catalonia (who knew that Michel Tremblay was a star in Edinburgh?), you never know quite where you're going to end up when Iyer takes you to La Paz, Yemen, or Port-au-Prince.

You could end up in a frame of mind, a digressive meditation on the dislocation of people or cultures, or you could end up in prison. Way back in the '80s and '90s you might be able to expect something provocative, but perhaps a little cerebral from this self-described "Indian boy born in London and raised in California." These days it's, unfortunately, not all that unexpected to find him naked, having his genitals prodded with a truncheon in a Bolivian holding cell because he fits the profile of a modern-day terrorist.

A darker thread of anxiety is weaving its way into Iyer's meditations, evident in the last sentence in the book, a street sign that reads "TOMORROW BELONGS TO HAITI." The world has changed greatly since Iyer started writing, back when it was possible to write a lighthearted youthful essay on the inevitable appearance of Coca Cola or Steven Seagal in the farthest reaches of the planet.

Globalization has always been a concept more fraught with questions than answers. Increasingly the questions are deeper, more difficult, and often unanswerable. "The physical aspect of travel is," Iyer writes, "the least interesting; what really draws me is the prospect of stepping out of the daylight of everything I know, into the shadows of what I don't know, and may never know."

Sun After Dark: Flights Into The Foreign by Pico Iyer, Knopf, hc, 223pp, $34.95. Pico Iyer will be interviewed at Blue Metropolis (Hyatt Regency, 1255 Jeanne-Mance) on Thursday April 1 At 7pm, $5. He will also appear on panels on Friday, April 2 and Saturday, April 3