April-June 2014 : Travel Writing and Travelogues Theme Read

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April-June 2014 : Travel Writing and Travelogues Theme Read

1lilisin
mrt 21, 2014, 10:13 am

For the second quarter of Reading Globally I came up with the idea of exploring travelogues. There were two major reasons for this:

1) Over the years we've spent some amazing moments exploring fictional explorations of various countries around the world and some have read nonfictional works as well. However, what about that middle ground? The nonfictional idea of the traveler, exploring a country, and their near fictional experiences? I felt there was some interesting territory to be explored here.
2) I had previously read a travelogue (but only one) and remember being mesmerized by the experience. It was an entirely different way of reading that I had not explored before. So I thought, why not make it a theme?

Now, as a moderator of this theme, this is not the part where I will list hundreds of suggested books for us to read. I'm hoping to make this a high group participation type of a theme. I will be preparing questions for us to discuss and explore as we read through the quarter.

In any case, I hope you join us! I'm thinking this theme can end up being really exciting!

2lilisin
mrt 21, 2014, 10:25 am

When discussing options for potential theme reads, there were some ecstatic responses and some hesitant ones. So, as a starting point I thought we'd share our experiences with this genre with a few questions to serve as inspiration.

Have you read within the genre of travel writing or travelogues? Did you have any initial trepidation or do you have any right now? What are some countries you have explored or wish to explore? Share some of the books you are thinking about reading.

Personally, my first experience was with Alan Booth's The Roads to Sata, a marvelous book about his 1000 mile walk along the length of Japan. I had not yet explored the genre as I wasn't even very aware that it existed, even though I was familiar with the term memoir. However, when my mom purchased the book, read it and loved it, I decided I had to read it myself and it really moved me. I've ended up recommending the book many times since then as it always comes up in discussion. Once I read it, it seemed such a silly thought not to read more books of the type but that was at least 7 years ago. So I'm excited to explore the theme.

To prepare for this theme read I read Elizabeth Eaves Wanderlust which gave me a lot of ideas for questions and was quite a delight to read. On my TBR as options I have Alan Booth's other travelogue about Japan, Looking for the Lost and then the book The Inland Sea by the famous Donald Richie.

3Korrick
Bewerkt: mrt 21, 2014, 5:41 pm

I've been meaning to get to West's Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey through Yugoslavia and Ryszard Kapuściński's Imperium and Shadow of the Sun for ages. I'm also hoping to get my hands on some Patrick Leigh Fermor soon.

4rebeccanyc
mrt 21, 2014, 3:25 pm

Over the years, I have read a variety of wonderful books about travel. Most recently, I read the third of Patrick Leigh Fermor's books about his youthful travel, on foot, from Holland to Constantinople, on the eve of the second world war. The first two, A Time of Gifts and From the Woods to the Water, are among my favorite books of all time (a long list, I hasten to add), and the third, published posthumously The Broken Road, was good but not up to the first two.

I also loved An Armenian Sketchbook by Vassily Grossman.

In the past few years, I also was entranced by Ian Frazier's Travels in Siberia and Dersu the Trapper by V.K.. Arseniev. I would classify the latter maybe a little more as exploration literature, but I'm going to expand my reading in that direction anyway. I wasn't that enamored of Kapuscinski's Travels with Herodotus -- it made me think I should be reading Herodotus himself instead.

Years ago (decades, in fact) I read several books by Eric Newby -- I don't really remember them but I must have liked them. The first I read was On the Shores of the Mediterranean, which I bought and read while I was actually on the shores of the Mediterranean, and I think there is something to be said for reading books about an area while you are there.

The books I'm hoping to read include more travel-oriented ones, like Leigh Fermor's books about Greece, some possibly more of historical interest than travel interest, like Journey to a War by W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood, which I bought because of a recommendation here on LT and Chekhov's Sakhalin Island and A Journey to the End of the Russian Empire, and books which I classify more as exploration, including several about polar expeditions (including The Worst Journey in the World by Apsley Cherry-Garrard, Cold: The Record of an Antarctic Sledge Journey by Laurence McKinley Gould, The South Pole: An Account of the Norwegian Expedition in the Fram by Roald Amundsen, Arctic Labyrinth: The Quest for the Northwest Passage by Glyn Williams, and The Ends of the Earth: An Anthology of the Finest Writing on the Arctic and Antarctic by Elizabeth Kolbert) and some about scientific explorers.

Other books I've had on the TBR for a while that I might get to include Terra Nullius: A Journey through No One's Land, an LT recommendation about Australia; Journeys by Stefan Zweig; From Heaven's Lake: Travels through Sinkiang and Tibet by Vikram Seth, one of my favorite writers; Autonauts of the Cosmoroute by Julio Cortazar; Sacred Sea: A Journey to Lake Baikal by Peter Thomson; No Mercy: A Journey to the Heart of the Congo by Redmond O'Hanlon; In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin which I've had probably for more than 25 years and am amazed I've never read; Stones of Silence: Journeys in the Himalayas by biologist George Schaller; The Road from the Past: Traveling through History in France by Ina Caro; and Space Chronicles: Facing the Ultimate Frontier by Neil deGrasse Tyson.

As always, way too much to choose from! I am excited about exploring this field with the rest of you and finding more interesting books to read.

5lilisin
Bewerkt: mrt 21, 2014, 3:30 pm

Leave it to you, rebecca, to have seemingly already read every book within the genre! Great to have you joining in on the theme read. I'm already curious about the Zweig.

6rebeccanyc
mrt 21, 2014, 3:37 pm

I haven't read all (or even most) of these, lilisin, and the fact that I can list them at all is thanks to LT and my "travel" and "exploration" tags!

7thorold
Bewerkt: mrt 21, 2014, 5:44 pm

I love travel books, but it's an endless field. Worse than novels: for every one you read you discover another four or five you would like to. Apart from the parameter of space, which is obviously crucial for travel writing, you can also play around with time (travel books go at least as far back as Xenophon), and then you have to choose your means of travel: do you stick with the mainstream feet, trains, ships, camels and post-chaises, or do you wander off into the exotica of bicycles, rowing boats, gipsy caravans, balsa wood rafts, and all the rest? Do you make a distinction between travel and exploration?

Some of my favourites in the more straightforward literary travel genre: in the 20th century Chatwin and PLF of course, as Rebecca already said, but also the inevitable Wilfred Thesiger and Robert Byron. In the 19th George Borrow, Eothen, Emily Eden, Richard Ford.

I'm reading The broken road at the moment, slowly, and on the TBR pile I have From heaven lake, Doris Lessing's African laughter and Penelope Chetwode's Kulu (that's Lady Betjeman, who in her old age used to leave her husband with his mistress in London and go off pony-trekking in the Himalayas). I read Nicolas Bouvier's L'usage du monde a couple of years ago, and I definitely want to try to read some more of his work. He was a kind of Swiss proto-hippie who drove via Yugoslavia to the Khyber Pass in a decrepit Fiat Topolino in the early fifties.
But I'm going through a Spanish phase at the moment, so I'll have to dig out some Spanish travel writing. Maybe I'll try Bernal Díaz?

8overlycriticalelisa
mrt 21, 2014, 5:44 pm

i have really enjoyed just about everything i've read that fits into this category. it's going to be fun to see all the new books to add to the list!

i'm currently reading iberia which technically counts but isn't written like other ones in this vein that i've read. >7 thorold: but it's about spain if you're looking for a long thick one that isn't written much like a novel (at least not through page 60).

9thorold
mrt 21, 2014, 5:53 pm

>8 overlycriticalelisa:
I see one of the reviews says "...I stopped at page 500 and never started again"!
I was thinking about books by Spanish-language writers, rather than books about Spain, but it's one to bear in mind. Thanks!

10overlycriticalelisa
mrt 21, 2014, 6:25 pm

>9 thorold:
i was figuring you were but thought i'd throw it out there since i'm in the middle of it. you'd think that 500 pages in the investment would be significant, but that's only about halfway through this one. i usually really like his stuff but this isn't grabbing me so far. still, i've heard it's quintessential writing about spain. as a writer he definitely captures the feel of wherever he is in his novels, i expect that to be true here, too. i think the time period will be significant, though, as so much has changed since he wrote this in 1968, about travels and time spent there in the decades before that.

11anisoara
mrt 22, 2014, 8:31 am

I'm restricted to my Kindle for another month, but I've got some Patrick Leigh Fermor as well as Grossman's Armenian Sketchbook, as well as Steinbeck's A Russian Journal and Lawrence's The Sea and Sardinia.

12southernbooklady
mrt 22, 2014, 9:01 am

The best travel book I've read in the last ten years is one I found thanks to a recommendation on LT several years ago:

An African in Greenland by Tete-Michel Kpomassie

It's a remarkable book, not the least because it is completely free of the "white-man-visits-the-primitive" narrative that undercuts so much travel lit. Basically a young man from Togo decides to go to Greenland, primarily because he has read there are no snakes there.

The language is poetic and beautiful, the author gentle but endlessly curious. It's a great, great book.

13anisoara
mrt 22, 2014, 10:38 am

#12 - This sounds wonderful. Thank you for mentioning it. I've now added it to my wish list.

14rebeccanyc
mrt 22, 2014, 11:01 am

>12 southernbooklady: I have that one too; not sure why I left it off my list of books above.

15PaperbackPirate
Bewerkt: mrt 23, 2014, 1:46 pm

I have Travels with Charley: In Search of America by John Steinbeck and A Woman Alone: Travel Tales from Around the Globe by Faith Conlon on my tbr pile so I'll be reading one of those.

16banjo123
Bewerkt: mrt 23, 2014, 4:16 pm

I am ambivalent about travel writing, because I always think it's more about the writer than the travels. But maybe that's not a bad thing? At any rate, I plan to participate.

My favorite book for this theme would be Bruce Chatwin's Songlines. Also, if we are including books in the US what about Henry Miller's The Air-Conditioned Nightmare?

I have been wanting to read An African in Greenland and also Peter Matthiesen's The Snow Leopard.

Also, Rebecca, I am excited that you have a book by George Schaller. He is great! I got into him after reading a National Geographic article in a doctor's waiting room. I read one of his books, but now I don't recall which one. Definitely not the one you have though--it was about tigers.

17rebeccanyc
mrt 24, 2014, 8:11 am

Rhonda, I read Schaller's The Year of the Gorilla as a teenager and have been meaning to read more by him ever since. I loved Peter Matthiessen's Shadow Country, but it's not a travel read.

18thorold
mrt 24, 2014, 1:27 pm

I'm intrigued by all the mentions of An African in Greenland, but it seems a shame that you can only get it in translation: the French edition has been out of print for years, and the handful of copies on ABEBooks are in the $50+ range (there are plenty of copies around in Dutch, German and Italian, though). In general I approve of James Kirkup, but I don't like reading translations of things I could perfectly well read in the original. Annoying.

19overlycriticalelisa
Bewerkt: mrt 24, 2014, 3:04 pm

>9 thorold:

an update: (i don't think you were in danger of it, but) do not read this book (iberia) if you want a travelogue of any type. it's more just history of spain and it's not well written and for someone who is usually quite liberal and openminded, so far it's also kind of offensive. but then, i might be missing a lot because all i can bring myself to do is skim or scan. i'm giving it 3 more days and that's it.

20frithuswith
mrt 24, 2014, 6:28 pm

I am sneaking in to join in (I hope that's OK!).

I can second the recommendations of Terra Nullius's unflinching description of the abuses of Aboriginal rights in Australia, A Time of Gifts - terrifyingly erudite but beautiful - and Bruce Chatwin's only-mostly-fictional Songlines. I would add From the Holy Mountain by William Dalrymple, an extraordinary exploration of the Christian communities across Greece, Turkey and the Levant.

I am currently pondering reading one or several of Jan Morris's Venice, A Ride to Khiva (by a young British officer in the late nineteenth century who decided to go investigate what the Russians were up to) or A Dairymaid Travels the World, which, if nothing else, will be a different perspective - that of an intelligent, somewhat rebellious Icelandic woman who decided in her fifties to go and see the world.

21banjo123
mrt 25, 2014, 12:29 am

>19 overlycriticalelisa: elisa.saphier: Well, Elisa, I am convinced to never read Iberia! I'm amazed you persevered this far with it!

22rebeccanyc
mrt 25, 2014, 1:10 pm

>20 frithuswith: The more the merrier!

23overlycriticalelisa
mrt 26, 2014, 12:30 am

>21 banjo123:

finished it this evening! i gave it a pretty bad review, but really i think that if you weren't expecting a travelogue and were actively seeking some really detailed history of spain and certain cultural staples of spain, maybe it would be alright. maybe...

24whymaggiemay
apr 1, 2014, 6:04 pm

This quarter fits with my book club read this month West With the Night by Beryl Markham. I also have several others on Mt. TBR, including Baghdad Without a Map by Tony Horwitz. I also wonder wether Burmese Days by George Orwell might fit here. Obviously, haven't read it so will have to investigate.

In the fiction arena there's always The Voyages of Dr. Doolittle or Gulliver's Travels, and I vaguely remember that Travels With My Aunt would also fit. I'll have to do some thinking about which fiction books I have that would fit the theme. I'm sure I have lots.

26banjo123
apr 2, 2014, 1:14 am

I am planning to start with The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiessen

Quartzite - Bryson is hit or miss for me but I ADORE A Walk in the Woods. So funny!

27thorold
apr 4, 2014, 7:34 am

I've somehow got completely side-tracked and started reading Norman Douglas's Old Calabria (1915). He comes up in other writers' memoirs all the time, as a kind of tourist attraction (last of the great Edwardian reprobates), but I've never actually read any of his work before. Quite amusing, when he's not being insufferably superior.

28thorold
Bewerkt: apr 6, 2014, 4:01 pm

Italy
Old Calabria (1915) by Norman Douglas (1868-1952)

Before reading this, all I knew of Norman Douglas was a vague idea of him as one of the last of the great Edwardian reprobates, famous for his talent for hopping over a succession of frontiers just in time to avoid (sex) scandals, regarded in his later life as one of the cultural monuments of Capri (together with Gracie Fields and William Walton). Now that I look, I see I have a copy of South wind on the TBR shelf, but it's still untouched.

Old Calabria, published in 1915, purports to be an account of one journey through Southern Italy, but it soon becomes clear that Douglas must have visited the area several times between about 1908 and 1912 (there are few mentions of external events, but he does talk about the Messina earthquake and the Albanian rebellion).

You do have to wonder a bit how many British readers would have been in the mood for a book like this in 1915, with the world apparently falling to bits around them, and travel a luxury that most wouldn't be able to undertake for quite some years to come. It is notable that, whilst he quotes extensively in Latin, Greek, French and Italian, he never uses more than the odd word of German: in the circumstances, he probably wanted to play down the fact that he had spent about half his childhood in German-speaking countries and had a German mother.

There is no attempt to cultivate the spontaneous “diary-style” later popularised by Robert Byron: it's the kind of travel book that wears its erudition with pride, and was obviously put together not merely in one library, but in a whole succession of them. Douglas refers to, and quotes from, all manner of obscure sources: not just the classical authors and recent travel writers you might expect, but also all manner of obscure 17th and 18th century local historians. Douglas clearly takes an especial pleasure in lives of local saints, the more implausible the better. There's a whole chapter devoted to an obscure flying Franciscan, and another to a saint who devoted much of his time to the useful art of resurrecting deceased eels.

But Douglas isn't just interested in history and religion: there are long discussions of problems like malaria, deforestation, crime and the failures of the Italian justice system. There's a chapter about a 17th century play that might have inspired Paradise lost. A discussion of Pythagoras leads to a long aside on the intellectual weakness resulting from too much indulgence in the kind of soft, anti-scientific thought that comes from Pythagoras and Plato (a weakness he specifically accuses the English of being prone to). So it's definitely not a journey for cissies. But you shouldn't let that put you off. Most of the names he drops are so obscure that he clearly doesn't expect his readers to be able to pick them up, and you can make sense of most things without having heard of them. The style is a bit Edwardian, but it's still extremely readable. Somewhere about halfway between Ruskin and Oscar Wilde, perhaps, if you can imagine that. Fiercely intelligent and erudite, but with a waspish delight in teasing the reader’s expectations.

On the more prosaic side, there's a lot of very perceptive observation of local people and habits. Some obvious prejudices, of course, but not as many as you might expect from someone of his class and period. He likes to complain about the discomforts of travelling, and is often very funny when he does, but he's also realistic about what to expect, and makes the best of what he can find. He knows he's in an area where there are no roads to speak of, few hotels and fewer travellers, and many places are so poor that there is simply no food that anyone can sell him. He has a lot of fun playing the game where he has to let the locals cheat him exactly enough to satisfy their own self-respect, but not so much that they despise him. By the sound of it, even more fun when the local doing the cheating is a saucy young man with Hellenic good looks...

29kidzdoc
Bewerkt: apr 8, 2014, 8:17 am

This theme comes at a perfect time for me, as I will visit Paris and Barcelona in June, after a return trip to London, and I have several books that I plan to read before I go there.

I'll start with In Search of London by H.V. Morton this coming week, which was originally published in 1951. In the coming months I hope to read Barcelona by Robert Hughes, Roads to Santiago by Cees Nooteboom, Spain in Mind: An Anthology, edited by Alice Lecesse Powers, Paris by Julian Green, and Metro Stop Paris by Gregor Dallas.

Earlier this year I read Homage to Barcelona by Colm Tóibín and Ghosts of Spain by Giles Tremlett, so I'll post reviews of these books here after I write them.

30lilisin
apr 7, 2014, 11:53 am

28, thorold -

Thank you for providing our first review for this theme. A very interesting and well-written review!

---

When I first suggested this topic as a theme read and then while setting up this thread, there seemed to be people noting a difference between travelogues and travel writing? Do you think these are one and the same or are they indeed two different genres?

31kidzdoc
apr 7, 2014, 12:10 pm

Homage to Barcelona by Colm Tóibín

The Irish author Colm Tóibín wrote this extended love letter to his second home during his extended stay there in 1988, 10 years after he first left. He first arrived there in 1975, as a 20 year old recent college graduate, two months before the death of General Francisco Franco. Tóibín begins the book by providing a first hand account of those heady and uncertain days following Franco's death, when no one knew what freedoms would be permitted, or whether democracy would truly take hold in the country after nearly 40 years of civil war and fascist rule. A rich description of the Gothic Quarter (Barri Gòtic), the center of the old city, follows, along with a brief history of the city, Catalonia as a whole, and its unique language, cuisine and relationship with Spain. Separate chapters are dedicated to the lives and influences of Antonio Gaudí, the Modernist architect whose unorthodox creations are featured throughout the city, including the still uncompleted Sagrada Família and the Casa Batlló (both pictured below), Pablo Picasso and Joan Miró.





Tóibín also describes the major political and factions that dominated the city in the years preceding and during the Spanish Civil War, particularly the wealthy landowners and industrialists, who refused to provide their employees with a decent standard of living and occasionally beat and killed those who dared complain; the trade unions that arose in response to the inhumane treatment of the workers; the Anarchists, whose violent opposition to the Church and the wealthy elite led to the deaths of hundreds of priests; the Communists; and the Republican government, which ultimately fell to the rebels led by Franco and his colleagues during the Civil War.

In later chapters he explores smaller towns in Catalonia, including the medieval city of Girona, known for its Passion Play about the last days of Jesus Christ and the macabre and dangerous Dance of Death that only residents can attend; the Costa Brava, which has become a favored destination for tourists but still holds pockets of isolated beauty; and Llavorsí, a mountainous village that has also experienced a not completely welcome transformation due to the influence of non-Catalonians.

Throughout the book Tóibín compares his impressions of Catalonia during his first stay from 1975-1978 with his subsequent ones in 1988. The book closes with the preparations underway in the city for the 1992 Summer Olympic Games, which seem to be disjointed, disruptive and a vague threat to that unique region.

Homage to Barcelona was a superb and beautifully written introduction to a city which I plan to visit for the first time later this year. At just over 200 pages it would serve well as a portable cultural guide to Barcelona and Catalonia, although it is now a bit dated nearly 25 years after its initial release. My only disappointment was that Tóibín only dedicated a couple of paragraphs to the region's leading authors and those non-Catalonians who have written about the city. I used the maps in Everyman Mapguides Barcelona and Secret Barcelona to help me locate the buildings and streets mentioned in Homage to Barcelona, as Tóibín's book contains no illustrations or photographs.

32greydoll
apr 8, 2014, 9:18 am

>26 banjo123: RIP Peter Matthiessen. I have Snow Leopard, Nine-Headed Dragon River and Indian Country and hope to take time to revisit these.

33banjo123
apr 11, 2014, 8:01 pm

>32 greydoll: Yes, I should start reading Snow Leopard right away! Did you read the NYT piece on Matthieson? It was really interesting.

>31 kidzdoc: Thanks for the great review, and pictures!

34greydoll
apr 12, 2014, 3:40 pm

>33 banjo123: Just checked it out... thanks for the pointer banjo.. lots of stuff there.

35anisoara
apr 13, 2014, 7:05 am

Have chosen and begun Peter Matthiesen's Under the Mountain Wall.

36rebeccanyc
Bewerkt: apr 13, 2014, 6:21 pm

Journey to a War by W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood



I bought this book, after seeing it mentioned on LT, because I was taken by the idea of Auden (one of my favorite poets) and Isherwood as war correspondents. In 1938, they were commissioned by British and US publishers to travel to China, which had been invaded by Japan the previous year, and to report on what they saw. The book is written in prose by Isherwood, apparently based on both of their diaries, and the prose is preceded and followed by poetry by Auden (largely sonnets, and one long, "preachy" (Auden's word) "Commentary").

Everywhere they went (and I gave up searching on Google for the locations of the cities and towns they visited -- a map would have been a huge plus for this book), they were greeted as honored guests, even when in several cases the Chinese people they met tried every means, utterly politely, of dissuading them from visiting the front. They met Agnes Smedley and even the Generalissimo (Chiang Kai-Shek) and Madame Chiang, and multitudes of other local leaders, missionaries and religious leaders, military leaders, train workers, hotel owners, "coolies" (such was the language of the time) who pulled rickshaws and carried packages and luggage and even people, interpreters, and many others, both British and Chinese. They describe towns devastated by the Japanese invasion, breathtakingly beautiful scenery, charming hotels and not so charming ones, train trips delayed by Japanese bombing, the way the Chinese welcomed them so wholeheartedly but seemed unprepared for the war, their unsuccessful efforts to visit the Communist Eighth Route Army (the Communists were collaborating in the defense of China at the time), propaganda and army songs, Chinese opera, food and drink (lots of drink), life in the international concessions of otherwise occupied Shanghai, scary trips over mountain passes, the still almost colonial attitude of the British in China, and much more.

All of this is told in an understated but witty way. Even the impact of the war is understated, and I know from other reading how cruel the Japanese invasion of China was. But this is a story of their journey, not of the war itself. Early in their stay, they were told about the German invasion of Austria, and they were to return to a Britain that was soon to be plunged into a war of its own.

37whymaggiemay
apr 13, 2014, 1:54 pm

>36 rebeccanyc: Nice review, Rebecca. Another good book about travel in China during WW II, though it is a biography of the adventurer, is The Man Who Loved China by Simon Winchester.

On another country, I also enjoyed The Places in Between where the author walked Afghanistan at the beginning of the war with the U. S.

38southernbooklady
apr 13, 2014, 4:14 pm

I just finished W. Somerset Maugham's The Gentleman in the Parlour, an account of a trip he took through the Far East-- Burma, Cambodia, Vietnam. It took awhile to grow on me. He begins, without irony, by stating that this is not the kind of journey where the traveler brings along his whole household and attendant conveniences with him, and thus could barely be said to be traveling at all. You have to leave your world behind, he insists, and submerge yourself in new worlds.

This, he does not do. Not in the way we would understand it. Maugham is very much a sahib and is treated as such by everyone he meets. His willingness to sleep in bamboo huts (constructed especially for him by village headmen on the news that his arrival is imminent) and eat food cooked by native cooks not withstanding, Maugham is a white man traveling through lands he endures more than he understands, and at the end of his journey he is as untouched by his experiences (and unmoved) as those lavish travelers he complained of in the beginning of his account.

There is little in the way of real descriptions of the places he passes though, although he is at his best describing ordinary scenes--river traffic, rail station crowds, street bustle and rickshaw rides. He's at his worst whenever he is dragged against his will to some temple or site of local significance. "Another giant head of Buddha" being his usual comment on such things. He makes no effort to discover the history of these places, or to understand their significance. Even the people he meets are not native. His interactions with the locals in any of the countryside he travels through tend to be limited to inquiries about food and accommodations. He saves his longest and most in-depth interest for any European he happens to meet during his journey--an Italian priest who hasn't been home in twenty years, but keeps up with the social scene via magazine subscriptions. A mid-level colonial bureaucrat who is depressed because the Burmese girl he'd taken as a mistress left him when he wouldn't marry her. An old classmate who was kicked out of school after he was arrested, and has washed up in a dingy apartment in Haiphong where he whiles away his life smoking opium and thinking about the life he could have had.

I found Maugham's sense of unquestioned entitlement wearying, in a way I might not have if I'd read the book twenty years ago when I was reading Kipling. And yet....and yet...I kept reading. And by the end of the book I was not only reading, I was engaged. Maugham gets a lot of criticism for his prosaic writing style but I like its dry understated tone and clean use of language. And when he gets going on one of his ex-patriot character sketches, he does a beautiful job. So I think that's the spirit in which The Gentleman in the Parlour needs to be read--not as a 'travel' book, per se, but a book about what it is to be adrift in a foreign land.

39banjo123
apr 13, 2014, 7:40 pm

Interesting insights, southernbooklady.

40thorold
Bewerkt: apr 15, 2014, 3:51 am

China (Xinjiang, Tibet), Nepal
From Heaven Lake (1983) by Vikram Seth (1952-)

On the face of it, it might seem surprising that the author of the longest Indian family-saga novel ever to have dominated the bestseller lists should have started his writing career with this modest little travel book that you can read in a day. But Seth is clearly someone who doesn't like to be tied down to one style or genre: remember that he’s also written a verse novel, a biography of his aunt and uncle, and a novel about a string quartet. You always find yourself asking "is that the Vikram Seth who wrote...?"

From Heaven Lake was written while Seth was a research student at Stanford in the early 1980s. His research involved a two-year stay at Nanjing university in China. When it was time to travel back to see his family in India at the end of his first year, in August 1981, he decided to try to travel overland via Tibet. The book describes his journey, starting with Seth and fellow foreign students on an organised trip to Xinjiang, where they visit the eponymous Heaven Lake. With a combination of charm, deviousness, and the experience of dealing with Chinese officials he's built up during his year in the country, he manages to get the necessary permit to visit Tibet, and then persuades a local security official in Liuyuan to arrange a lift for him in a truck going to Lhasa. Most of the book is taken up with his account of the epic 1800km truck journey across the desert and mountains into Tibet and of his short stay in Lhasa: the onward journey over the border to Kathmandu, which seems to have been pretty exciting too, is treated rather more superficially, and is just a sort of epilogue to the main text.

Seth is interested in the places and their landscape and culture, but his first concern, and the bulk of his descriptive effort, is always with the people he meets on his journey. Like Thesiger, he has the gift of turning random encounters into fully-developed portraits that could be characters in a novel. I don't think you would read this book for what it tells you about the temples in Lhasa, but it is definitely worth it for its account of Sui the truck driver, the Tibetan Norbu whose family suffered during the Cultural Revolution, Mr Ho of the Lhasa Foreign Affairs department, and all the rest of the many characters we are introduced to. And through them, of course, we get an idea of what life in China (in 1981) is really like. Obviously, a lot of that is down to Seth’s knowledge of the Chinese language, his patience as a listener and his ability to charm people into telling him about themselves, but clearly the novelist’s insight is involved too.

Seth is conscious that readers will expect this book to give “an Indian’s view of China”, and devotes a bit of time to discussing the differences between the two biggest Asian nations, but he doesn't really get beyond the obvious with this, and his comments sometimes seem disconcertingly sophomoric. And of course somewhat irrelevant, thirty years on. Perhaps that is one place where the book suffers from his relative naivety and lack of experience as a writer, which elsewhere gives it a lot of its appeal.

Probably not the top of the reading list for anyone going to Tibet, but definitely worth a look.

41thorold
apr 15, 2014, 4:11 am

In the last few days I also finished The broken road, which I've been reading in small chunks for several months, so as to stretch out the pleasure as far as possible. I won't post a review here, because Rebecca has anticipated just about everything I want to say in her excellent review: I can only concur that it's a book that everyone who loves PLF's work will want to read. Not just because it (almost) completes his famous journey to Constantinople, but also because it contains several absolutely brilliant passages that stand up with his best work.

42rebeccanyc
apr 15, 2014, 8:12 am

Thanks for the review of From Heaven Lake, which has been on my TBR for a long time because I am a fan of almost everything by Seth that I've read. I hope to get to it sometime, maybe for this theme read . . . (And thanks for agreeing with me about The Broken Road!)

43quartzite
apr 16, 2014, 11:22 pm

I'd like to recommend Turkestan Reunion by Eleanor Holgate Lattimore--a great tale of a woman crossing China, Russia. and Central asia to meet up with her husband in somewhat perilous times.

44SassyLassy
apr 17, 2014, 11:26 am

>43 quartzite: Owen Lattimore's sister... that does sound interesting. Thanks for the recommendation.

45chrisharpe
apr 19, 2014, 5:22 am

Heard this short programme on two of the travel greats (he also mentions Bruce Chatwin, who I've never enjoyed) on the radio last night and thought it might be of interest...

Travel Writing Giants http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b040lws7

William Dalrymple celebrates the writing of Peter Matthiessen who died this month, comparing him with another of his favourite travel writers, Patrick Leigh Fermor. "Both were footloose scholars who left their studies and libraries to walk in the wild places of the world, erudite and bookish wanderers, scrambling through remote mountains, notebooks in hand, rucksacks full of good books on their shoulders."
Producer: Sheila Cook.

Duration: 10 minutes
First broadcast: Friday 18 April 2014

I realise I'm reading a sort of travel book: The Butterfly Isles, about a year searching for all of the UK's 59 species of butterfly. Three chapters in, it is fascinating and well written.

46greydoll
apr 20, 2014, 8:13 am

I seem to have begun re-reading Peter Matthiessen's Indian Country.
Not read it for about 20 years. It's tragic. But it is layered with the very different landscapes of the different tribal regions and how the traditional peoples made their living from them. The tragedy lies in the ruin of both the cultures, landscapes and ecologies by "progress", greed and industrialisation. This is a story now being repeated all over the globe: Africa, Indonesia, China.
A tough read but a fascinating one.

47thorold
Bewerkt: apr 22, 2014, 10:17 am

Spain
Viaje a la Alcarria (1948) by Camilo José Cela (1916-2002)

Camilo José Cela, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1989, was one of the best-known literary novelists of post-war Spain. His novels La familia de Pascual Duarte and La colmena (The Hive) appear on most lists of "must read" Spanish novels. (As they are also still on my TBR list, I can't comment...). Although he was politically a supporter of the Franco regime, he seems to have had a taste for shocking his readers (sex, violence, ...), and was frequently in trouble with the censors for the content of his books, several of which were initially only published outside Spain.

Despite Cela's reputation for literary experimentation and scandalous content, this little book seems to be relatively innocent and straightforward, its only obvious eccentricity being the use of the third person instead of the first person narrative that is usual in travel books: Cela refers to himself throughout as "el viajero" (the traveller). This gives the book a sort of quirky archness, which is irritating at first but soon comes to seem natural. It probably allows him to distance himself a bit further from the story and add a layer of irony. Perhaps it is also meant to remind the reader that a travel book has to be read as a literary construction, not an unfiltered account of a journey.

The book describes a tour Cela made of the Alcarria region, to the north-east of Madrid, in 1946, seven years after the end of the civil war. He sets out from Guadalajara and makes his way, mostly on foot, in a big arc through the region, travelling from village to village and staying in the local inns (posadas, paraderos and fondas) - which don't seem to have improved notably since the days of Richard Ford and George Borrow. Although he comes across a great deal of poverty, neglect, hardship and ignorance, the tone of the book is determinedly upbeat. The traveller wants to tell us about the beauties of the countryside and villages of the region, and about the amazing diversity of the ways people respond to the challenges of living there. The great charm of the book really lies in the traveller's frequently very offbeat dialogues with the characters he meets (shepherds, a slightly deranged tramp, a super-sharp commercial traveller, a monumentally ignorant local antiquary, various innkeepers, ...).

Whether the narrator entirely agrees with the traveller's optimistic view of things is something we have to make our own minds up about. He does tell us directly in his introduction that there are bad things he has suppressed from the text (the village where they mistook him for a wanted criminal and put him in jail overnight), and he drops a few hints about his exasperation with people who are so concerned with lamenting the passing of the golden age that they don't bother to take simple steps to improve their own environments (e.g. by looking after historic buildings).

(Cela also wrote a follow-up to this book in the 1980s. I haven't read it yet.)

I had a short walking holiday in Germany over Easter, and took this book with me on my e-reader. Perhaps not the most appropriate reading for the region, but it fitted in quite nicely with the activity!

---

Going back to the discussion above about Michener's Iberia: some classic travel books about Spain I can recommend are:
George Borrow The Bible in Spain (1830s) - crazy evangelical philologist on the rampage in the Peninsula
Richard Ford Gatherings from Spain (1860s) - cynical British journalist tries to demolish clichés about Spanish culture
Penelope Chetwode Two middle-aged ladies in Andalusia (1960s) - the book version of Lady Betjeman's classic WI lecture

48thorold
Bewerkt: apr 25, 2014, 7:37 am

India
Kulu: the end of the habitable world (1972) by Penelope Chetwode (1910-1986)

Like most upper-middle-class Englishwomen of her generation, Penelope Chetwode was never trained for anything in particular apart from the role of wife and mother. In the 1960s, when her children had grown up and her husband (John Betjeman) had found someone else to see to his daily needs, she found herself at leisure to pursue her own interests. Rural England is largely run by ladies in that situation, who keep the parish councils, charitable foundations, gardens, churches, stables, kennels and historic buildings organised via the piles of paper on their oversized kitchen tables. But what Lady Betjeman really wanted to do was travel to remote places on horseback, an activity that had given her great pleasure when she was a young woman in India in the 1930s (and her father was Commander-in-Chief of the British forces there).

She took a trial trip to Spain to prove to herself and her family that she could cope, and that she would be able to recoup some of the expenses by lecturing about her travels on the W.I. circuit (see Two middle-aged ladies in Andalusia - the other "middle-aged lady" in this case being the horse). Then, in 1965, she set off for the Western Himalayas to re-create a trek from Simla to the remote Kulu valley she had undertaken in 1931. On that earlier occasion she had travelled very simply, accompanied only by a couple of aides-de-camp and three servants; in post-colonial India she had to make do with two mules and a groom. This book is essentially a description of her 1965 trek, with additional chapters describing a later visit to a religious festival in the valley, the architecture of mountain temples, and some of the eccentric Europeans who settled in the valley in colonial times.

Lady B obviously wasn't a very enthusiastic writer: it took her seven years to get around to finishing this book, and she must have had a lot more fun talking about her travels than writing about them. The style is quite natural and lively to read, but it isn't especially polished.

Apart from the slightly clumsy jokes against herself that obviously belonged to her W.I. shtick (coping with Indian toilet arrangements, only knowing "a few Hindi verbs in the imperative mood", etc.), everything is delivered very straight. However - especially when she's talking about the glories of the British Raj - her account is often hilariously funny. The part of the writing process Lady B obviously did enjoy was poking around in dusty libraries to dig out learned works on Hindu architecture and iconography and the memoirs of nineteenth-century empire-builders, and as well as useful background data she managed to find quite a few real gems of the genre. She also managed to find some former residents who were prepared to share their memories of Kulu with her.

The comedy could be purely unintentional, and she allows us to believe that if we want to, but one suspects that either she or whoever edited the text must have had a pretty clear idea what they were up to. The Misses Donald (who did their war service in the Army Remount Depot) are an absolute joy, and so is Mrs Tyacke, author of How I shot my bears. I don't think anyone could have reproduced Mrs Tyacke's picture of herself with her trophies without malice aforethought, and we shouldn't forget that Lady B was married to one of the leading experts on the funny side of Victorian England.

I enjoyed reading this, but I found it a bit patchy: Two middle-aged ladies is a better travel book, really. Lady B obviously had a real passion for the Kulu valley, and continued to visit it to the end of her life (she died on trek there in 1986), but, perhaps because she's trying to do too many things at once, that passion doesn't quite come over in this book.



Mrs Richard Humphrey Tyacke, from How I shot my bears (1893) (also reproduced in Kulu)

49SassyLassy
apr 24, 2014, 6:13 pm

>48 thorold: Wonderful review.

50thorold
Bewerkt: apr 24, 2014, 6:37 pm

BTW: as Chatwin fans will know, Lady B was a friend of Bruce and Elizabeth Chatwin (Elizabeth went trekking with her at least once, I seem to remember), and she makes a cameo appearance in On the Black Hill.

51edwinbcn
apr 24, 2014, 9:02 pm

Wonderful reviews here. I was planning to read Homage to Barcelona in my flat in Nanning during the Spring Festival, but it didn't happen and I left it there till my next stay.

I read Journey to a war in 1994, 20 years ago!, and would enjoy a reread of that, but the book is in my mum's attic, some 8000 km from Beijing, sigh. Thanks for your great review, Rebecca.

I just dumped my French translation of From Heaven Lake, having decided that although I'd like to read it, I don't want to read it in French.

I hadn't paid that much attention when I bought The Gentleman in the Parlour and am excited by southernbooklady's review. I will soon try to read that.

Thorold has reviewed some interesting books. I think Victorian women travelling around the world would form an entire sub-category of the Travel genre. I may read some Isabella Bird and am also tempted to start in one of my books by Alexandra David-Néel. Both authors are warmly recommended.

Meanwhile, I haven't done a lot of reading as I am and have been very busy with work.

52anisoara
apr 25, 2014, 6:19 am

Peter Matthiesen's Under the Mountain Wall was a fascinating, engrossing read, but it's more accurate to describe it as a work of popular anthropology rather than travel writing. It's an account of two seasons spent by researchers among the southern Kurelu ("a people entirely untouched by civilization”) in order to "record their wars, rituals and daily life with a minimum of interference, in order that a true picture of Stone Age culture ... might be preserved”. In keeping with their aim to live among the Kurelu "as unobtrusively as possible", the members of the expedition have been carefully stripped from the account, which - although admirable in its aim of authenticity - paradoxically leads to a certain falsity. Nevertheless it would have been very interesting to know how the members of the expedition were received and how they managed to observe the tribe without interfering in their day-to-day lives. That they were intruding amongst a people "entirely untouched by civilisation" is a bit like plucking the last living specimen of a rare flower, but Matthiesen does point out in his preface that "armed patrols and missionaries invaded the Kurelu's land on the heels of the expedition, and by the time this account of them is published, the proud and warlike Kurelu will be no more than another backward people, crouched in the shadow of the white man." Enormously sad.

Moving on to the daily life of the Kurelu, I was struck by the all-pervasive warfare – a never-ending spiral of vengeance: the death that balances a previous death creates a new debt to be paid. Warfare is a sort of badly skewed death accounting, as well as an occasion for display and an opportunity for the men to advance their standing within the clan. And the men, at least, almost seem to approach warfare as a form of entertainment, although the women can evidence great hostility towards the men for their love of war.

Peter Matthiessen’s skill as a writer is evident in the character portraits that emerge. However there are so very many characters (some of whom are actually composites, as Matthiesen points out in his preface) that I could not follow all of them and would lose the thread from time to time.


53rebeccanyc
apr 25, 2014, 8:36 am

>51 edwinbcn: I think it was your mention of Journey to a War, Edwin, that led me to buy it.

I'm really enjoying all the reviews on this thread. I'm busy reading The Worst Journey in the World, but it is quite long (although absorbing), so it will take me a while.

54thorold
Bewerkt: apr 25, 2014, 9:08 am

>51 edwinbcn:
Victorian (and earlier) ladies: there's quite a selection of the less well-known here: http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/wr-type.html#Description%20and%20travel
Lots of things to distract us...

55banjo123
apr 25, 2014, 11:16 pm

the Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiessen

In 1973, Peter Matthiessen and biologist George Schaller traveled through Nepal to study the Himalayan blue sheep and to look for the rare snow leopard. This is the story of the trip, and also of Matthiessen’s inner journey as he explores his relationship to Zen Buddhism and to the death of his wife, a few months previously.
The thing I liked about this book as it really emphasized how travel, and exposure to a different culture can impact self image. Here is a favorite passage:

“A child dragging bent useless legs is crawling up the hill outside the village. Nose to the stones, goat dung, and muddy trickles, she pulls herself along like a broken cricket. We falter, ashamed of our strong step, and noticing this, she gazes up, clear-eyed, without resentment—it seems much worse that she is pretty. In Bengal, GS says stiffly, beggars will break their children’s knees to achieve this pitiable effect for business purposes: this is his way of expressing his distress. But the child that lies here at our boots is not a beggar; she is merely a child, staring in curiosity at tall, white strangers. I long to give her something—a new life?—yet am afraid to tamper with such dignity. And so I smile as best I can, and say “Namast-te!” “Good Morning” How absurd! And her voice follows as we go away, a small clear smiling voice---“Namas-te!”—a Sanskrit word for greeting and parting that means, “I salute you.”

I had an interesting experience with this book, for most of the book I found the author quite irritating, and planned to write a critical review. There were three aspects of the book that bothered me; and I marked numerous annoying passages as I read. However, at the end of the book, Matthiessen pulled it together in a way that worked for me, and I ended up feeling that the book was valuable; honest and thoughtful.

The first bothersome issue is the focus on Buddhism. I should have probably realized before I began this book, that it is mostly about Buddhism. In my younger years, I was interested in Buddhism, but over the years I have become impatient with Buddhism as it is practiced by westerners. I feel that most often Western Buddhism has little relation to Buddism as it is practiced in its home. (Hopefully I haven’t offended any LT Buddhists by saying this—it’s probably my own problem) A book that made me really aware of this is Touching My Father’s Soul by Jamling Tenzig Norgay . I would recommend this book to anyone who wants a Sherpa perspective on climbing and on Buddhism.

The second annoying issue is related. I really did not like Matthiessen and Schaller’s attitude toward their porters and guides; which seemed condescending. This was especially hard to read after the recent tragedy on Everest. By the end of the book, however, Matthiessen seemed to have expanded his view of the Sherpa, and to almost view some of the men as friends. Here is a passage that illustrates this as Matthiessen is at the hotel, ready to leave the journey.

“I shake Tukten’s hand under the portico, and it occurs to me to invite him in to supper. I know that this is sentimental, a show of democratic principles at his expense, for the caste-crazy staff will make things miserable for this soiled Sherpa in the jersey much too big for him. Even if they restrain themselves for the sake of their baksheesh, a friendship formed in mountain sun might be damaged in the sour light of the hotel. All true, all true, and yet that I feel too tired to transcend these difficulties upsets me very much. I let him go.

The third difficult thing, is Matthiessen’s relationship to his son. Matthiessen left his 8 year old son, who had just lost his mother, with friends in order to go on this several-month long expedition. As a parent, it’s hard to imagine this. I haven’t really reconciled myself to this, except to think that many people do things that they shouldn’t do. Matthiessen had a lot going in emotionally and spiritually, and as a result made a decision that was, in my opinion, a mistake.

In the end, I did like the book, because Mathiessen writes so beautifully and so honestly. The good thing about my annoyance with the author is that it made me think.

56overlycriticalelisa
apr 25, 2014, 11:29 pm

(rhonda, while that last does seem pretty awful by today's standards, perhaps keep in mind that unfortunately the father's role even as recently as 1973 was less of the day to day child rearing stuff. the poor kid probably had a ton of abandonment issues, but dads in 1973 didn't experience fatherhood (and the kids didn't experience their dads) the way dads do now.

we're having a pretty raucous friday evening in portland, aren't we?)

57edwinbcn
apr 26, 2014, 6:40 am

I have now started reading The Gentleman in the Parlour.

58streamsong
Bewerkt: apr 26, 2014, 9:24 am

>55 banjo123: Thanks for the thoughtful review! I haven't read any of Matthiessen 's work, and with his recent death, I had thought about putting this one on Planet TBR.

59banjo123
apr 26, 2014, 11:49 am

>56 overlycriticalelisa: Hey Elisa- I did try to think about the differences between now and 1973, but it still seemed extreme to me. I did google his son, Alex, and found out he is a prominent environmentalist living in NYC. (Yes--exciting Portland! I did watch most of the basketball game after finishing the review.)

>58 streamsong: Thanks streamsong. This was a book that really made me think.

60southernbooklady
apr 26, 2014, 12:34 pm

I recently finished Turn Right at Machu Picchu It was a pleasant book, but it left me wanting: wanting more information about how the Inca made these incredible large-scale constructions, how they did their math, their astronomy, their architecture. How they created a construction style that could withstand earthquakes and avalanches.

Mark Adams is suitably self-deprecating throughout the book, but he doesn't seem to have much of a purpose beyond "Follow in the footsteps of the discoverer of Machu Picchu." It's a bit of a man's midlife crisis story, rather than a personal discovery story. As much as I've always enjoyed travel literature, lately I've been chafing against the whole white-man-discovers-the-native thing that riddles the genre. Ever since reading An African in Greenland, I've been wanting to find books like it--travel accounts by non-Europeans, by people who, no matter what their culture, were just bit by that kind of restlessness that makes them always want to move towards new shores and horizons. It would be a neat travel list, if I could find enough accounts to put on it.

Mostly, I was wanting to talk to the guide in the story, John Leivers, more than the author. He's the most fascinating thing in the book.

61banjo123
apr 27, 2014, 7:34 pm

>60 southernbooklady: It sounds like I really need to read An African In Greenland!

62thorold
apr 29, 2014, 7:51 am

>45 chrisharpe:, >52 anisoara:, >55 banjo123:
I read The snow leopard a long time ago and don't remember anything about it. Having heard what Dalrymple - who's a pretty impressive travel writer himself - has to say about Matthiessen, I feel I ought to have a proper look at him, but anisoara's and banjo123's reviews make me suspect that I am not going to enjoy it. He sounds like someone who takes himself far too seriously for my taste.

>54 thorold:
Started reading Up the country last night (a pdf from archive.org). Miss Eden's vice-regal progress across India makes a lovely contrast to Penelope Chetwode. Rather like Jane Austen, but with elephants and vast armies of servants.

>61 banjo123:
The secondhand copy of An African in Greenland I ordered from France a month ago still hasn't arrived. They probably sent it to Greenland instead of Holland.

63southernbooklady
apr 29, 2014, 7:57 am

>62 thorold: I ordered from France a month ago still hasn't arrived. They probably sent it to Greenland instead of Holland.

If they sent it to you via the author's route, you should get it in about seven years.

64edwinbcn
Bewerkt: mei 2, 2014, 12:24 am

.

65thorold
Bewerkt: mei 3, 2014, 4:04 pm

India
'Up the country' : letters written to her sister from the upper provinces of India (1867) by Emily Eden (1797-1869)



George Eden, Lord Auckland, was appointed as British Governor-General of India in 1836. Being unmarried, he took his younger sister Emily with him to run his household, act as hostess for official functions, and generally fill the place of "first lady". She also happened to be a very competent writer, who later published a couple of moderately successful novels, and her letters and journals describing her time in India have become one of the classic first-hand sources on colonial India in the early Victorian period.

Up the country is a selection of letters (most of it a journal written as a serial letter to one of her sisters) dealing with a series of journeys around northern India she made with her brother between October 1837 and March 1840. Her voyage to India and the rest of her stay there between 1836 and 1842 (mostly in Calcutta) is described in another book, Miss Eden's Letters (1872).

Going camping with Miss Eden is a bit different from any other travel book you've ever read. The first time she mentioned that they were a party of 12,000, I assumed that the printer had stuck in a couple of zeroes too many. Apparently not: The Governor-General went on tour not so much to see the country as to be seen: he had to "show the flag" and exchange courtesies with local rulers, and that meant travelling with a sizeable military escort (two infantry regiments plus cavalry and artillery). Communications were slow, railways and telegraphs had yet to be brought to India and even the famous Grand Trunk Road seems to have been in such poor condition that Miss Eden didn't even notice she was travelling along it. Auckland couldn't rely on sending instructions back to Calcutta, he had to take his complete administration with him. By the time you bring in all the family members of the staff, the domestic servants (one European in the party complained at being forced to limit himself to the 150 most essential servants; Miss Eden employed at least three people just to look after her pet dog), and all the pack animals and porters needed to transport the luggage and provisions, you do indeed end up with a group the size of a small town. And it's not altogether surprising that it takes them all five months to get from Calcutta to Simla. A far cry from Lady Betjeman with her two mules and one muleteer!

It's a dreadful cliché to compare every woman writer from the Georgian or early Victorian period with Jane Austen, but in Miss Eden's case it does have some justification. At least seen from this distance, there is quite some similarity in their styles (informality, intelligence, barbed wit, ...)and their range of subject-matter. Obviously, there are rather more elephants here than in Emma, and we are two or three notches further up the social hierarchy, but what Miss E seems determined to do is show us the domestic side of living in India as a privileged European woman. There is a lot about balls and charity events (fancy fairs, amateur dramatics); about formal visits and sketching excursions; about lovelorn aides-de-camp and daughters who can't marry before their elder sisters. There is also a lot about sickness, bad weather, the discomforts of travel. Her letters to her sister seem to have given her a place where she didn't need to set a good example to her underlings and could have the occasional good solid moan about how awful it all was and how she missed home.

There's a lot of politics going on in the background, but Miss E is too discrete to say much about it. We meet Ranjit Singh and his family in the Punjab, the name Dost Mohammed is dropped from time-to-time, and there are passing mentions of Kabul and Kandahar, but no-one who didn't know would realise that brother George has started what would turn out to be a spectacularly unsuccessful war in Afghanistan. Perhaps this reflects security concerns at the time: it might have been ill-advised to discuss politics in personal letters that had to travel across India carried by relays of runners. Or perhaps it is later editing to avoid people associating her brother's name with the loss of the British army in Kabul. We get quite detailed and very entertaining descriptions of the many durbars and formal meetings with rajahs and ranees, but there is never anything substantive about the nature of the discussions. What seems to occupy her a lot more is the business of formal exchange of gifts that goes with these state visits. She and George receive piles of jewellery and shawls, but they all become the property of the East India Company and are whisked away by clerks before she gets a proper look at them.

(Incidentally, fans of the Flashman stories will recall that GMF has Flashman meet Miss Eden in Calcutta in 1841. She is largely responsible for getting him posted to Kabul. He calls her an "old trout" — she must have been in her early forties at the time. But probably not as good-looking after five years in India as in the portrait from 1835. Another important Flashman character, Mrs Eliza James, later to be famous as "Lola Montez", also makes a cameo appearance in Up the country — Miss E's comment that she is likely to come to a bad end looks suspiciously like an afterthought, though.)

An irritating feature of Miss Eden's style is her habit of referring to Europeans only by initials. At first I thought this was more discretion, but it seems to be simply shorthand. The text would hardly make sense if we didn't know that G was her brother George and F and W the other Eden siblings in the party, for instance. The others are also easy to spot when you happen to know them. Where she says something really offensive about someone (which she does quite often, mostly about women), she doesn't use initials, but replaces the name by a dash. If you want to read these journals as more than a matter of passing interest, you probably need to get a decent modern edition with footnotes. (I read a facsimile of the 1867 edition from archive.org)

Miss Eden's sketches, many of which were later worked up into lithographs and published, are also very charming and attractive. There weren't any in the edition I read, but it's easy to find them on the internet.

66southernbooklady
mei 3, 2014, 5:02 pm

>65 thorold: An irritating feature of Miss Eden's style is her habit of referring to Europeans only by initials.

I think this was a common practice at the time? In Megan Marshall's new biography of Margaret Fuller, she traces the growing familiarity of Emerson and Fuller by the progressively shorter abbreviations they used to sign their letters to each other. In short order, Fuller had gone from signing "Miss Fuller" to "S.M.F" to "M."

67thorold
mei 3, 2014, 5:21 pm

>66 southernbooklady:
Not just at the time - having a kind of private code is a normal thing to do when writing to someone you're intimate with, a way of saying "we know each other so well I don't need to explain that". Perfectly normal when E is writing to her sister, but odd when she publishes the letters (30 years later, when most of the people mentioned are not around any more) without expanding the initials.

68thorold
Bewerkt: mei 8, 2014, 2:14 am

Full Tilt: Ireland to India with a Bicycle (1965) by Dervla Murphy (1931-)



After Emily Eden travelling around India in the sort of style that might have struck Cleopatra as a bit on the grandiose side, I was looking out for something a bit more low-key, and this looked as though it might fit the bill.

Full tilt was Dervla Murphy's first book to be published. It describes her journey to India in January to July 1963, equipped with little more than the most uncomplicated bicycle she could find, a change of underwear, a toothbrush and a revolver. The title is slightly misleading, as Europe (including the famous contretemps with the pack of wolves) and Turkey are covered in the first ten pages or so, and she only really starts to describe the journey in detail from the Iranian frontier onwards.

In effect almost all the book is about her time in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the two countries that she particularly enjoys. Iran and India have their good points too, but for Murphy they're not a patch on their neighbours. There's probably something of a Thesiger-like element of romanticising tough, masculine cultures about that preference. On her own website, there's a quote from the New York Times describing her ‘indomitable will … and almost Monty Python-like stiff upper lip’ (both amply demonstrated in this book) — very possibly only someone used to nomadic life in the Himalayas could match up to her standards of toughness. But she clearly also finds contact with local people an extremely important part of travelling, and that is something that works particularly well for her both in Afghanistan and Pakistan. In remote areas the local people welcome her into their homes on equal terms, probably responding to the simplicity of her travelling style; in the cities she charms her way into the homes of the upper classes. People in India and Iran don't quite respond to her in the same straightforward "man to man" way (although the book ends before she's really had a chance to get a feel for India).

The style and construction feel a bit rough around the edges, ranging unpredictably between raw farce, lyrical descriptive passages, thoughtful analysis and gritty adventure, in a way that seems to go very well with Murphy's evidently rather forceful and eccentric personality, and her tendency to do things she would definitely be advised against if she were so foolish as to ask for advice before doing them. She comes across as someone who travels for her own satisfaction and writes about it because she wants to share the pleasure she takes in what she experiences: I'll definitely be looking out for some more of her work (she's written some twenty books in the last fifty years, so I don't know how I managed to overlook her for so long).

ETA:
Something that struck me about Murphy's approach is that she notices farmwork and always tells us in a very straightforward way about what people are doing in the fields, what the crops look like, what condition the animals are in. It's never presented as picturesque background activity, but she always talks about it as though she understands how these things fit into the way the local people make their living. And when she doesn't understand why they are doing something, she evidently takes the trouble to ask about it. Probably this has something to do with her background in rural Ireland, but it made me wonder whether it struck me particularly because so many other travel writers are urbanites for whom a sheep is a sheep?

69whymaggiemay
mei 9, 2014, 6:34 pm

West With the Night by Beryl Markham is a vivid and fascinating look at Kenya (then British East Africa) of the early 1900s, even into the 1930s, from the eyes of a young woman, it has a bit of travel across Africa to England by air, showing the problems of travel in the early years of WW II through the Italian and Spanish areas of the Mediterranean, and Beryl’s historic flight across the Atlantic from England to the U.S., but otherwise it is a partial biography of a fascinating adventurer and feminist (long before there was such a label to stick on women).

There is a great deal of controversy over who actually wrote this book. It bears Markham's name, but suggestions have been made that it was probably written by one of her writer lovers or husbands. In her acknowledgements she states "I wish to express my gratitude to Raoul Schumacher for his constant encouragement and his assistance in the preparations for this book." Those who have examined both this book and her book of short stories note that there are serious stylistic commonalities with Raoul Schumacher's writing. In fact, Schumacher is purported to have said that "Beryl did not write West With the Night or any of the short stories. Not one damned word of anything." Whoever the writer was (and I would certainly agree that it stretches credulity and is highly unlikely that Markham, who admittedly was not a reader and never discusses writing anything more than letters to her father, could possibly have written something of the tremendous quality of this book), the writing is masterful and even Hemingway raved about it.

That mystery having been set aside, Beryl Markham lead a fascinating life, only a small part of which is in this book. Born Beryl Clutterbuck, she left England at the age of four with her parents (her father a serious scholar of the Greek classics), who had bought land in British East Africa because her father saw the potential for the area and the land was cheap. Her mother hated the isolation of the house and very soon returns to England, taking their older child, a son, back to England. Beryl never mentions her or her brother in the book again, and she clearly has no particular feelings for the mother who abandoned her. Beryl is raised by her father and a succession of nannies, none of whom she ever talks about in the book. Mostly she was raised by the natives in Africa, with whom she seems to have spent nearly all her time, learning to hunt like a boy. Nothing seems to have really shaken this child, including being attacked by a lion, the family pet of a near neighbor, Lord Delamere.

When she was 17 her father’s business failed during a terrible drought and he moved to Peru. Beryl does not relate it in this book, but just prior to her father’s move to Peru she was married to a nearby neighbor about 8 years her senior. Apparently that marriage quickly failed and she moved on to become a successful horse trainer. While doing that, she met a man who raved about the joys of being a pilot. This sparked a response in Beryl who shortly thereafter talks herself into pilot training by another bush pilot. At the time she was the only female pilot in Kenya and must have been one of the very few in the entire world. She started her own quite successful company ferrying supplies and people in Kenya, and working as a spotter for the wild game (particularly Elephants) for big game hunting. When she hears about Trans-Atlantic races between the U.K. and the U.S. she decides life has been too placid and off she goes again on her next big adventure.

There are many, many things from her life that aren’t covered in the book – her three husbands and many lovers (including the Duke of Gloucester and Denys Finch Hatton {think Out of Africa}), scandals, and pregnancies; but what is there was amazing and fascinating when you consider the time and the place they happened.

70whymaggiemay
mei 9, 2014, 6:40 pm

>68 thorold: Your review reminds me that three years ago I read Catfish and Mandala where the author returns to his native Vietnam on bicycle. That book, too, would fit this quarter's theme.

71brenpike
mei 10, 2014, 12:12 am

>69 whymaggiemay: maggie West with the Night is one of my all-time favorite books. What a great memoir about a fascinating woman. Glad you enjoyed it! Makes me think I need to read more about her . . .

72thorold
mei 10, 2014, 12:20 am

>69 whymaggiemay:
Thanks for that! West with the night is another book I seem to keep forgetting to read... I read the five quasi-autobiographical novels of Doris Lessing's Martha Quest sequence at the beginning of the year: it would be fun to compare the two accounts of remarkable (but very different) women growing up in colonial Africa.

73avatiakh
mei 10, 2014, 2:40 am

The Colossus of Maroussi by Henry Miller (1941)
I was looking forward to reading this memoir of a year that Miller spent in Greece at the start of WW2, however I found it quite a difficult book to take in. Miller spends much of the book philosophising on Greece, Greeks, Americans and how he dislikes spending time in the company of people with money. He was also quite disdainful of the US and had been living in Paris before arriving in Crete to stay a few weeks with Lawrence Durrell. So I found it a slow read and probably would have appreciated it more if I had just returned from Greece myself. He does get around most of Greece and when he's enjoying himself the book does start to redeem itself. You do come away with a feel for Greek society at that point in time, I just didn't care for the constant comparisons.

At the end as Miller boards an American ship to return to the US he is immediately aware of a different world, one he doesn't want to return to and says ' I was among the go-getters again, among the restless souls who, not knowing how to live their own life, wish to change the world for everyone.'

I had hoped to read Barcelona: The Great Enchantress by Robert Hughes, a shorter version of his Barcelona and part of the National Geographic Directions series.

74rebeccanyc
Bewerkt: mei 11, 2014, 11:45 am

The Worst Journey in the World by Apsley Cherry-Garrard



"Polar exploration is at once the cleanest and most isolated way of having a bad time that has ever been devised." Thus begins this remarkable book by a remarkable man about a remarkable multiyear group of journeys made just over 100 years ago. As is well known, Robert Scott lost both the "race" to the South Pole and his life in the trip to Antarctica that began in 1910 and ended in 1913. Cherry-Garrard was the youngest member of the team, a kind of utility player selected for general aptitude (and his ability to contribute to the expedition) rather than the specific skills of the other participants, whether they were prior experience with polar exploration, scientific expertise, medical knowledge, dog- or pony-handling experience, logistical skills, or whatever. Soon after his return, he was thrust into the carnage of World War I, so it wasn't until almost 10 years later that he completed this wonderful book.

A war is like the Antarctic in one respect. There is no getting out of it with honour as long as you can put one foot in front of the other. p. lxv

In the book, he combines his own general reportage with excerpts from his diary as well as the diaries of Scott and Wilson, and excerpts from Bowers' letters to his mother. Wilson and Bowers were his companions on "the worst journey in the world," an expedition in the middle of the winter (i.e., total darkness, temperatures routinely in the range of -50°F) to observe and obtain eggs from the Emperor Penguin (but more on that later). His writing includes vivid descriptions of the beauties and harshness of the Antarctic environment, penetrating analysis of the factors contributing to success and failure, and deep insight into human (and dog/pony/mule) behavior.

The expedition consisted of several phases. Arriving in Antarctica after traveling by ship first to South Africa and then to New Zealand, the explorers began a series of journeys to set up depots with food and fuel before winter came, so they would be there the following spring when they undertook their 800-mile journey to the Pole (and 800 miles back). They brought ponies and dogs to pull sledges, but there were drawbacks to both, and very often the men had to pull the sledges laden with goods themselves. During the first winter, the journey to the penguins took place. Then in the spring the polar journey itself began; three teams set out, but two returned at various points along the route, so only Scott and four others continued to the Pole. Cherry-Garrard was in the second group to return. When Scott didn't return, they realized he and his team must have died, but winter came and they couldn't search for the bodies until the following spring. After they find the bodies, Cherry-Garrard fills in the narrative of the polar team from their diaries, and the continues to their return by ship to New Zealand.

The expedition was not only designed to reach the South Pole, although it was that goal that attracted the funding necessary to undertake it; it was also, very importantly, a scientific expedition, with people exploring geology, meteorology, snow and ice movement, and marine life, as well as the seals and penguins that inhabit the Antarctic. The winter journey to find the eggs of the Emperor Penguin was based on two scientific misconceptions: first, that the penguin was a very primitive bird, and second that ontogeny (or embryonic/fetal development) recapitulates phylogeny (or evolutionary changes that led to the specific animal). Nonetheless, the three men set off in the pitch dark, facing crevasses they couldn't see, hauling the sledges themselves, sleeping in frozen sleeping bags, experiencing blizzards and their tent being carried off by the wind, and so much more. The descriptions of what they went through are astounding, and horrifying.

"The horror of the nineteen days it took us to travel from Cape Evans to Cape Crozier would have to be re-experienced to be appreciate it; and anyone would be a fool who went again; it is not possible to describe it. The weeks which followed were comparative bliss, not because later our conditions were better -- they were far worse -- but because we were callous. I for one had come to that point of suffering at which I did not care if only I could die without much pain. The talk of the heroism of the dying -- they little know -- it would be so easy to die, a dose of morphia, a friendly crevasse, and blissful sleep. The trouble is to go on . . ." pp. 229-230

"Antarctic exploration is seldom as bad as you imagine, seldom as bad as it sounds. But this journey had beggared our language: no words could express its horror." p. 288

He speaks of his companions, Wilson and Bowers.

"In civilization men are taken at their own valuation because there are so many ways of concealment, and there is so little time, perhaps even so little understanding. Not so down South. These two men went through the Winter Journey and lived; later they went through the Polar Journey and died. There were gold, pure, shining, unalloyed. Words cannot express how good their companionship was." p. 239

Part of the book is devoted to what life is like in their camp over the winter, how the men entertain each other with lectures on various topics, and part is devoted to discussions of how to deal with ponies and dogs in the Antarctic (Cherry-Garrard and, indeed, the other men, have what I consider a very English fondness for their animals, although I suppose this is a much more widespread feeling), the effect of different kinds of snow and ice on the runners of the sledges and on sledging itself, the fierceness of the winds and the bitterness of the cold, the signs and "progress" of frostbite and scurvy, the moral qualities of the men with their emphasis on always appearing cheery no matter how terrible the conditions (that "stiff upper lip"), and almost anything else you can think of that plays a role in polar exploration. Yet Cherry-Garrard has the ability to fold all these topics into a compelling narrative, a narrative that benefits greatly from the excerpts from diaries and letters. At the end, in a chapter entitled "Never Again," he reflects on what has been learned from the expedition, what could be done better in the future (vitamins, significantly larger food rations, and the potential for air exploration, to name a few).

I could go on and on, but I will close with a quote about the majesty of the Antarctic.

"Of course for the most part the land is covered to such a depth by glaciers and snow that no wind will do more than pack the snow or expose the ice beneath. At the same time, to visualize the Antarctic as a white land is a mistake, for, not only is there much rock projecting wherever mountains or rocky capes and islands rise, but the snow seldom looks white, and if carefully looked at will be found to be shaded with many colors, but chiefly with cobalt blue or rose-madder, and all the graduations of lilac and mauve which the mixture of these colors will produce. A White Day is so rare that I have recollections of going out from the hut or the tent and being impressed by the fact that the snow really looked white. When to the beautiful tints of the sky and the delicate shading of the snow are added perhaps the deep colours of the open sea, with reflections from the ice foot and ice-cliffs in it, all brilliant blues and emerald greens, then indeed a man may realize how beautiful this world can be, and how clean.

Though I may struggle with inadequate expression to show the reader that this pure Land of the South has many gifts to squander on those who woo her, chiefest of these gifts is that of her beauty. Next, perhaps, is that of grandeur and immensity, of giant mountains and limitless spaces, which must awe the most casual, and may well terrify the least imaginative of mortals.
p. 181

ETA I became interested in reading this book after I read, several years ago, The Coldest March by Susan Solomon, in which she interweaves excerpts from the diaries of men on the trip with modern scientific data on the unusually extreme conditions the expedition encountered.

75thorold
Bewerkt: mei 12, 2014, 10:33 am

Coasting (1986) by Jonathan Raban (1942- )



This perhaps doesn't belong in the Reading Globally group, as it's a book about the UK by a British writer, but I read it in part because of this thread and the prompting to go out and find travel writers I'd overlooked or put aside. Having read a cycling book (Dervla Murphy), I wanted to complement it with something that ties in with my interest in sailing, and this book was the first to come up in my search that looked as though it would go beyond "what I did on my holidays". And it did...

Travel books often use the narrative logic of a journey as a framework for more discursive subject-matter: bits of history, autobiography, political commentary, "state of the nation" stuff. But however far they range away from the dotted line on the map, they are usually strict about coming back to it wherever they left it. Not so Raban: he structures his book around the ideas he wants to develop, using insights from his journey, taken in arbitrary order, to provide the support, illustration, or metaphor he needs. His map - significantly - has no dotted line on it.

His journey, in 1982, was a coasting voyage around Great Britain in a sailing boat. He started from Falmouth and went anticlockwise around, using the Caledonian Canal to cut out the tricky part round the North of Scotland. The first part of the trip up the Channel from Cornwall to the Thames is described fairly linearly, albeit in the middle part of the book; on the East coast we only hear about Hull and Blythe, in Scotland we get one brief vignette from Loch Linnhe, and on the West coast we get the Isle of Man and part of the passage across the Irish Sea towards Wales (in the opening section of the book). The rest is left to our imaginations. Most perversely of all, he finishes the book by telling us he is starting another journey, without giving us any clue where he is headed, or why.

What Raban really wants to do with the journey seems to be to dissect what being British (or at least English) means in the 1980s, how the British view themselves, their islands, and the rest of the world, and how he fits in with it, having grown up, the son of a clergyman, on the impoverished lower edge of the upper middle-class, the rather unsatisfactory product (in their view) of a minor public school. He uses the model of the Isle of Man to develop his ideas about insularity and how it makes us view the rest of the world, and ties this in with Mrs Thatcher's Little War, which conveniently breaks out as he is sailing towards the Plymouth naval base. Later on he also brings in an account of the miners' strike, which actually falls outside the timeframe of his journey, but is something you can't really omit from an account of Britain during the Thatcher time.

The early eighties were the last years I lived in the UK, and when the Falklands war took place I was at university, almost as detached from normal life as he was in his boat. As students we had the same feeling of puzzlement about the alleged outburst of patriotism linked with the war: we never watched television, we didn't know anyone who was in the armed forces or admitted to reading the Murdoch papers, and the whole thing seemed almost irrelevant to us.

Where sailing books normally overwhelm us with technical information about the boat, equipment, weather and courses sailed, Raban makes a point of telling us more about the contents of his on-board library than about sails, masts and rigging. We gather that his boat is a wooden ketch designed like a North Sea fishing boat, but that's about as far as the technical description goes. He talks wittily and perceptively about some of his predecessors as writers about coastal sailing - people like John MacGregor, E.E. Middleton, and Hilaire Belloc, all clearly running away from lonely and unsatisfactory lives to try to find some sort of fulfilment in communion with the sea - and tries to analyse his own motives for buying a boat.

Raban was clearly irritated to discover that his "former friend" Paul Theroux was also busy with a trip around the island, in his case going clockwise on foot (see The kingdom by the sea). The two arranged to meet in Brighton: it's amusing to read their subtly-different accounts of what was evidently a slightly edgy afternoon for both of them, neither willing to give the other too many details of what he was working on (Raban had the advantage of writing his when Theroux's book was already published, of course). A happier (and equally comic) meeting is his reunion in Hull with the elderly poet Philip Larkin, whom Raban in his undergraduate days had apparently cajoled into acting as a kind of mentor.

Oddly enough, the other writer who is most obviously looking over Raban's shoulder is never explicitly mentioned, except for a throwaway remark about amateur theatricals: his fellow-pipe-smoker J.B. Priestley, whose English Journey (1934) dealt with many of the themes Raban picks up. Post-industrial society, the "merrying of England", depression in the North-East, inward-looking Englishness - all as actual in the eighties as they were in the thirties(*). Although Raban sails where Priestley travelled by bus, train and Rolls-Royce, there seem to be very strong echoes between the two of them, in the structure and feel of their books as well as in the subject-matter. Not that Raban tries to imitate Priestley's very oral "radio lecture/pulpit" style, of course: his voice is a more literary, abstract one, more in keeping with the 1980s and the printed page.

ETA: (*) Hmm - on reflection, I wonder if you'd see the same parallels if you looked at Defoe, or Cobbett...?

>74 rebeccanyc: Another one that's been on my list for years!

76banjo123
mei 16, 2014, 11:47 am

Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before by Tony Horwitz

I had not read anything by Horwitz before, and really liked it. I would probably compare his style to Bill Bryson; lots of research into history and culture made easy to read by a bumbling humor and funny side-kick.

In this book, Horwitz follows Captain Cook’s footsteps in Tahiti, Bora-Bora, New Zealand, Australia, the Savage Island, Tongo, Yorkshire, Alaska and Hawaii. He talks to people in all of these countries about their feelings about Captain Cook and then he gets drunk with them. There is also lots of information about Cook’s experiences form Cook’s diaries and other sources.

I enjoyed this book and also learned about different indigenous cultures and how they were affected by European contact and colonialism. Horwitz does a good job of pointing out both similarities and differences, which I really appreciated.

77thorold
Bewerkt: mei 19, 2014, 4:15 pm

Of all the pleasures in the world travell is (in my opinion) the sweetest and most delightfull. For what can be more pleasant then to see passing variety of beautifull Cities, Kings and Princes Courts, gorgeous Palaces, impregnable Castles and Fortresses, Towers piercing in a manner up to the cloudes, fertill territories replenished with a very Cornucopia of all manner of commodities as it were with the horne of Amalthea, tending both to pleasure and profit, that the heart of man can wish for: flourishing Universities (whereof only Germany yeeldeth no lesse than three and twenty) furnished with store of learned men of all faculties, by whose conversation a learned traveller may much informe and augment his knowledge. ... Yea such is the exuberancie and superfluity of these exoticke pleasures that for my owne part I will most truly affirme, I reaped more entire and sweet comfort in five moneths travels of those seven countries mentioned in the front of my booke, then I did all the dayes of my life before in England, which contayned two and thirty yeares. Moreover, the knowledge of forraine languages (which the shortnesse of time did not affoord me) acquired by industrious travell, yeeldeth an ornament beyond all comparison the most precious and excellent that can be incident to a Gentleman.

Thomas Coryat the Odcombian Legge-stretcher, 1611

78thorold
Bewerkt: mei 20, 2014, 3:54 am

In Xanadu (1989) by William Dalrymple (1965-)

This was Dalrymple’s first book, describing his journey “in the footsteps of Marco Polo” from Jerusalem to the site of Kublai Khan’s summer capital in Inner Mongolia, made during the Long Vacation of 1986, whilst Dalrymple was still an undergraduate in Cambridge. The journey was prompted largely by hearing of the opening of the Karakoram Highway and realising that it might now be possible for foreigners to travel overland from Pakistan to Sinkiang. And I think that's the clue to a slight weakness in the book: unlike his strong interaction with John Moschos in From the Holy Mountain, Dalrymple doesn't display any particular affection for the alleged source text. If anything, he makes it clear that he's rather bored with Polo, whose book he characterises as a 13th century business travel handbook to Central Asia.

What the book is really about is the process of travel, as experienced in a succession of accidents by a slightly naive young man bumbling across Asia (accompanied by a comically forceful young woman as far as Lahore, and a different, comically feeble one thereafter). This is always interesting and entertaining - Dalrymple is definitely a good writer, even in his early twenties, and the journey itself is a bold and enterprising one - but there's probably a bit too much of the Robert Byrons about it. Albeit without Byron’s aggressive nastiness - when Dalrymple makes fun of the locals, he always makes sure that he makes himself look even more foolish than they.

I'm around the same age as Dalrymple, and of course reading a book like that makes you wonder how it could be that you omitted to travel overland to Asia in your own youth. It sounds such an obvious and simple thing to do, from this safe distance, but I never got much further than Vienna. In summer 1986, if I remember rightly, the most adventurous thing I did was spend a fortnight cycling around Holland with a friend. A holiday which had some important consequences for me (I ended up applying for a job in Holland and have been here ever since) but wasn't really on a par with the Karakoram Highway or bouncing over the deserts of Sinkiang on the back of a coal truck...

79thorold
Bewerkt: mei 22, 2014, 2:01 pm

Coryat's Crudities hastily gobled up in five months in France, Savoy, Italy, Rhetia commonly called the Grisons country, Helvetia alias Switzerland, some part of high Germany and the Netherlands; newly digested in the hungry aire of Odcombe in the County of Somerset, to the nourishment of the travelling members of this kingdome (1611) by Thomas Coryat (c.1577-1617)

It's probably going too far to call him "the first English travel writer", but Thomas Coryat was certainly in at the very beginning of the idea of travel as something worth doing for its own sake. Earlier generations went on pilgrimages, military, diplomatic or scholarly missions, or simply to do business, but Coryat didn't bother with any such pretext: he was a gentleman, travelling for his own pleasure, to broaden his mind, and to gather material for a book. What would later be called the Grand Tour.

Coryat, who liked to emphasise his rural Somerset background, was a contemporary of Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, a regular at the Mermaid Tavern, and had blagged his way into the court of James I's eldest son, Henry, Prince of Wales, where he seems to have acted as a kind of semi-rustic straight-man to the galaxy of high-powered London wits that met there. Coryat's Crudities is his record of a tour to Venice and back that took him five months in the summer of 1608.

Although Coryat liked to boast about his walking exploits, he seems to have taken whatever means of transport offered itself: horse, coach, or river-boat. He probably did about half the journey on foot. Outward he went via Paris and Lyon to the Mont Cenis pass, then on into Savoie and Italy. He spent six weeks in Venice, then on the way back he crossed the alps into Switzerland and followed the Rhine through Germany and Holland to Vlissingen.

One of the oddest things about the book is the blurb — all 150 pages of it. As was usual, he asked a few of his literary friends to contribute verses recommending the book. They did so, but with tongue firmly in cheek, and they also suggested to a few of their friends to join in, until the whole thing snowballed into the in-joke of the moment, and there was practically no-one in literary London (from Ben Jonson and John Donne down to the lowliest scribe) who hadn't written a humorous sonnet or ode in mock-praise of Coryat. Prince Henry was enchanted with the joke, and insisted, much to the author's embarrassment, that the entire collection be included in the book, where it took up about a third of Volume I.

Coryat obviously wasn't quite the buffoon his friends made him out to be, but he's not the most gifted of writers. His descriptions of palaces and cathedrals often read as though drafted by an estate agent, he has a tendency to overlook things like scenery, and relies on a very limited stock of adjectives. Metaphor and simile are devices he clearly doesn't approve of at all. But there are a lot of endearing little human touches, especially when he excuses himself - as he continually has to - for the things he should have seen but didn't. Or - in the case of his comments about Venetian courtesans and the dangers of drinking too much in Heidelberg - for the things he shouldn't have seen but did.

Coryat's most irritating habit is perhaps his insistence on quoting in full any Latin epitaph or inscription he happens to have seen. He has a great veneration for the Romans and anything written in their language, but he doesn't really explain why he is so interested: in most cases he simply quotes the text without comment, and after a while you realise that you can skip all the Latin without missing anything. (I did see a comment on the web somewhere that there are a few inscriptions for which Coryat is now the only surviving source, so even this effort wasn't entirely futile.)

The real joy of reading this book is the sense of getting a first-hand account of what Europe looked like 400 years ago. There are places where you can almost forget that distance in time, but then you're suddenly pulled up by the realisation that (for instance) he's just walked past the future site of the city of Karlsruhe, a hundred years before it was built. In Köln, he comments that the cathedral will be nice when it's finished...

Another joy, of course, is deciphering the 17th century language. I read the 1905 Glasgow edition, which leaves Coryat's eccentric spelling intact, apart from a few basic things like replacing ſ by s and modernising the use of u,v, and w. Especially with place names, there's sometimes quite a bit of puzzling involved before you've worked out which city he's talking about.

After getting back from this tour, Coryat had clearly been well and truly bitten by the travel bug. He set off for Asia not long after the Crudities were published, and managed to get to India, possibly the first British traveller to do so by the overland route. Unfortunately, he died before he could write another book, but some of his letters and notes from the Asian trip were published posthumously.

80rebeccanyc
jun 1, 2014, 8:10 am

Autonauts of the Cosmoroute: A Timeless Voyage from Paris to Marseille by Julio Cortázar and Carol Dunlop



At once meditative, playful, literary, quirky, erotic, imaginative, and even modestly paranoic, this delightful book chronicles a journey Cortázar and Dunlop made in May and June of 1982 along the autoroute from Paris to Marseille stopping at every rest stop at the rate of two per day. Why did they do this? Initially, the idea came to them as a way to escape the responsibilities, especially phone calls and mail, that confronted them in Paris, and also perhaps a certain psychological gloom, but as ideas will, it evolved, and they came to see it as a an expedition inspired by those of the early European explorers and resolved to scientifically document their observations. They traveled in their VW van, nicknamed Fafner the dragon, which was outfitted with a refrigerator and a jerry can of water, along with other supplies including food, liquor, books. and cassette tapes. They arranged for a few friends to meet them along the way for companionship and fresh food (they also ate occasionally in restaurants at the rest stops and stayed overnight in hotels at the stops).

What was perhaps most surprising to me is how frequent the rest stops on this highway are. In the logs that detail each day -- times of arising and travel, as well as of other interesting events, information about each rest stop, their meals, the temperature and weather, etc. -- it seems to take about 15 minutes to get from one rest area to another. Thus, they spent most of their time in rest areas, not on the autoroute. This gave them ample time for exploration, reading, writing (they brought two typewriters with them), and enjoying their freedom and the opportunity to be only with each other. In addition to the logs, and the descriptions of what they saw at the rest areas, this book includes forays into fiction, meditations on everything from music to love, visits from imaginary characters, photographs, and illustrations (drawn by Dunlop's son). Every page is both deeply personal and addressed to the reader -- they knew from the beginning that they would write a book about the trip.

Thus their journey was a search for happiness, as well as an exploration of the rest areas. They call each other by their pet names, La Osita (little bear) for her, El Lobo (the wolf) for him, and their affection for each other shines through the writing. At one point they mention a bet two of their friends made about whether they would complete the trip, one hypothesizing that they would squabble and separately return to Paris. Instead, the trip seems to have deepened their love for each other, perhaps (although this isn't clear) knowing that Dunlop was ill and would die, tragically early, the next year, before the book could be completed. While each wrote different sections, it is sometimes difficult to know who wrote what.

In a way, the trip left them suspended in time (thus "timeless" in the subtitle), allowing them the illusion that life, like the autoroute, continues indefinitely. Hence their sadness when they arrived in Marseille and returned to "real" life. Speaking of the deeper meanings some of their friends attempted to hang on the trip upon their return to Paris, Cortázar writes:

"All that dazzled us a bit, but most of all we found it funny, because we'd never conceived nor realized the expedition with underlying intentions. It was a game for a little Bear and a Wolf, and that's what it was for thirty-three wondrous days. Faced with disturbing questions, we said many times that if we'd had those possibilities in mind, the expedition would have been something else, perhaps better or worse but never that advance in happiness and love from which we emerged so fulfilled that nothing, afterwards, even admirable travels and hours of perfect harmony, could surpass that month outside of time, that interior month where we knew for the first and last time what absolute happiness was." pp. 351-352

81rebeccanyc
jun 13, 2014, 10:26 am

In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin



This book is the delightful, idiosyncratic tale of Chatwin's trip to Patagonia and at the same time a tour of some of his interests. Initially spurred by a desire to find the source of the mylodon skin acquired by his grandmother's sailor cousin Charley Milward, he also explores the fates of Bruce Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, mostly failed revolutions of various kinds, self-appointed kings, Darwin's travels, native language, potential literary sources for Shakespeare (Caliban), Coleridge, and Kipling, "unicorns," the travels of Charley Milward, and much more. All of this is written in a spare and very readable style; Chatwin is a superb story-teller. (In fact, he may have been more of a story-teller than a journalist, as I have read that some of the people he quoted in the book said it didn't quite happen that way.)

Diverse as Chatwin's interests are, he nonetheless focused on the Europeans in Patagonia -- the remnants of immigrants from Wales, England, Russians, Germans, and even Boers from South Africa, among others. These are people not only removed from the countries of their or their ancestors' origins, but also people living at what could be considered the edge of the world. But there is almost no sign of the native people or even the governments of Argentina and Chile.

This book has sat on my TBR for 31 years, and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

82banjo123
jun 13, 2014, 8:26 pm

Nice reviews, Rebecca! I am particularly intrigued by In Patagonia. Perhaps I will try to squeeze that one in.

83whymaggiemay
Bewerkt: jun 15, 2014, 12:35 pm

I finished Learning to Bow by Bruce Feiler. Feiler spent a year teaching English in a junior high school in Japan. Although he never explains where or why he learned Japanese, he was obviously fluent. The chapters are broken down by incidents which occurred over that year and which illustrate some facet of Japanese culture or, more likely, Japanese education and how it affects the students, teachers, and the community.

Kids in the U.S. who complain about school would quickly quit doing so if they saw the Japanese system which still relies very heavily on rote memorization, even in teaching English, a compulsory language for three years in junior high school and (if the students get to go on to an educational high school as opposed to a trade high school) three years in high school. Feiler immediately encountered problems when he tried to teach them in a more open way by engaging them in conversation. They eventually began to enjoy his style of teaching, but were confused and resistant at first. In addition to their lessons and taking tests, Japanese students clean their classrooms, the school halls, serve the meals for their class and, once a year, the students as a group go into the community and pick up trash.

In Japan, the teachers are responsible for much more than the education of their students. They are expected to teach them how to bow correctly, about honor, duty, respect, and even how to hold chopsticks. They are responsible for the children from the moment they leave their homes until the moment they return. Thus, if they see a child riding home on their bicycle without a helmet they will stop the student and correct the situation immediately. Likewise, teachers are held to a very high standard and Feiler discovered this when it was reported that he was running a red light on his bicycle very early in the morning because there was no one else at the light.

There was much more in the book about the teaching and cultural differences, all presented in descriptions of days at the school, events during his stay, days off, etc., including the dating and romance changes in the country. The book was published in 1991, and Feiler apparently spent a year in Japan in the early to mid-80s. I would be very interested to see how things have changed (or not) at the schools. As is apparent from this book, the Japanese are resistant to change, but it appeared that they were beginning to see that their form of education was not necessarily giving them the kinds of students who could fulfill the working positions Japan would need in the future.

84rebeccanyc
jun 15, 2014, 3:19 pm

We still have half a month to go with this theme read, so keep on reading travel writing, but I wanted to let everyone know that Steven has started the thread for our July - September theme read on Mexico and Central America. Here it is! Happy reading!

85thorold
Bewerkt: jun 16, 2014, 5:04 am

I've been offline for a bit - during that time i finally got around to reading An African in Greenland in James Kirkup's translation (not quite what I was expecting, but definitely worth the trouble). Thanks to the various people who mentioned it at the start of this thread! I've posted a short review.

I also read two very different sailing books, Miles Smeeton's Once is enough (tough-as-nails brigadier and rock-climber wife survive being capsized and dismasted twice off Cape Horn in the 1950s) and Jonathan Raban's Passage to Juneau (which is like Coasting, only more so).

86thorold
Bewerkt: jun 16, 2014, 11:05 am

...and my thumbnail review of Passage to Juneau:

Rather as he does in Coasting, Raban takes the conventional framework of the travel narrative and shakes it up to give structure to a complex, multifaceted meditation on the ways people engage with places and struggle to find sense in them. The result is more like a narrative poem than a prose travel book — ideas and trains of thought are linked by being juxtaposed and intermingled in the text, rather than by the author drawing explicit connections between them. The closest parallel I could think of to the effect is Derek Walcott's Omeros, but Raban manages to do it without the safety-net of poetic meter. Daring, elegant, and extremely rewarding for the reader, even if Raban's bleak mood is sometimes a bit hard to take.

87RidgewayGirl
Bewerkt: jun 17, 2014, 8:16 am



It had seemed, at the time, a good idea, this holiday in Pyongyang.

Falling Off the Map: Some Lonely Places of the World is a series of essays about the parts of the world isolated by politics, geography or culture. Pico Iyer spends time in the places you'd expect, like North Korea, Cuba, Bhutan and Iceland, but also in Argentina and Australia. Iyer comes across as a more thoughtful, less humorous Jon Ronson, able to insert himself into interesting situations, offbeat locations, and to get people to speak openly with him, without becoming the focus of his tales. Even the one in which police officers had a great deal of difficulty determining whether "Pico" or "Iyer" was his first name revolves around life in a Cuban village.

Back in the Gran Hotel, the receptionist greeted me in Hindi, a cockroach was waiting to welcome me in my bedroom, and a sudden thunderstorm turned the hotel corridors into rivers, a few dead leaves floating by my door. In the beautiful dining room, where La Madama had once held masked balls and taught le tout Asuncion to polka, four men in ponchos were putting on a show of Paraguayan culture, featuring songs from Mexico, songs from Cuba, and songs from Peru.

Iyer spends time in each of the places featured, returning to some years after his first visits. He falls into the daily rhythms of the places he's staying in, becoming familiar with Saturday markets or the movies being shown at the local cinema. The book itself is a bit dated, having been written twenty years ago but, for me at least, it has lost little of its appeal, the countries that he wrote about remain as exotic and unknown as they were when he wrote the essays.

88banjo123
jun 20, 2014, 4:19 pm

Two reviews:

Tales of a Female Nomad by Rita Golden Gelman
In 1986, Gelman was going through a divorce. She sold all her possessions and started a nomadic existence, traveling in Mexico, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Israel, The Galapogos, Indonesia, New Zealand, Thailand, and the US. In her travels, she focusses in living in communities and meeting people. Sounds, interesting, but I found the book dull. The writing is pedestrian. Also, it is written in the present tense. I feel this was not a good choice, because it means that the travels seem disconnected from each other and not as part of a narrative whole. Here's an example of the language:

"As we sit and sip, we do not speak much, but we smile a lot. Then, after about ten minutes, a tall and distinguished-looking man approaches. He is wearing a patterned scarf tied artistically around his head in a traditional Balinese fashion."

Interesting fact: Gelman relays that she gained spiritual growth through her stay in Bali. I couldn't really see the spiritual growth, but it was interesting to me that Elizabeth Gilbert had a similar experience in Eat Pray Love.

In contrast, I really enjoyed reading Going Somewhere by Brian Bensen, which was an Early Reviewer’s book. It’s about a bicycle trip from Wisconsin to Oregon that Bensen, then a recent college grad, took with his girlfriend Rachel. I thought that the book did a great job of showing the tensions that a trip like this places on a relationship—I think that was my biggest take-away. I also loved the descriptions of the scenery and the people they met along the way. And now I really want to go to Glacier! (But not on a bike—I am nowhere near in shape for that.)

89rebeccanyc
Bewerkt: jun 22, 2014, 6:01 pm

The White Rock: An Exploration of the Inca Heartland by Hugh Thomson



This wonderful book combine's the author's descriptions of his travels through a broad swath of Inca territory, deep insights into what's true and what's not true about Inca cultures and history, thoughtful comments on various explorers, anthropologists, and artists, and a lively writing style and interesting characters. It is a great introduction to the Inca world, and I was pleased to find an extensive glossary and bibliography, as well as a chronology, an Inca genealogy, photographs, and helpful maps.

At the age of 21, in 1981, and somewhat on a whim, Thomson traveled to Peru to find one of the "lost" cities of the Incas. Traveling the length and breadth of the Inca empire (which at its height stretched from Ecuador to Bolivia, although centered in the Andean heights of Peru), he met anthropologists, the local people, explorers, and more, and needless to say encountered various challenges. Some of the people he met were fascinating, such as the daughter of a photographer who took thousands of images of Inca ruins and people from the 20s up to 1950 when an earthquake destroyed many of his glass plates. As he recounts his travels, Thompson comes to realize that much of what we "know" about the Inca is not supported by evidence. As he says in his introduction (written after a return trip to the area many years later):

"As a powerful mythopoeic base on which to build fantasies of confrontation with an alien culture, the Inca world has few rivals. But just as the lure of the Inca myth has increased, so any actual understanding of the Inca themselves has become obscured, let alone of the nature of exploration in the Andes.

The White Rock is an attempt to present a clear-sighted view of that Inca culture, drawing on my journeys throughout the Inca heartland near Cuzco and across the vast empire they created. Along the way I travelled to some of the most remote Inca sites and talked to leading archaeologists and explorers working in the area.

As I did so, I became more and more aware of the discrepancy between popular preconceptions about the Inca and the actual evidence on the ground. . .
The very familiarity of Machu Picchu causes problems and can lead us to forget how very little we know about the people who built the place . . . I have taken Chuquipalta -- the "White Rock" of the title, deep in the Vilcabamba -- as being emblematic of that hidden and lost Inca world which is rarely visited and which I have tried to explore."


Throughout the book, Thomson emphasizes the people who built the famous and forgotten sites -- and in many cases their exploitation. For the Inca achieved their empire as so many others have, by conquering other tribes and then moving their members around to do the heavy lifting for them (and in the case of the Inca, moving huge rocks was literally heavy lifting). Among the building tasks were the famous Inca highway, stone roads, occasionally 10 feet wide, that snaked up and down the mountains and along ridges over hundreds of miles, a network of roads that the Andean nations are today trying to preserve (see this recent New York Times article.) Needless to say, the conquered tribes hated the Inca and thus tended to side with the Spanish conquistadors. Thomson has nothing good to say about the conquistadors, who were particularly brutal in Peru (although the Inca didn't take enough advantage of their high ground and the difficulty of bringing the Spanish horses up stone steps), and their successors who exploited the remaining Indians for mining under horrific conditions.

Among the interesting topics Thomson discusses are the role of the cities the Inca built; they were not mostly religious, as is commonly thought, but were often created because each new emperor had to build a new palace (the old emperor remained, mummified, in his old palace) and as vacation spots for the rulers. He also meditates on the stupendous views at many of these sites, and why the Incas may have chosen them, and their talented and magnificent use of stone work. He discusses the trading networks, with high-altitude crops exchanged for those from lower down from both the jungle and the sea, and explores why people now can't attain the level of agricultural productivity enjoyed by the Inca. He notes that no explorer would have "discovered" any of these ancient sites without the assistant of local guides who always knew they were there; talks about the work of various archaeologists including one, who he spent some time with on his initial journey, who helped local people rebuild the old irrigation canals; discusses the history of the Inca as they maintained their last stand against the conquistadors in a remote ares; and describes his travels, including adventures with buses, trucks, mules, people, food, and drink vividly.

This is a very rich book, filled with all kinds of information about the Inca and their culture, mixed with a lively appreciation of all the people who helped the young explorer. I learned a lot and I thoroughly enjoyed the journey.

90southernbooklady
Bewerkt: jun 25, 2014, 8:22 am

>89 rebeccanyc: Ooh...I'm going to find a copy of that.

I posted this on my reading journal page, but it occurs to me it belongs here as well:



The Cloud Forest by Peter Matthiessen

The Cloud Forest is an account of an extended trip the author took to South America, spending most of his time in Peru although he also wandered through Argentina and Brazil, and did get as far as Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego at one point. Given the amount of territory he covered, it is perhaps not surprising that Matthiessen spends less time talking about cultures or ecosystems, and more time describing the succession of truly precarious conveyances he was forced to use--rickety buses driven by men with little concern for the safety of their passengers, standing room-only rail cars for trips that would take fourteen hours, flimsy boats manned by inexperienced crews, tiny airplanes piloted with the kind of fatalism that comes from flying over innumerable crash sites. Each time the author climbs into one of these things, one gets the sense he is putting himself in the hands of fate. Presumably, such an attitude was a requirement when traveling in the bush, or one would never get anywhere.

A writer of naturalist inclinations, Matthiessen faithfully records all the birds he sees with the diligence of a birder adding species to his life list, and he is suitably interested, and wary, of fauna with teeth. There is an extended section where he tries to determine the "most dangerous" animal in the jungle, and everyone he asks agrees that it is the Bushmaster-- a pit viper -- but that it is a thing rarely encountered. He does confirm, by personal experience, that it is safe to swim in a river with piranhas as long as one isn't bleeding or sporting any open wounds. But he doesn't go into the natural histories of the species he encounters, so they remain mere snapshots as he floats, or drives, or walks, or flies by.

But landscape he does beautifully, especially when he is describing scenes from the windows of whatever doubtful aircraft he has consigned himself to.

The last part of the book is devoted to a poorly-planned, poorly-executed, and almost absurd "expedition" to search out a giant fossilized mandibula that was rumored to have been discovered on the banks of the Pongo river deep in the Peruvian jungle. It's the kind of trip that would make John Leivers, the savvy guide from Turn Right at Machu Picchu, shake his head in disgust. Matthiessen seems to have got through on a wing and a prayer and a whole lot of dumb luck.

But he does devote considerable time to describing the indigenous peoples he comes across--most of them in a state of cultural disintegration owing to the effects of industrial forays into the jungle, "modernization" and civilization beating back the forest, and the indefatigable efforts of various Christian missionaries to save their souls. This last group comes in for some very harsh criticism by the author, who finds that those who have been "saved" are almost always left in a worse condition than they had been as heathens. Despite the occasional missionary who seems to have the well being of the natives truly at heart, the general practice seems to have been to strip the natives of their culture, hand them Bibles, force them into clothes, and then take off for the next wild tribe in need of salvation, leaving the newly saved peoples to fend for themselves in a culture they neither understood nor had any place in. Sort of an evangelical version of the slash and burn agriculture that was decimating the rain forest.

This was in 1960, so steps have been taken to slow down the decimation of indigenous peoples -- indeed, Matthiessen makes a point of talking about steps that were being taken even at that point: including one law that made it illegal to murder a native even in self defense. Of course, laws are only as good as your ability to enforce them, and the country Matthiessen is traveling through is utterly lawless. He learned to go armed. But the only thing he shot was a capybara, which he promptly lost in the river, thus losing his chance for something besides yuca for dinner.

As is probably clear at this point, The Cloud Forest is ultimately more of an adventure story than a "travel" narrative. But as adventure stories go, it is pretty impressive.

(edited for typo)

91rebeccanyc
jun 22, 2014, 4:22 pm

>90 southernbooklady: That sounds interesting too,

92whymaggiemay
jun 24, 2014, 7:09 pm

I'm surprised that no one read The Voyage of the Beagle or The Lost City of Z for this read. I kept expecting to see both and, having read both in the past, I thought they would fit this theme.

93Eckodar
jun 24, 2014, 7:33 pm

Deze gebruiker is verwijderd als spam.

94thorold
jun 25, 2014, 5:59 am

>92 whymaggiemay:
Yes, the Beagle would have been a good one for a re-read in context. I don't know Z, but I suspect I wouldn't like it. It's recent and very popular and all the reviews seem to be talking about the subject-matter rather than the writing, all things that are usually bad signs.

I was thinking about re-reading something familiar to conclude this exercise, but time is slipping away, so I think it will have to be rather short. Maybe A sentimental journey.

Otherwise, I'm quite happy with the travel books I've read over the past three months. This thread encouraged me to seek out a few authors I wasn't familiar with, and to deepen my acquaintance with some others I already knew slightly. It's also left me with quite a few others I still mean to try, not least Matthiessen. I wouldn't have come across Kpomassie without this thread, and I might not have made the effort to try Jonathan Raban.

95southernbooklady
jun 25, 2014, 8:10 am

I just found myself a copy of The White Rock thanks to rebeccanyc.

96PaperbackPirate
jun 26, 2014, 2:26 pm

Thank you everyone for sharing your thoughtful reviews! It's interesting how different the stories were even though at first the theme made me think there would be more similarity.

I've wanted to read The Voyage of the Beagle for a long time, but A Woman Alone: Travel Tales from Around the Globe edited by Faith Conlon has been on my shelf for 5 years so that's what I'm going to read for this theme. I don't know that I would enjoy traveling abroad solo, so I think it will be fun to live vicariously through these stories.

97rebeccanyc
jun 28, 2014, 11:23 am

Terra Nullius: A Journey through No One's Land by Sven Lindqvist



The term "terra nulllius," for "land belonging to no one," refers to the legal fiction used by the European colonizers of Australia to take the land belonging to the various groups of Aborigines who already lived there and, not so incidentally, for whom the land had very deep significance, reflecting (to oversimplify) the creation of the world. In the book Terra Nullius, Lindqvist combines a travelogue with a look at some highlights (lowlights?) of European interaction with Aborigines: outright massacres, rape, introduction of diseases including venereal diseases, land theft, imprisonment, stealing half-white and other children, breaking up families, testing of nuclear weapons without moving people away, and of course, underlying everything, breathtaking racism. Towards the end of the book, he introduces a little hope with an exploration of the success (i.e., in the white art market) of Aboriginal art and music.

Lindqvist has an amazing talent to blend his travelogue with historical information, which tends to speak for itself, and with examples from fiction written by colonizers (including a book he read as a child in Sweden which characterizes Aborigines as cannibals), which also tend to speak for themselves. He also devotes some space to an analysis of the the thinking of early 20th century European psychologists and anthropologists who hypothesized freely (and incorrectly) about the origins of humanity based on what they "knew" about the Australian Aborigines. I hadn't heard of Lindqvist before learning about this book from another LTer, but apparently he has made a career of traveling to places to understand the European/white impact on the people of color living in the lands they colonized. This is a compellingly readable, if borderline polemical, book, and it spurs the reader to anger. Many of the stories he tells are appalling.

Some examples of Lindqvist's writing.

"When the natives deny the occupiers access to their records and traditions, scholarship declares they don't exist. . .

When the settler community has stolen the land from its original owners, scholarship finds the natives have no land rights."
pp. 38-39

So the Aborigines were constantly being moved, not only to allow for atom-bomb tests, but also because the whites' cattle needed a particular pool of water or because the whites' company had found new mineral deposits -- or simply for their own good, so they could be looked after and learn the whites' table manners, the whites' good home cooking, the whites' working hours. The new policy after the second world war was aimed at 'assimilating' the Aborigines, which didn't imply the whites thought they had anything to learn from black people, but meant black people were to be trained to be steady wage earners and consumers on the fringes of white society." p. 163

Lindqvist makes the case for meaningful apologies from the descendents of colonizers by recounting his own encounter, as a young man, with Norwegians who accused him of benefiting from the Swedish policy of allowing the Nazis to march across Sweden to Norway. At first, he was taken aback by this, since he was only 10 in 1942, but comes to realize that "it was my own country's cowardly appeasement policy I had to thank for never having been bombed or shot at or even gone to bed hungry." He also discusses how countries can effectively make amends for past misdeeds; needless to say, saying "I'm sorry" isn't enough.

He ends the book with a broader look at the world.

"Three hundred million human beings on this planet are members of indigenous peoples who have been, or are on the way to being, robbed of their land. They are generally among the poorest and most scorned minorities in the countries where they live. Not long ago, they were considered doomed to die out. But in recent decades the indigenous peoples have seized back the initiative on a global scale." p.204

He then goes on to discuss some of these efforts, what Australia is doing, the fight to obtain German reparations for the Holocaust, and other claims for reparations. He concludes:

"When the misdeeds of the past are brought to light, when the perpetrators and their heirs confess and ask forgiveness, when we do penance and mend our ways and pay the price -- then the crime committed has a new setting and a new significance. No longer the inescapable extinction of a people, but its ability to survive and eventually have the justice of its claim acknowledged." p. 213

98rebeccanyc
jun 28, 2014, 11:56 am

The Songlines by Bruce Chatwin



Although I really enjoyed Chatwin's In Patagonia, and I enjoyed aspects of this book too, overall I found it irritating. Let me count the ways.

First, I have learned that Chatwin made up a lot of what he wrote as travelogue, although perhaps to be kinder it is "based on a true story" as movie publicists claim. This didn't bother me as much in the Patagonia book, possibly because he interspersed some real history and possibly because it involved largely people of European heritage and not the indigenous people. It is widely claimed that Chatwin, in The Songlines, is retelling stories about the Aborigines second hand and that he didn't actually meet the ones he describes encounters with, and that they never would have shared with him the details of their Songlines and Dreamings.

Second, a large part of this book is excerpts from Chatwin's notebooks, stories from his travels around much of the world, quotations from writers, conversations with various scientists interested in human evolution, and more. Apparently, Chatwin was in his final illness as he was writing this book, and may have even wanted to write a different book, as I will discuss below.

Finally, I found many of his descriptions of the Aborigines he "met," and of people he describes from his other travels (which he references in this book), condescending, although he probably would not recognize his perspective as such.

And that leads me to the book Chatwin apparently wanted to write, one that he thought he could hang his travels to Australia and his interest in Aboriginal origin myths and culture on. As emerges from his notebook excerpts, Chatwin is obsessed with nomadism -- as humanity's original way of life, as the best way of life, as the way of life whose loss has led to all the evils "civilized" humanity is now prey to.

"My two most recent notebooks were crammed with jottings taken in South Africa, where I examined, at first hand, certain evidence on the origin of our species. What I learned there -- together with what I now knew about the Songlines -- seemed to confirm the conjecture I had tied with for so long, that Natural Selection has designed us -- from the structure our brain-cells to the structure of our big toe -- for a career of seasonal journeys on foot through a blistering land of thornbush or desert.

If this were so; if the desert were 'home'; if our instincts were forged in the desert; to survive the rigours of the desert -- then it is easier to understand why greener pastures pall on us; why possessions exhaust us, and why Pascal's imaginary man found his comfortable lodgings in a desert."
p. 162

The breadth of topics covered in Chatwin's notebooks is remarkable, his writing sparkling, and his fictional (?) description of Aboriginal Songlines and Dreamings fascinating -- but all in all I found the book frustrating,

99Polaris-
jun 28, 2014, 1:20 pm

What a rich theme read this has been that I've pretty much entirely missed!

>97 rebeccanyc: I'm really glad you read Terra Nullius, I thought it was a very well written book, and as you said elsewhere - a compelling read. His book Exterminate All the Brutes is superb.

Well, hopefully better late than never, I've realised that my last read and my current read both fit the theme. I'm swept away by the wonderfully dreamy and poetically written As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning by Laurie Lee and recently enjoyed Fraser Harrison's Infinite West: Travels in South Dakota - which I hope to review soon.

100rebeccanyc
jun 28, 2014, 4:05 pm

>99 Polaris-: Thanks, Paul. I'll look for Exterminate All the Brutes.

101rebeccanyc
jun 29, 2014, 9:55 am

I just want to say how much, and much to my surprise, I've enjoyed this theme read. It spurred me to take several wonderful books off my TBR shelves, where at least one had been lurking for 30 years! And of course I learned about the fascinating books you all have been reading too. Thank you, lilisin, for coming up with the travelogue idea, and for encouraging us all to explore.

102lilisin
jun 30, 2014, 1:06 pm

rebecca -

I'm very glad this theme read inspired you to read so many books. I thank you for your participation and for your wonderful reviews which have inspired so many. Although the theme read didn't inspire the discussion I had originally wanted (all my initial attempts at generating discussion were ignored so I just stopped), I'm glad this thread will still serve as a great resource for those curious about the genre. Because as I've realized myself while dipping in, this genre is so broad and there is so much to explore. I know I still have a few books I need to read and can't wait to get to.

103banjo123
jun 30, 2014, 10:14 pm

One last book for me, unfortunately not a favorite:

I Should Have Stayed Home: The Worst Trips of the Great writers edited by Roger Rapoport

I picked this book up from a free pile. It seemed like a good idea for a book to me, since I have long noticed that what I remember best are the little disasters that occur with travel; arriving at the Phoenix Airport to find our credit card was frozen and we couldn't rent a car and were limited to cash on hand; the night we spent in a Rogue River campground, in a tent with a 5 year old, while the rest of the campground (except one very nice family) was occupied by meth-users (including the park ranger) who were partying ALL NIGHT LONG; the almost-out-of gas ride from Chichen Itza to Cancun, on a deserted highway. So I thought this collection of essays would be fun. Unfortunately, it was a mixed bag. Most of the essays seemed unexceptional: lots of stories about cockroaches and other vermin; sleazy hotels, etc. However, there were a couple of really good stories in here. I was partial to Isabel Allende's story of camping across Europe.

104thorold
jul 1, 2014, 7:54 am

>102 lilisin:
Thanks for hosting the thread! It's a pity that we didn't manage to turn it into a real discussion, but perhaps, as you suggest, it's just too broad a topic. I think I'd have a hard time picking out linking themes from the books I've read in the last few months - four centuries, just about every part of the world, every possible level of literary sophistication from the naive literalness of Coryat to the multidisciplinary stream-of-consciousness of Raban. From Edwardian aesthetes in straw hats (Norman Douglas) to mad Irishwomen on bicycles (Dervla Murphy); posh Englishwomen on mules (Penelope Chetwode) and on elephants (Miss Eden).

I suppose one thing that struck me is how many of the writers I was reading came from the kind of background where going off on a journey and writing a book about it is nothing very special. Raban, Seth, Dalrymple, Norman Douglas, Miss Eden, Paddy Leigh Fermor, - in their different ways, they all had the sort of family, education, income and age, where travel-writing would fit in as an obvious variant on empire-building. The ones who stood out were those like Dervla Murphy, Tété-Michel Kpomassie and Penelope Chetwode for whom it was by no means obvious to set out on long journeys. Even Coryat, who might have lacked the imagination to be a great travel-writer, but was still one of the great travellers.

105southernbooklady
jul 1, 2014, 8:22 am

>104 thorold: where travel-writing would fit in as an obvious variant on empire-building.

This unquestioned sense of entitlement, of "let's see how these natives live," has really started to wear on me. It seems to infect a huge swath of the genre. Even where the author's intent is what might be called "conservation" -- a plea to save a vanishing culture, for example -- the sense of cultural superiority still bleeds through and I find that an irritant to enjoying the account.

One book that you might add to your "exceptions" list, thorold, might be Vasily Grossman's Armenian Sketchbook. The reason the writer is in Armenia at all is rather absurd, but he's there as Stalin's regime is disintegrating in the aftermath of his death, so he's seeing a country and a culture trying to find its footing after the domineering Soviet presence, while he is still trying to navigate his own way against the uncertain political winds. His descriptions of the country are very beautiful, though. And his account of the misguided attempts to "harness" the potential power of Lake Sevan are pretty heartbreaking if you are an environmentalist.

106lilisin
jul 1, 2014, 3:43 pm

104 -
it's just too broad a topic. I think I'd have a hard time picking out linking themes from the books I've read in the last few months

But that's exactly what I hoped would be noticed while doing this thread! I know that I used to throw a bit of a sneering eye at the concept of travel writing thinking that it was just a bunch of 22 year-old college students trying to show how rebellious they are for leaving the United States and exploring foreign lands. And that's even after having read the amazing The Roads to Sata by Alan Booth about his 1000 mile walk along the coast of Japan. His book had been so amazing that since it didn't fit the stereotype I had of travelogues, I never considered his book to be one.

Now, I blame my perception on movies actually. Movies like "Into the Wild" (never read the book) where I can't take the main character seriously due to what I see as unnecessary philosophizing on topics that to me aren't that difficult to comprehend. (I'm quite the rationalist when it comes to things.)

So it came to be a surprise when I then read Elizabeth Eaves' Wanderlust that I surprisingly picked up due to a recommendation from the book list in a fashion magazine. a) This was the first time for me to use such a book list for a recommendation. b) There was a huge chance this fit the original stereotypical portrayal I had in my mind of those lost college students. So when I read the book I was slapped in the face but my liking of the book and realizing that she's not some lost hippie philosophizing on the world and that I actually related to her a lot.

Basically, that's what I wanted this theme read to be about: to show people how broad a topic this genre is and to demonstrate how fascinating it can be. So it is to my extreme pleasure to see those who have enjoyed themselves taking part.

107southernbooklady
jul 1, 2014, 4:48 pm

>106 lilisin: "Into the Wild" (never read the book)

I never saw the movie, but I found the book very sad. That was a guy in trouble long long before he lost himself in the wilderness.

I also thought Krakauer was a bit of a jerk who imposed himself on the story.

just a bunch of 22 year-old college students trying to show how rebellious they are for leaving the United States and exploring foreign lands.

I came to the genre from an entirely different direction--Freya Stark, Gertrude Bell, all those Victorian lady adventurers. So it wasn't "rebelling" so much as "escaping" the confines of their own culture for a freer existence in another.

108rebeccanyc
jul 1, 2014, 5:13 pm

>104 thorold: I did feel a little bad that almost all the books I read were by British writers, but those were the ones I had on my TBR. However, this theme read did make me realize that I had an uninformed prejudice against travel writing in general, and I hope to read more varied works in the future. It is, however, true, that most people who travel for pleasure or education (and who write about it) have to come from a certain class because they have to have the money and leisure to be able to travel. Of course, there are also people who have to or want to flee from their homes, but they don't often have the time or freedom from the necessity of working to write about it.

>105 southernbooklady: I wholeheartedly second your recommendation of An Armenian Sketchbook.

109thorold
jul 2, 2014, 7:33 am

>108 rebeccanyc:, >105 southernbooklady:
Yes, the "from" is something that always plays a part in travel books, and it's the thing it's easy to overlook. I'm sure I also picked up too many by British authors, without thinking too much about it. Murphy and Seth aren't British, of course, but they both come with a lot of cultural baggage from the British empire. Cela, as a bourgeois, urban Spaniard travelling in rural Spain, doesn't really shift the perspective much.

Kpomassie should have been the real outsider who gave a radically-different perspective, but that wasn't really what I got from his book. It was still a book about how strange the Greenlanders are. It didn't seem to make very much difference to what he saw that he was from Togo: most of the intellectual structure he was using to decode what he saw seemed to come from his French education.

The impression I got from the books I read is that what makes the biggest difference to the approach of the book is the author's personality and readiness to interact with people on their own terms. Kpomassie is obviously good at that, but so are Seth and Murphy and Dalrymple (once he got over the notion of pretending to be Robert Byron), and so is Paddy Leigh Fermor. Raban isn't, and seems to be aware of it; Douglas apparently doesn't care one way or the other; Robert Byron is so unsympathetic to everyone he meets that he almost turns it into a virtue; Cela is so preoccupied with making people into fictional characters that we can't really tell how he relates to them. And there are all sorts of other complications, like the British obsession with virile Muslim men (cf. Dervla Murphy, T.E. Lawrence and Wilfred Thesiger), or Miss Eden's vast social superiority to everyone in India (except her brother), Europeans and Indians alike...

I was just looking through my books to see what else I might have read by "non-metropolitan travellers" - there's not much, really. V.S. Naipaul is scarcely someone who turns the paradigm of travel-writing on its head, is he? Ibn Battutah is non-metropolitan by our standards, but by his own he's as metropolitan as they come, and everywhere outside Tangiers (except Mecca and Medina) is thoroughly provincial.

I don't know. I have an old book by an Indian writer called A Passage to England, which sounded as though it should be interesting, but turns out to be a deadly dull account of "the British character" that I didn't manage to finish. Like England, their England, but without the funny bits. Maybe I'll have a go at Grossman. Or maybe have a re-read of Böll's Irisches Tagebuch

110banjo123
jul 2, 2014, 12:36 pm

Let me echo the thanks for hosting the thread! I think that really the best thing for discussion is if we all read some of the same books. But this group is pretty independent-minded and reading self-determination is a big value. At any rate, I have enjoyed reading the reviews.

Naturally, I haven't done as much reading for this group as I intended to, and there are several books still on the to-read list. But I have enjoyed most of what I've read. I actually kind of enjoy the 22 year old - hippie -self discovery - read, as long as it's accompanied by real self-refection.

I have to say that I am a big Jon Krakaeur fan. He does come off as a bit of a jerk, but I think it's admirable that he lets his rough edges show. ( Unlike some writers who try to sound all enlightened and zen, but it comes off fakey-nice. ) I don't think of Krakaeur as a travel-writer, though I suppose that's an interpretation. I thought Into the Wild was brilliant, but so sad that I couldn't bring myself to see the movie.

111Polaris-
jul 2, 2014, 5:56 pm

>110 banjo123: Yes! Completely agree with what you say about Krakauer and Into The Wild.

112brenpike
jul 3, 2014, 12:01 am

Another Krakauer fan here. Into Thin Air is one of my all-time favorites. . .

113lilisin
jul 19, 2014, 9:38 am

As I'm late to my own party, I finally read the travelogue I was planning on reading during the time set for this theme read. But I have finally read it and I utterly delighted with it. Below is my review for the book.

Donald Richie : The Inland Sea
America/Japan
4/5 stars

One cannot enter the world of Japanese studies without hearing the name of Donald Richie, considered an expert in Japanese film and culture. Many wish to emulate his success and many more try to surpass him. This is his tale of his explorations of the Inland Sea of Japan to try and find what has been forgotten in Japan. The Inland Sea is located within the main island of Honshu (Japan is composed of 5 main islands) and Shikoku and is comprised of a series of tiny little islands that Donald Richie visits via boat over the course of a few months in the 70s. Reading the book was eerily mesmerizing as we are both horrified by some of his opinions, viewpoints and stories, while also entranced by his lovely opinions, viewpoints and stories.

Yes, reading the book is both painfully cringe-worthy and beautiful in the sense that Donald Richie is one of those men you would love to invite to dinner to introduce to your friends but you're also afraid of his words offending the majority of your guests. I tried to keep in mind that this book was written in the 70s but Donald Richie is certainly a man carrying rose-colored glasses when it comes to certain aspects of Japan. Japan can do no harm even when it he admits that it does. He praises its xenophobia while also asking to be wanted by the Japanese. Donald Richie feels like the middle child craving attention from his stern father who can do no wrong in his eyes. Let's not forget his experience with the 15 year old girl whom he tries to seduce despite being well into his 40s. (Worse for me, I have only the face of the 77 year old Donald Richie in my mind so that made the scene extra-cringeworthy.) Now, I'm not entirely against sex tourism (not paying for sex, but involving yourself in sexual adventures with "the locals"); it's true what they say that you can learn a lot about a language and a culture when in the arms of a lover. But please leave the 15 year olds alone, Mr. Richie. And stop trying to seduce the female owners of the local bars. Now you just sound desperate. But Mr. Richie does address his own faults (he provides an incredibly personal look at his failing marriage) and you do see that he really is trying to understand himself.

And within that, the trip he takes is really beautiful and he describes it quite eloquently. I cannot fault him for that and I actually say thanks. His anecdotes are humorous, many of his encounters are delightful and he adds additional notes on the history of the islands that is fantastic. All in all, a book worthy of reading.

114Samantha_kathy
jul 25, 2014, 1:40 pm

I finally got to reviewing the travel book I read for this back in June.

Met de trein door China (By Train through China) by Jesse Goossens (3 stars)



By Train through China is perhaps a bit of a misnomer, as the first third of the book the train journey goes through Russia. Still, it’s a nice, quick read. The adventures in the train are the focus, although sometimes an anecdote about time spent in a place between train journeys is give. But while an enjoyable read, there wasn’t anything sparkling in the story. At times it even felt a bit repetitive. I think it might have done better if it hadn’t just focused on the train journeys and also included the stops in between.

115spiralsheep
jan 26, 2021, 11:01 am

18/2021. I read Travels with Herodotus by Ryszard Kapuscinski, which is a travel book describing how his reading of ancient Greek author Herodotus influenced Kapuscinski's perceptions and writing as a journalist. I've read plenty of travel writing and journalism by foreign correspondents but this book made me think and even provoked one entirely fresh perspective. Sometimes it's useful for journalists and historians to ask questions for curiosity's sake without necessarily expecting those questions to be fully answerable. 4*

The copy I read is a Penguin paperback kindly gifted to my local library system by the Polish embassy, and two Polish arts organisations, in a thoughtful diplomatic gesture. So I laughed when I saw the first pages included a map of Herodotus' world which, of course, includes neither Poland nor the UK, lol.

Quotes

On border walls, written before 2007: "That is how the world’s energy is wasted. In complete irrationality! Complete futility! For the Great Wall — and it is gigantic, a wall-fortress, stretching for thousands of kilometres through uninhabited mountains and wilderness, an object of pride and, as I have mentioned, one of the wonders of the world — is also proof of a kind of human weakness, of an aberration, of a horrifying mistake; it is evidence of a historical inability of people in this part of the planet to communicate, to confer and jointly determine how best to deploy enormous reserves of human energy and intellect."

On war: "In the realm of human affairs, admittedly, one also needs a pretext. It is important to give it the rank of a universal imperative or of a divine commandment. The range of choices is not great: either it is that we must defend ourselves, or that we have an obligation to help others, or that we are fulfilling heaven’s will. The optimal pretext would link all three of these motives. The attackers should appear in the glory of the anointed, in the role of those who have found favour in his chosen god’s eye."

In conclusion: "The past does not exist. There are only infinite renderings of it."