Lebanon light hearted and fun--at least on the surface

To subscribers: this is the first travel writing I've put up on the site -- though the site was supposed to be dedicated to travel. Unpublished elsewhere so may be full of unedited junk.

As the sparse, scrubby fields of the Bekaa Valley and the misted out brownish smudge of mountains called the Anti-Lebanon Range that frame it to the east flow past the tour bus window, it occurs to me that this vehicle is on the road to Damascus, at least in theory.

Wasn’t there somebody in history or legend who’d had a change of heart on the “road to Damascus”? I rack my brains for the literary or Biblical reference—was it Paul or Saul? I ask around the bus if anyone can produce the reference, but no one can. I consider asking our voluble guide Abbas (“That’s like the Swedish popgroup ABBA with an S”) but he is far away at the front, delivering an unstoppable monologue.

“There are the tents of bedouins,” thunders Abbas in his amplified, already powerful voice. They are not Lebanese, he informs us, and had come to do the harvest.

Would I or anyone else have a great revelation or change of heart on this trip? In the event, I’d have to resign myself to something less--I couldn’t milk the Biblical metaphor at all! But that didn’t prevent me from experiencing a whole flurry of minor revelations about this oddly unbalanced but amiable place.

Taking advantage of a 10-day holiday break at the Muslim climax of Eid al Adha, I headed to the smallest, most complicated Arab country (recently described as “wartorn”) rather than the sunny in-season beaches within shooting distance--Sri Lanka, the Maldives and Kerala to name a few. Actually Lebanon has quite a few fine beaches as well, but I saw few swimmers cutting the turquoise in November. Why I went I can’t quite say but it had something to do with wanting to reduce the huge amount of ignorance I have about the broader context of the Middle East heretofore seen primarily from a sand-bound perspective.

In addition, since a gimpy back limits my heroics—I thought a small country – not more than 100 k in length --might suit me best. In any case, I found Lebanon to be manageable, stimulating and fun at least on the surface.

Some macro impressions. First the fear factor: Even though no major violence has happened in Lebanon for years, that is following the Hariri assassination and Syrian exit, peace and tranquility in this land, as Neil MacFarquhar points out in his recent book on the Middle East (in a title too long to quote) are rarely to be found. Indeed, the suggestion of a new crisis regarding the outcome of the UN sponsored Hariri Tribunal was in the news. Individual Lebanese I talked to seemed cautiously optimistic, but then again, as one said, “We have to be.”

No need, however, to worry about the weather. It was almost as blazing as the Gulf – downright summery, even up in the hills. But as a Lebanese citoyen told me, there’s a warming trend in Lebanon as everywhere else.

What’s next in importance for the tourist? Food! Here again no worries. Almost all the decent food in the Middle East is a spinoff from Lebanese or Syrian. So if you like lentil soup and shish taook in Dubai or Doha, you’re not going to be disappointed with the genuine article in Beirut. I expected to find schwarma stands all over the country, but in fact only saw one or two – I did have one superb chicken schwarma a la Libanaise though it cost double the Dubai price.

Some regional comparisons: Lebanon is roughly at the same level of economic development as Jordan though the country seems less dynamic than booming Turkey. Beirut is much livelier and cosmopolitan than safe, orderly Amman, less historically dense and atmospheric than Cairo but much easier to put up with than the Egyptian capital due to the latter’s wall-to-wall touts and incessant demands for baksheesh. Overall, Lebanon seems less “third world” than Egypt as well – though there are world-class slums in South Beirut and the Palestinian refugee camps. Though these contrast dramatically with the very wealthy quarters of the same town, Beirut still seems modern, upbeat and civilized. Prices in Lebanon are very reasonable ($77 per night at the Mayflower, a 4 star hotel), though services can seem expensive to the Gulf resident because unlike in the Gulf, Lebanese citizens themselves perform these services and not cheap foreign labor.

Lebanon is freer and more outspoken than any other Arab country I’ve seen (and indeed the Lebanese confirmed my impression and are proud of this freedom) though there is only one English-language newspaper, The Daily Star. The friendly welcome so typical of other Middle Eastern countries I’ve visited is very much out in force in Lebanon as well, as is a fair amount of price gouging and (unfortunately) good old fashioned chicanery. Overall, however, the Lebanese that I met were (with one exception, see below) reliable, trustworthy and articulate in a variety of languages.

They are also Francophones to a degree you wouldn’t believe. So ubiquitous is French in fact that I found myself speaking it nearly everywhere, in taxis, hotels, and on tours with French tourists. It was a nice unexpected linguistic bonus for this old student of French and onetime Francophile. The Lebanese seem to have adopted en masse a French cultural alter ego so that wherever you go you’re sure to see some vestige of France such as the blue & white street signs (“Rue de Hamra”), as well as patisseries , traiteurs, etc. and a marked preference for French over English in the names of restaurants and hotels. There is also a respectable effort at simulating one of ~France's greatest contributions to civilizaton--street cafe life. The reason for this? France has a long history of intervention in Lebanon, most recently after World War II. Alien invaders they might have been yet as Catholics their cultural affinities with the Christian segments of Lebanese society seem to have left a deep imprint. In addition, many Lebanese of all sects were educated in French schools that still exist. In any case, Lebanese francophony provided a pleasant cultural diversion for me and revived my interest in French literature as I browsed the shelves of French bookstores in Beirut. (The first one I went into had a copy of Houllebecque’s latest Goncourt-winning novel La Carte et Le Territoire plus a Le Clezio that I was looking for).

But what about the tours? What about the tourism? What about the fun? There was plenty of that to be had in Lebanon at a reasonable price and with moderate effort yet I only succeeded in booking one full day of tours to famous and great sites. My first tour to the coastal archetypal town Byblos was a disaster due to a taxi driver who was either insane or a total cheat. He told me I had only an hour in that incredibly ancient place, maybe the world’s first city. I was there long enough to understand very little—fortunately one hour among old stones is my limit anyway; the surrounding souks were more enticing, but alas! The lying crook tricked me back to Beirut (where we had a hell of an argument over how much I owed him. I actually won the argument yet lost a half day).

Next on the list was Balbec, not the fictional birthplace of Proust's alter ego Marcel in another book whose title is too long, but the legendary Roman ruins close to the Syrian border. I tried to sign up on the day of Eid itself – but it was fully booked, so I had to wait. In the meantime, I booked hotel taxis at exorbitant rates (since there are no city tours) to take me to Beirut legends such as the old Green Line and Palestinian refugee camps. The guidebooks warned against visiting the latter places (without a local contact of some kind) so although interested in them I remained cautious while being driven through Sabra and Shatila camps, scenes of the notorious massacres in 1982. I must admit that the human density of the camps, as revealed by a superficial drive through, exerted a strange kind of attraction--similar to the lurid squalor that had fascinated me in pre-Capitalist Shanghai in 1986. I walked around for a half hour or so in Shatila, accompanied by my driver, and found the place reasonably calm and orderly. No one rushed me—an obvious Yank in their midst--or cursed me out.

It took a half-day to get there, but Balbec was worth the trouble. Because I’d dropped my camera in a freak accident in my hotel room and smashed the telephoto lens, I have no ocular proof of my visit. We got, for 75 dollars, the truly charming Ummayid/Roman site of Anjar, a wine-tasting stop at Ksara, a a superb but rushed dinner at the “best restaurant in Lebanon” (the “Arabi Casino” perched in the mountains) and the beautiful, fantastically well-preserved ruins of the ancient Roman religious site of Balbec (which means “temple of Baal” the sun god). Featuring the remains of a temple to Jupiter and another to Bacchus, it is a small, very manageable ruin in a particularly scenic spot of the Bekaa Valley. The temple of Bacchus is the single best preserved Roman building I have ever seen (outside Rome’s Panteone) – like a miniature Parthenon. The whole site begs comparison with one other well-preserved Roman site--Ephesus in Turkey, which includes the contours of a whole city.

What I will remember perhaps even longer than the classic architecture of Balbec is the comraderie of the busload of tourists I travelled with to Balbec. Across the aisle from me was a young Pakistani couple from the Emirates – apparent strangers until, noticing the husband’s fluent American accent, I asked him where he went to school. His answer, “Madison, Wisconsin” placed him in a highly select group of only four in my whole experience of the Middle East. Though we probably wouldn’t have been great friends in Madison—the old hippy and the young business grad—we enjoyed the old school connection and present encounter. I also enjoyed the naïve but genuine interest of an Indian doctor (working in Saudi) in the religion of paganism, the real French of two authentic female French tourists, and the affable guide Abbas. I was also amazed to learn that an educated and attractive European pair—the husband of which was wielding a camera in a way I envied for obvious reasons—were retired int the Greek island of Leros. Leros? Let me see. Isn’t that the small lump we see, sitting in Bodrum, Turkey, every day on the horizon just north of Calymnos? A common alma mater, exchanged addresses and hopes for a visit in the future—such are the chancy miracles of travel.

So no major revelations or change of heart on the “road to Damascus” – just a few small insights. One of these was based on the fact that Lebanon draws an interesting bunch of travelers. The more special the country, it seems, the better quality the tourists and vice versa (the less special the country, the more riffraffish the people who come to its shores). And finally this modest observation: the more you travel, the more at home you feel not being at home. And, oh yes, it was both Saul & Paul since the former turned into the latter by converting from paganism to Christianity.

Vive Lebanon!
Vive le Liban libre!

Weaving Strands of the Silk Road

Early on in Shadow of the Silk Road, Colin Thubron gets a key travel epiphany, one of many in the course of his epic eight month 7000 mile journey from Xian, China to Antakya (Antioch) Turkey – the endpoints of that legendary route once traveled by camels, carpets, caravans and silk. The author as is his wont has just been staring intensely at some artifacts: he notices tortoises and dragons mixing with Islamic designs in a Xian mosque:
“…alongside my disquiet, an excitement rises: it is the stir of things transforming, of peoples intermingling and transmuting one another. This I recognize is the merchant’s reality: everything convertible, kaleidoscopic. The purity of cultures, even the Chinese, becomes an illusion. So the hybrid mosque is like a promise or warning. It is the work of the Silk Road, long ago. Nothing ahead of me, I sense, will be homogeneous, constant. To follow a road is to follow diversity: a flow of interlocked voices, arguing, in a cloud of dust.”(31)

With these words, the author has perhaps provided the best description of his own work along with a sample of his writerly wares. Thubron really does exert himself to explain his kaleidoscopic theme wherever he finds himself on the hard road from China to Kyrgyzstan (rough), Uzbekistan (rougher), and Afghanistan (roughest), then on to the relative peace of Iran and Kurdish Turkey. In all of these places, besides the rich description of places and persons, we get insights into the old borderless confusion of the Silk Road which to some extent still supersedes the modern nation states defined by maps but not by any natural borders.

“To follow the Silk Road,” he writes, “is to follow a ghost. It flows through the heart of Asia, but it has officially vanished leaving behind it the pattern of its restlessness: counterfeit borders, unmapped peoples. The road forks and wanders wherever you are. It is not a single way, but many: a web of choices. Mine stretches more than seven thousand miles, and is occasionally dangerous.” (3)

This is pretty much how the whole book goes. Thubron, who is also a novelist, plays the multiple roles of hardcore traveler, multilingual companion, evocative historian and indefatigable ghost-chaser. Everywhere he goes he decodes both faces and places according to these transmuting insights and finds plenty of evidence for his assumptions.

In China, he has a particularly good time dismantling fixed Chinese notions of their nation’s “pure” identity. He sees the Yellow Emperor, for example, whom Chinese regard as the founder of their nation and culture as most likely the descendent of northern Mongol tribes (though he presents no proof for this assertion). He also finds traces of the old Nestorian Christian cult in the famous caves of Dunhuang (94), and, in the pale faces of a remote Gansu village, descendents it is thought, of a lost Roman legion (75).

In Xinjiang (China’s westernmost province), his reflections on the “most hybrid people of all,” (115) the Uighur, lead him to envision the deepest effects of the Silk Road as a “river where nations lost their meaning. This after all was the road whose Chinese silk lay in the graves of Iron Age Germany. It had spread variousness and impurity.”

After cataloguing the many cross cultural oddities he’s picked up over the years (for example, Chinese opera sleeves coming from Crete), Thubron’s imagination goes into overdrive: “…you could go mad… tracing the origins of the simplest things. The peppers in my pilau would return to India, I fancied, the sesame on my bread to central Asia. I pictured the onions flying westward off my neighbor’s plate, while his pistachio nuts disappeared to Persia. China, of course, would claim the paper napkins and rose wilting on the counter…” 116

Thubron cites few sources for all these theories but one never doubts that his research is painstaking and accurate. He’s also good on his basic themes the route itself and its prime mover silk -- its history, biology and production. He describes with pleasure the intricate process by which a long series of middlemen exchanged goods so that, at one moment, ancient Romans and Chinese might be wearing each other’s goods or designs, without ever having met in the flesh. He even braves going into modern silk shops to check out the wares. (116)

Thubron the intellectual tries hard to get inside the spirit of Silk Road commerce by a series of imaginary dialogues between himself and a “Sogdian trader” who questions the author’s purpose in traveling and mocks his lack of trading skills, among other things.

Not only silk and spices but war and warfare also traveled the Silk Road, resulting in several spectacular destructions of Middle Eastern capitals and civilizations, the most notorious having been carried out by the Mongol emperor, Genghis Khan, who destroyed Baghdad, Samarkand and Bukhara among other legends. Thubron dutifully visits their mausoleums and ruins (he seems particularly fond of ancient graveyards that locals have forgotten) providing a useful background for those whose history courses didn’t include this region (probably most of my fellow Americans).

The author is also interested in the religions (“shapes of faith”) of the Silk Road, a subject in which he shows unusual knowledge and sensitivity. His accounts of the Tibetan “Living Buddha” in Lanzhou (“tamed” by the Chinese authorities) and modern, decadent Taoists are probing and sceptical; he produces a more involved portrait of a Russian Orthodox service in Samarkand in which he seems to join in. But Thubron’s most impressive piece of religious tourism occurs in northeast Iran (Herat) where, in spite of his misgivings about Shiism, he surreptitiously participates in one of that religion’s most sacred rituals.

Though Thubron may be one of the most intellectual and culturally astute of travelers, he is also a physical traveler who takes on a lot of tough terrain, bad weather and other assorted risks (including the SARS epidemic) in this journey. He’s physically fit, one senses, and a hard worker, scaling numerous mountain top fortresses in Iran; he makes it to the top of the Assassins mountain where he’s thrilled to find evidence of Mongol destruction. He rides horses in Kyrgyzstan, outfaces a would-be bandit and is nearly killed in a head-on car collision in the same country. There are also increasing threats of violence in and around Afghanistan which at that time was under attack by US forces retaliating for 9/11, forcing Thubron to reschedule that part of his trip a year later. The Afghanistan he describes, however, is still far from safe, and he goes through it in a rush of panicky moves. The most brutal episode though is the extraction of one of the author’s teeth without painkillers, in a dental clinic in Iran, an account sure to go down as one of the most horrendous in the history of travel.

If all of this seems a bit heavy for the supposed entertainment requirements of the travel genre, let me say that, yes, there are times when I wish Thubron would take a day off, and forget about those piles of rocks that seem to fascinate him. Because when he does relax, the results are nearly always engaging and revealing.

For the human element, Thubron doesn’t seek out the high and mighty for interviews, but sticks to the ruck of common humanity. His encounters in this book are no less varied than one would expect from Behind the Wall and The Lost Heart of Asia, and you only wish there were more of them. Speaking adequate Chinese and fluent Russian (and perhaps Arabic since he reads it), he is able to get under the skin of his interlocutors and bring out their individuality. Since this isn’t Thubron’s first passage through these regions, he has friends from previous trips whose perspectives and changes in fortune add a lot to the tale.

Thubron views all the people he meets as individuals but certain themes emerge depending on the nationality. His Chinese contacts are mostly defined in relation to the vast economic transformation that has turned so many of them all into frantic entrepreneurs, but he also notes ghostly vestiges of the Cultural Revolution and Tiananmen Square, and clearly sympathizes with and draws out the anti-Chinese sentiment of minority people (mainly Uighurs) who are perhaps the most memorable voices of this section of the book.

Among the mountain tribes of the various “istan” republics, Thubron finds tough, simple, warm-hearted people whose hardscrabble existence he shares and admires. Independence (from the USSR) came to most of the “Istans” without a struggle; the younger generation no longer remembers Communism. The post-soviet euphoria has of course dried up, and some of Thubron’s contacts long for the orderly soviet times when people at least had work. Neither Islam nor nationalism seems strongly implanted among these people many of whom have reverted to subsistence pastoralism. You feel that Thubron nonetheless thoroughly enjoys himself among these nouveaux rustics, especially the horseback riding Kyrgyzis where he rides a “docile roan.”

In super legendary Samarkand and Bukhara (whether in Uzbekistan, Tajikistan or Kazakhstan the author’ map doesn’t make clear), his fervent attention to the tomb of Tamerlane dominates the tale, but an irreverent encounter with subjects depicted in a previous book, artist-intellectual types who still cling to secularism and Stalin, is one of the best parts of the book. It’s too bad he doesn’t tell us more about what life is like under the last Soviet-style dictator, Karimov.

The interesting encounters never stop, but as the book goes on you feel Thubron’s increasing obsession with solving his multicultural puzzles.

That doesn’t prevent the final chapters of his book, “Over the Oxus” and “Mourning” from being among the most gripping and best-written sections of the book; Afghanistan’s real dangers are obvious as Thubron slips through a messy situation, barely making it out of the danger zone, but he does, landing in the relative safety of Herat and Meshed, which he has visited before and is anxious to see again. You almost expect a conversion as Thubron literally gets carried away on a sea of living worshippers at the Festival of Ali celebrated at a legendary mosque in Meshed. Only the last detail tells you, he has retained his skepticism: the mosque, he writes, looks like a ship “setting sail into the dark.”

And that brings up the subject of Thubron’s style. As the reader may have guessed already from the brief samples quoted, it is not just that Thubron writes well; it is that he transmutes metaphorically nearly everything he sees, as in (China): “Beneath us, the river was liquid loam, the colour of milk chocolate, roiling between cliffs split by rain into bitter gullies. Over this drama the dark descended suddenly, and our train became a snake glimmering through emptiness” (though you wonder how he managed to see his own train (on horseback): “We went through an icy stillness. The shadows of powder-puff clouds marbled the water, which lisped alongside in nervous waves. A faint wind tapped in my ears. Yet by noon the snow was thawing, the horse’s hoof’ sinking into slush…” And “As the hills lurched into mountains, their flanks burned with mauve strata or a dull, charred black, and dribbled purple scree.” (154-55). There is also a falling rhythm in Thubron’s descriptive passages that end on a blank, empty or dark note, as in the last sentence of the book: “…the sky was not the blue calm of my imagined homecoming, but a troubled cloudscape that swept the sea in moving gleams and shadows.” In view of the superb writing found here, it’s not surprising that Colin Thubron is also a distinguished novelist.

Finally, Shadow of the Silk Road is one more celebration of travel. No one has described better the peculiar joys of this activity. Here he is in Labrang, not far from Tibet:
“My feet crunch over the snow, seeming light and lonely, and from somewhere in the darkness ahead,-- like an old god clearing his throat – sounds the braying of a horn. Then a familiar elation wells up…The experience is inseparable from solitude and a vestigial fear, because you don’t know where the road will end, who will be there.”
(originally published in Bloomsbury Review, US, reprinted three times)

Mario Vargas Llosa Wins Nobel for Literature; review of Gauguin novel

The Far Flung Review wishes to congratulate Mario Vargas Llosa for winning the 2010 Nobel prize for Literature. Llosa has always been one of our favorite figures in world literature, and we rally strongly to this decision. Llosa is preeminently international in scope and -- although his work is uneven in quality -- he has still written enough great books to be considered a major writer in every sense. He is also one of the most powerful standard bearers of what we might call (for want of a better word) the liberal tradition. For decades, he has been overshadowed by the other Latin American giant Gabriel Garcia Marquez -- but now he that he's gained the recognition he deserves he'll be read and appreciated for his own merits. Llosa's best work in our opinion is his (2000) The Feast of the Goat, a brilliant, horrifying portrait of a Caribbean (can anyone spell this word?) Trujillo like tyrant. His other undoubted achievements are Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, a satire of magic realism, and (1984) The War of the End of the World, an epic and gripping account of a millenarian war that engulfed Brazil at the turn of the last century. The book reviewed here is one of Llosa's sweetest and kindest -- a rehabilitation of the bohemian cult itself in both its political and artistic dimensions. It is also a considerable artistic success.

The Way to Paradise
By Mario Vargas Llosa
UK: Faber & Faber, 2003.
L16.99/373 pp.

“Sometimes he saw himself in Japan rather than the Marquesas. That was where you should have gone in search of Paradise, Koke, rather than coming to mediocre Polynesia. In the cultured country of the Rising Sun, all families were peasants nine months of the year, and artists for the remaining three.”

Chances are that Paul Gauguin (“Koke” in Maori), one of the two co-heroes of this book, would have been disillusioned with Japan as well, but it’s a lovely vision that the author Mario Vargas Llosa conjures up in the French expatriate painter’s mind as he waits calmly for death in his lonely hut on an island of the Marquesas.

The Way to Paradise by the famous Peruvian novelist is a compelling fictionalized twin biography of two figures not usually associated: Paul Gauguin, the legendary French post-Impressionist, and Flora Tristan, his grandmother, a social crusader and world traveler of the mid 19th century. Though they never met in real life, Llosa brings together their life threads in dozens of unexpected ways.

In a cleverly cross hatched pattern of alternating episodes, Llosa weaves together the two time streams of grandmother and grandson, who, though their narratives contrast starkly, had more in common than they realized -- both idealistic rebels, family deserters, and haters of the bourgeoisie (in which both could have lived comfortably). Gauguin, as is well known, gave up a career as a stockbroker for the undisciplined and impoverished life of the artist among the exotic tribes of the South Pacific. Flora, after a difficult adolescence, spent hers among the no less exotic political tribes of 19th century Europe, crusading for the rights of women and workers. Flora’s search for paradise took the form of leftist utopian futurism while Paul’s, ironically, took the form of an attempted return to the past – an apolitical primitivism.

If a page-turning contest between the two narratives were held, it might well be that Gauguin’s more sensational exploits would win hands down. He’s an outrageous monster, but bigger than life and so beyond judgment. Yet it’s Gauguin’s artistic vocation that interests Llosa more and where he has achieved the most in his recreation of the artist. Llosa not only recounts in lavish detail the high points of Gauguin’s career and travels, he also describes the creation of many of Gauguin’s most famous masterpieces, and at the end establishes their greatness as well as simple humanity. It’s a much deeper treatment of this artist than we find in the previous bet-known fictional work on Gauguin, W. S. Maugham’s otherwise delightful The Moon and Sixpence (he turns him into an unconvincing Brit).

Llosa’s novel can be seen as an intelligent defense of the long-embattled artist: he makes sure we note Gauguin’s anti-Colonialist leftist tendencies, and also emphasizes Gauguin’s multiculturalism before that term was invented; for good measure, Llosa gives Gauguin an amusing homosexual encounter with a mahu (man-woman) in Tahiti.

The author generally succeeds in enlivening the harsher materials of Flora’s disastrous marriage, broken family life and numerous energetic campaigns to “change the world.” Flora’s travels to England and South America, however, are in their way just as colorful and impressive as Paul’s journeys. On the way, the beautiful reformer is the object of many romantic designs (including one by Charles Fourier) -- but Flora’s rapist husband has soured her on sex – except for one affair with her disciple, Eleonore Blanc. Finally, her books, which were well-known at the time, have survived and generated a small scholarly industry. Flora holds her own with her grandson as she does with every other male she encounters.

The real connection between Flora and Paul is seen in their common cultural context and incendiary mood of 19th century France, in which artists, writers and politicos (generally anarchists, utopian and leftist) mixed it up in the revolutionary fervor of post-Napoleonic Paris. This 19th c. revolutionary ethos, by the way, links this novel with Llosa’s earlier War of the End of the World.

Though Paul never met his grandmother since she died before he was born, fellow gauchiste Camille Pissarro (Gauguin’s artistic mentor) did and was impressed by her Workers Union platform. In one of his final moments, Llosa has Paul remember Pissarro’s flattering words about Flora; though a physical and mental wreck, the aged painter is still combating the French colonial authorities who are threatening to imprison him over a tax revolt he organized among the natives to protest the colonial imposition. Flora, he thinks, “would be applauding.” Thus Flora and Paul, the social reformer and the libertine, join hands symbolically.

The Peruvian connection shared by the two principals may be what brought their intertwined stories to Llosa’s attention: Flora had rich relatives in the country and spent several eventful years in Arequipa; Paul came to Peru with his mother, Aline Gauguin, whose husband died on the same sea journey. Best-known for powerful political narratives such as The Feast of the Goat and The War of the End of the World as well as the delightful farce Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, Mario Vargas Llosa has again produced a book of uncommon vitality and depth.


--HJ/JD Originally published in Kyoto Journal summer issue, no. 61: 93

Colin Thubron: Interview, London June 2008

INTERVIEW WITH COLIN THUBRON: London, June 2008
BY JAMES DALGLISH

The door opens to the first floor apartment in a West London neighborhood so full of sycamores and shrubbery that it seems at first some kind of urban-rural utopia. This is the address of Colin Thubron who in his books at least prefers a more austere landscape. And now the novelist and travel writer is standing in front of me with a friendly smile that allows time for recovery from the discrepancy between photos and reality. Mostly it’s the shock of white hair and a face that is neither as intimidating or ruggedly Asiatic as some recent author shots suggest. He looks very fit for his age, however, and I can easily imagine him scaling the Assassins mountain barehanded as described in Shadow of the Silk Road.

His invitation to enter comes in a voice that my dull American ear hears as a RP intonation of perfectly pronounced syllables. The same refined sounds introduce me to the author’s life partner, Margreta de Grazia, a professor of English literature at the University of Pennsylvania. We sit in a spacious living room graced by a fireplace and lined with bookshelves (which I’ll later find include few travel titles and none of Thubron’s books). A wide window looks out on a garden/lawn.

Colin Thubron began his literary career with four travel books about three small countries – Syria, Cyprus, Lebanon -- and the city of Jerusalem. (Out of print in the US, they can be ordered from the UK.) More ambitious in 1978, he took on giant Russia - then the USSR - in his first big publishing breakthrough Where Nights are Longest. He turned to another giant, China, just opening in 1986 (Behind the Wall), then pushed into newly independent states of central Asia (The Lost Heart of Asia), then reencountered a post-communist Russia (In Siberia). His latest, reviewed in these pages, improves even upon that. His parallel novelistic career includes seven titles of concise, intense fiction.

Born in 1939, Thubron comes from an illustrious British family that, he acknowledges, gave him a number of privileges in life – but not including wealth, he insists. He’s always had to earn his own way as a fulltime author.

His half-American father was a descendant of Samuel Morse, the inventor of the Morse code. His mother descended from John Dryden, the first English poet laureate – which “fed into my feeling that writing was important.” He himself, unmarried, has no children.

His father’s foreign postings as military attaché provided Thubron his first travel experiences and stimulus to roam later in life. In a typically English colonial pattern, the young boy was educated at boarding schools in England while his parents served their nation abroad. On holidays, he would fly across the Atlantic in old Stratocruisers (Boeing’s first long range commercial aircraft) to visit them. “I think I got an early feeling of excitement about travel because of these transatlantic journeys which I would undertake alone.”

After Eton, the traditional incubator of British prime ministers, he went directly into publishing instead of first going to university (“which always amazes Americans,” he quips). Why the unusual career choice? “I already wanted to be a writer. I never had any doubt about what I wanted to do....It was a passion.” Soon after taking his first paying job was with Hutchinson publishers, he lit out on his own.

Modus operandi [could be a sidebar?]

As his readers will already know, Thubron carries very little into the field. Only what will fit into a small rucksack: one change of clothes, minimal bad weather gear, four-to six moleskins and a ball point pen. No recreational reading—only a phrase book or dictionary. As for money, he hides that somewhere. Plastic and ATM machines are making that aspect of travel easier, he notes, even in Siberia. He takes no camera or recorder.

Each project, he informs me, takes about three or three and a half years to complete. He spends as much as a year researching the country and studying its relevant languages, which prepare him for his most important sources, the people he will meet. Although his travel narratives seem scholarly, even donnish, in their factual backgrounds, Thubron not only attended no lectures at Oxford or Cambridge but is also not a trained specialist in any of the areas about which he has written. “The great material for the travel writer is his experience on the ground,” he insists. “That’s where such originality as he may lay claim to exists.”

Two interviews were not enough for me to discover at which stage of his writing Thubron injects his famous stylistic brilliance - or as a friend put it, his obsession with avoiding ordinary linking verbs. But I did learn that his post-travel production begins with processing his “densely packed notebooks,” the source of each travel book. He then transcribes by longhand the notes while fleshing out the narrative into what he regards as the real first draft.

Q: Between that and the published version do you make any revisions?

CT: Yes, umpteen. First, the notes... are very full. In a way, I’ve got the whole journey there in impressionistic splashes of words. Those get disciplined, you hope, shaped into something by longhand. When it’s eventually on the screen it seems suddenly to have lost the personality it had in handwriting. In handwriting it has a certain energy, but once in print it loses something. Then I start to smash it up. I have to reenergize it and also, paradoxically, to prune it down because it’s overwritten.

Q: Is it tough earning your living as a fulltime writer these days?

CT: As for economics, I'm secure now, but only became so after the publication of my first book on Russia (Among the Russians). Before then it was very tough.

Q: Does it help commercially to work in more than one genre?

CT: I don't think the writing of novels as well as travel books helps much commercially. My publics for each genre are very different. But it does help creatively. When I'm worn out by one genre, I go for the other!

Q; Why has Great Britain produced so much good travel literature?

CT: I have no ready answer. But I suspect it may have something to do with the institution of the boarding school: a peculiarly British phenomenon. It's not a fluke that almost all British travel writers are middle class and have been the victims of boarding school since the age of about eight. I think it inures us to a certain kind of self-sufficiency and isolation, and gives a sense of being able to cope alone. It's a very tough initiation into the world. I don't think it's altogether beneficial I could go on about this! But it does encourage a sometimes dangerous sense of invulnerability.

Q: How did you write your first book Mirror to Damascus?

CT: I’d traveled there with my parents, actually, when I was a student. And became fascinated by the inland cities of Syria… It’s always been the desert Bedouin that people have romanticized. But to me it was always the urban civilization. I was fascinated by cities like Damascus, Aleppo, and Hama. You wander these streets and you see nothing. You’ve got mud walls on either side, a door is left open, you look in, there’s a little marble paved courtyard and a lemon tree. You don’t know what is going on. I didn’t even know what a mosque was really. And so like all my books, it was a journey of discovery for myself. It wasn’t something I felt I knew about and was telling the reader [as an expert]. It was like taking the reader into the experience of my own astonishment, discovery, sometimes disillusion, whatever it might be.

Q: Could you describe your interest in a travel writing as a geographical or cultural passion?

CT: It’s both really. I think would put it like this. The actual business of traveling is exciting to me, being on the move in solitude, cut off from everything familiar. That has a certain geographical excitement. But I’ve always felt at least that I traveled not for its own sake but for an object, for a place. As you noticed, I do a lot of research, and get a strong sense of what a place is going to be like, and then get a passionate desire to go there. So there’s always this feeling the first thing is the place rather than the journey.

Q: How do you create vivid scenes in which the reader feels he’s reliving your journey?

CT: My style is sort of automatic now. I don’t really think about it. I don’t think: How am I going to say this? At least I try not to. I think about what I’ve got to say and hope that the writing will follow. So I go back to the notes... The notes have an immediacy, which a recollected journey would not have by itself alone. And it’s possibly from that the sense of lived immediacy comes from...

Q: The color of the sky, the weather...?

CT: Yes, all that’s gone down in great detail in the notes. Because those are the things you forget. After a few weeks, I find that the early experiences have faded. I mean you can usually remember how a conversation normally went. Or what a landscape looked like, or what a building looked like, but you can’t remember the precise expression someone used, or the texture of those rocks, or the exact color of that church wall... or whatever it is. That’s what I get down in notes and that’s often what gives life to the description. Those vivid little details, which bring things to life and those of course you forget unless you get them down in notes. People think that I must have a good memory but I don’t.

Q: Do you have a stylistic ideal?

CT: I do. I suppose I can only say that I’m trying to get simpler. A little bit more economical now. Which I think is a typical product of getting older. When one’s young, one’s very exuberant, everything gets poured in ... I’ve noticed with people who get older there’s a kind of economy creeps in, sometimes a dryness. Fortunately, I began with a super abundance of imagination and color so I can well do with a little pruning down that my instinct is to do now... My drift, if you will, now is toward something a little simpler and starker.

Q: How do you as a travel writer deal with the point of view that we are all culture bound and therefore can’t escape our own cultures or really understand those of other people?

CT: I think these two things: One is that in travel writing, as opposed to academic work, you introduce this person into the drama which is the “I” figure, walking across the landscape, having these conversations. How he reacts, how he feels is all going to be implicit in that narrative. ... The traveler is out there holding himself up for judgment whether he wants to or not. He’s this person who’s being staged, and his idiosyncrasies, his tastes, his values, are all up for the judgment of the reader.

The second thing is that, particularly in American academe, there’s an idea—maybe this comes from Foucault--that it’s all about power. The traveler has power. He is visiting a culture that he has some understanding of. He comes from a culture that the people he is traveling amongst don’t know at all. Presumably he is in most cases middle class and educated, traveling among peasants, factory workers and fishermen. Who knows? Anyway the power balance is unequal. But I don’t go with this extreme idea that this therefore makes encounters with the foreign country in some way invalid. This would turn all human contact into paranoia. So those two things I would weigh against the Orientalist argument from the travel writer’s point of view. They don’t eliminate for me the very obvious idea that you can’t lose your own culture. Of course you can’t but you can begin to be conscious of it and even use that in the travel narrative.

Q: Compared to some travel writers you keep yourself pretty much out of the narrative. Any reason for that?

CT: Maybe I’m very English, I don’t know. It’s not an intended technique, it just happens. I don’t have anything very interesting to say about that. I’m concentrating very much on the country I’m in. And I tend to take my discomforts for granted. Whatever I happen to be feeling or thinking is pretty secondary to the fascination with the country itself where I am. And my personal reactions and thoughts tend to get lost in that process. That may be a fault because I know people want a little bit more of me very often.

Q: OK. What about the creative element in your writing?

CT: Is that a polite way of saying do I make up things?

Q: No, what I meant was...

CT: The answer is no quite firmly. I don’t believe in fictionalizing. Certainly in England there’s a kind of literary---not exactly a movement but idea-- that it’s all right to turn your travel book into fiction and to make up stuff. I think the ordinary reader—and that’s the huge majority -- takes it on trust that what happened happened. And in my case, it seems a failure of imagination or a failure of the journey if you’ve got to make a lot of stuff up to make it interesting...Usually the experiences you have are so extraordinary you don’t have to make anything up.

Q: Actually I wouldn’t have questioned your veracity. But it’s a good issue...

CT: The other thing is that in my case, I’m traveling among cultures I don’t feel I sufficiently understand, and if I were to make up, say, what a Chinese reaction to something would be, or even a Russian one, I would go horribly wrong. What I have done sometimes is to conceal people’s identity... in almost all the books it’s been necessary to safeguard someone’s privacy, even their safety politically.

Q: And the dialogue?

The conversations are condensations of what was spoken and what was important to me rather than literally word for word [transcriptions]. A whole lot is left out.

Q In Shadow of the Silk Road, is the ‘intermingling of cultures,’ as you put it, the lead idea?

CT: Yes, I think so. In looking back I realized whether it’s a product of the Silk Road or not, the book was all about interfusings and the rich impurities of cultures, that were seen as discrete, just as at the end of the book where I describe the borders as being so porous, some of the political borders were almost meaningless. Whereas other borders that meant more ethnically such as the division between Turkic and Persian peoples, were not on the map. That was exciting of course. That gave it a certain a bit of buoyancy that the book on Central Asia didn’t have.

Q: If we look at Lost Heart of Asia and then at Shadow of the Silk Road, I wonder why you retraced many of the steps made in the earlier book.

CT: I was keen on going back because I’d become fascinated with the Silk Road, because I had an urge to go back into what I’d felt was the heart of Asia and ...to revisit those cultures which had always fascinated me over forties years of travel. In other words China, Islam, Central Asia, the ex-Soviet Union, the Middle East, all these old fascinations for me, and something that was able to unite them which was the Silk Road.

Q: Does Shadow of the Silk Road summarize your previous work?

CT: It seems like that. Because it is based on so many of my interests that have been with me always since I started to travel, both Islam and the ogres of the Soviet Union that I wanted to visit and humanize. The subjects of my books are not often chosen from any very intellectual thought. It was a sort of gut desire to go back to these places and look for a unifying theme.

Q: When you’re out in the wild on one of your austere trips, what do you miss the most?

CT: Well, it’s irritating to those who are close to me, but I miss very little. I’m very inspirited by where I am. I’m very curious. There’s a constant tension of not understanding. All the time I’m traveling in o rder to write like this, I feel I’m not understanding, I’m not making enough contact. So there is a continuous strain, which is preoccupying you. So you’re forgetting--or trying to forget--your own culture, your own home, your own background... but I sort of leave it behind the moment I’ve taken off in the air. I find those things drop behind very fast. So I don’t on the whole miss people. When it comes to creature comforts, I find that I don’t mind the discomforts of travel or accommodation. You’re usually so exhausted you could sleep anywhere. Probably, if there’s a physical thing I miss, it’s the idea of a good rich Indian meal or something like that, but there’s not much I miss.

Q: Do you ever take trips purely for pleasure to tropical islands with blue skies and seas?

CT: Yes, but not quite the ordinary pleasure ones. I enjoy scuba diving, so I’ve been in places like Sulawesi, Jamaica, Mauritius. This has been pure holiday. I learned scuba a long time ago on Heron Island in Australia on the Barrier Reef.

Q: In one of your imaginary dialogues with the Sogdian trader (In Shadow of the Silk Road), there is a strong hint that you may quit traveling. He asks you, haven’t you ‘seen enough’ for one lifetime? So are you finished?

CT: These are dialogues between my cynical self, and my romantic self. But no, I have no intention of quitting...I don’t think I’ll stop writing travel books. I already have another one in my head. ... I want to make a short journey in Western Nepal over the Tibetan border to Mount Kailesh, the Buddhist and Hindu Holy mountain. This will be a very different journey from the last one. This will be short and focused, almost a pilgrimage. It’ll be more personal... I don’t know if this will work as a book. It may resolve into articles. But that’s my plan in September.

Q: Finally, what is it about the travel genre that attracts you?

CT: As for the form of travel writing, I think it's the sheer flexibility of the medium I find most attractive. A travel book is a very personal blending of the author's interests, so it can be a license, perhaps a dangerous one, to indulge in all sorts of passions and preferences - in my case the interaction of past and present, and the probing (in personal encounters) of people's beliefs and values, above all. The 'first person' narrative allows uniquely--outside autobiography--for the author to air his own feelings and thoughts, sometimes quite transient ones, and this gives a living texture to the work that appeals to me. But of course it's not only the form of the travel book that appeals to me, but the travel itself. The two are inseparable. Sometimes I even get a sense that it is the travel writing the book.

Q: Thank you, Colin Thubron, so much for your time.