So is Marco Polo a Good Read or Not? (review)

The Travels of Marco Polo The Venetian

(Description of the World)

Translated by W. Marsden, revised by T. Wright

Edited by Peter Harris

Introduction by Colin Thubron

Everyman’s Library, 2008 $29

Le Devisement du Monde by Marco Polo.
Edition Critique publiee sous la direction de Phillipe Menard.
Droz; Geneva, 2001 5 vol. $175

Having read Colin Thubron’ s glowing introductory essay for this edition when he first published it years ago in NYRB of what we used to call “The Travels of Marco Polo,” I was prepared to be transported to an enchanting faraway place or at least deeply impressed. As a former medievalist I was also prepared for a certain amount of rhetoric and boredom. In that essay, Thubron wrote,

Of all the travel sagas ever written, none is more richly astonishing than Marco Polo’s Description of the World. It records a land of such fabulous difference that to enter it was like passing through a mirror; and it is this passage…which gives the tale even now a dream-like quality. (ix)

Well, having read almost the entire book with notes, and intro (but not yet the appendix) I can say that while I found the book essential for someone like me interested in travel and medieval literature, I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it to a less dedicated reader than myself or even most general readers. I can't lie and tell you it's a page-turner because it's not.

The main reason for this is the prosaic quality of many of Polo’s episodes and his relentlessly factual approach to what he sees and does during his travels. He is not, as is Thubron for example, a visionary or poetic writer but very much a plodding “describer” as the original title implies.

But having said that, I can subscribe to the rest of Thubron’s enthusiastic endorsements of the great, seminal book behind so much of Western exploration and travel accounts. The single most important bit of information in Marco Polo’s travels is no doubt his splendid & detailed description and history of the reign of the Mongol Emperor Kublai Khan, bringing knowledge of China for the first time to the West. However, the Venetian Polo was a businessman first looking for buying and selling opportunities; he observed all of these new territories carefully, studying their economies, products, prices and markets. For the historian of economies, this is valuable stuff. Fortunately, there was another side to him—which was the observer of people, their governments, customs (including sexual mores) and religions. Another side of Polo was total fantasy but this is to be expected in medieval culture that was innocent of scientific or empirical methods.

The other area where Polo’s work is valuable is the field of comparative cultural studies, which aim at uncovering the ways Western cultures view and construct other cultures especially those of the East. After Foucault & Said, it is difficult not to look skeptically at the face value of statements made by Westerners about other cultures that differ radically from theirs, especially when dealing with those legendary places of the fabulous East, Africa and Islamic lands about much was imagined and little known. Thus we are obliged to look critically at Polo’s descriptions of the anthropology, culture and religion of faraway, exotic places for traces of reductive preconceptions and bias.

My preliminary report after a relatively conscientious reading of this translation’s text and foot-notes with occasional glances at the original text in old French reveals that the worst charge made against Polo—that he is shot through with ethnocentricity to the point of distorting every ethically different human group he sees as racially inferior Otherness can be dismissed out of hand. There is little evidence of racism in general or of black-white racism specifically in Polo’s account, for example;  Polo even describes one Indian (in India) tribe positively that reversed black-white values in skin pigment, esthetics, and in good vs evil. On the world of “Saracens,” (Muslims) Polo is generally even handed. He doesn’t apparently slander Muslims or their religion.

A slightly less serious charge—that of not viewing any of the cultures and peoples he sees with any real accuracy—is also mainly untrue though Polo does make some stellar mistakes (the detailed notes in the back clear up these cases, so no worry of gaining serious misconceptions if you read the book carefully). Polo accepted hearsay as valid evidence; that is, he doesn’t always distinguish between what he saw personally and what he only heard. Though he had nothing like a modern map, his geography is amazingly accurate – ask Thubron who traveled the same routes.

The closest Polo comes to portraying other human beings as monstrous is in Zanzibar where his accounts of the Negroid people are clearly fantastic and grotesque. Stories about pygmies and Hottentots may account for this unpleasant portrayal of short & squat men and women. But to use this one episode, as does one recent literary “theorist” to condemn the whole work as worthless prejudice is little better than slander. (Travel Writing: Self and the World by Casey Blanton, Routledge, 1997)
As for the original language in which The Travels or Le Devisement du Monde was written, according to Philippe Menard, the editor of the fine little edition published by Droz, it appears to be Franco-italien. The edition referred to here is the Old French version which was apparently the most popular, sold the most copies and Made Polo famous.

Finally sorry about the 3-5 year delay in this review depending on how you look at it!

-JD

Shanghai 15 Years Later

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[Note: this travel piece was requested but not published -- nor was it rejected--by a trashy local rag that quickly bit the dust due to the editor's dementia. I hope you will check out the pics.] 

Returning to Shanghai almost fifteen years after my first stay there, I’m shocked that my mental topography of the city is now almost entirely obsolete. I must spend a lot of my short visit here trying to figure out what happened to the city I knew.

Since my departure in 1986, cataclysms have reordered the town politically and geographically: the Tiananmen Massacre in 1989, Deng’s death, the reign of his conservative successor Zhang Zemin (Shanghai’s former mayor), then a new regime with even less personality but with the same dogged approach to politics. The big transformation of course is the economic one. Without really admitting it, the country has gone from Maoist socialism to a kind of authoritarian capitalism never before fully tested. I’m sceptical about it of course, never imagining that China could be anything other than what I had seen, a dark place full of socialist virtue and strange smells.

My first trip to China was as a “foreign expert” in the English Department at East China Normal University (Hua Dong Shifan Daxue) in 1985-86, a mellow time in East West relations when China, starting to flourish in the late-Deng era, seemed on a liberalizing course (Tiananmem was a few years away).

I’d heard much about the big capitalist transformation but didn’t see how any good come out of such contradictory conditions – a free economy with unfree people-- but a few hours traipsing around Shanghai proves me wrong. The city has not only changed; it has been totally transformed in the places that count. My conviction that not many people could profit from such disorderly change is also off the mark. The changes seem to affect Chinese generally, raising the standard of living for huge numbers of them, visible in the many hypermarkets that have replaced the vibrant street markets. Chinese are filling large shopping carts with food, detergent and drinks just like people everywhere else.

Another big change is the disappearance of the “mei-you” culture; in virtuous old pre-Boom China, whenever you went into a store or restaurant asking for almost anything the chorus reply from the multitude of featherbedded clerks was always “Mei-you!” (“There isn’t any!”). It became a half-humorous refrain. If you wanted to buy something with any class, you had to go to the Friendship Store (foreigners only!) and pay for it in FECs (foreign exchange currency). This totally corrupt and ineffective dual economy is now abolished, and the Chinese all have their solid, dignified Renmin Yuan.

What else?

Since I’d been able to ramble anywhere in Shanghai by on well-known and deeply loved routes where the biggest danger was an errant fellow cyclist. Now, those routes seem to have disappeared. Bicycles still flow, but the primary fact is the river of automobile traffic equal in its density to that of any big capital. I give up trying to trace my once cherished bike ride from the university to downtown Shanghai – doable back then in about 30 minutes: whole neighborhoods have been razed, and new powerful looking skyscrapers block the path.

The Normal University of East China is still recognizable, in fact, disturbingly entrenched in the past. The Foreign Experts Building, where we had once enjoyed a lifestyle so enviable that we had to be protected by strict door guardians, sports a thick layer of grime that disconcerts even a nostalgic like me. The investment in reconstruction obviously isn’t spread evenly throughout all sectors.

What I liked about Shanghai was its jumble of styles, moods, and neighborhoods, which you saw in the old linangs (enclosed neighborhoods that were like mini-cities within the city, neighborly and close, like the Chinese themselves) and concession areas. The latter were the legacy of the bad old days of the exclusive Imperialist zones when Shanghai (and China) was carved up by the French, Russians, British, Americans, and Japanese who all left their mark on Shanghai’s appearance. As a result, as you walk through its streets you get, along with the usual Chinese clutter & bric-a-brac, ghostly echoes of other cityscapes, a kind of surreal dream city.

The building Boom threatens this living museum of city styles that Shanghai is made up of – especially since the Chinese themselves don’t seem to care about it. My wife, for example, isn’t as disturbed as I am when we learn while touring one of the most “Shanghai-esque” of neighborhoods, said to have been built by the Japanese during the war, that this odd and charming place is slated for demolition within a year. The rule of thumb, she says, is to tear down any “slums” visible from the windows of the new 5 star luxury hotels.

Why can’t the Chinese skip immediately to the “gentrification” stage, I wonder. Think of the tourist revenues for “Old Shanghai.”

(In fact, according to my ex-wife something like this recently did get started.)

One of those unique Shanghai genres was (and still is) the Russian restaurant, established by post-Revolutionary White Russians – there were about a half-dozen well-known ones where you could get “borscht,” cheap caviar and beef Stroganoff. I’m glad to say that at least one is still going strong –the famous Red House on Huaihailu. Not only are its prices still low, I notice that Chinese are still using those work unit coupons to pay for their meals.

(It’s amusing to observe this enclave of socialism surviving in the precincts of former counter revolutionaries!)

Of course my point of view as a foreigner lamenting Shanghai’s quaint, architectural past is out of step with the point of view of the Chinese who are understandably proud of their economic and architectural accomplishments: there is much to wonder at: the new Opera House on People’s Square, for example, and the Pudong fantasyland of towers, turrets and crystal spheres, constantly on display across the river from the Bund, once Shanghai’s glory but now a bit dowdy compared to the fantasmagoric sculptures in steel and glass of the New China.

I get twitted by my old Chinese friends for still situating everything in Shanghai by means of the Peace Hotel—the former headquarters of foreign splendor and decadence –a sad relic of 14 stories now dwarfed by dozens of shiny new steel and glass creations nearby.

One of the most amazing signs of China’s transformation comes at the railway station where we go to buy tickets for Hanzhou, a  famous resort town barely an hour and ½ south of Shanghai.

It was no doubt the very difficulty of traveling anywhere in pre-boom China that made any destination you managed to get to seem wonderful by its rarity; non Chinese speakers had to go to a special office in the Peace Hotel and book weeks in advance for the simplest trip. Otherwise, you’d have to brave the horrific confusion and mobs of the central train station where thousands, it seemed, were vying for the same precious seat you wanted.

Then, when you got your ticket, whether for “soft seat” class or only slightly less desirable “hard class” sleeper, you’d have to battle the mobs again since your “reservation” was void until you boarded the train and struggled again, this fight taking place in the confines of the train corridor. Then you signed in with the officials who doled out the actual seats if there were any left (most Chinese travelled in “standing class”). Your only chance was to tough it out and wait for a seat to open up at a stop. Since this was China though, and your bragging rights depended on getting to the famous sites, you tried to keep your temper and not strain your health. The wonderful Chinese that you met and the fabulous destinations made it all worthwhile.

Now, however, we simply go the central station, drop some bills and coins into an automatic vendor, and amazingly, tickets emerge without the slightest human struggle. I’m not entirely convinced though, and when the train pulls up, I brace myself for the rugby match on board (old reflexes die hard). Incredibly, however, I find, once on the train, a clean modern express, that not only is there no sunflower seed debris on the floor but our tickets entitle us to two very comfortable seats in the “soft” class. It’s still a privilege, but one that many Shanghainese can now afford.

Such cosseted splendors are no longer for the glorious foreigners alone. But looking out the windows at the next train over, I see an image of the past – an overcrowded non A/C local, windows open, crowded to the gills with Chinese who stare silently at the flashy modern express pulling away from them.

The celebrated West Lake (Xilu) which I’d thought of as the ne plus ultra of Chinese scenic wonder is not as spectacular as I remembered from those days of fresh “Eastern intoxication.” It is after all artificial and very shallow; still the setting with its pines and pagodas is pleasant and relaxed with the distant hills receding pictorially into successively fainter layers. It is now I realize a Chinese cliché but one worth the trip considering how close it is to Shanghai.

I’d forgotten though about its most beautiful feature, the wooden walkway that goes from one bank to another and takes you straight to one of the most charming teahouses imaginable: a red wicker like roof, dark lacquered wood inside with rattan chairs and open windows for coolness. You can sit amid the grey drift of lake sipping fresh tea from bright green newly picked leaves.

“Do Chinese ever strain their tea?” I asked my too beautiful wife. (Every time I tried to woo her, I'd commit some incredibly gauche act -- like the poor bloke in The Gods Must be Crazy.)

“No, never.”

“Why is that?”

“We like to look at the leaves,” she replied. (later I realized how innocently she essentialized herself and her fellow Chinese in this statement).

Just then a small, rural looking Chinese man approached Jane and smilingly spoke in low tones. She dismissed him, and the man departed without protest.

“What was that all about?”

“He wanted to tell my fortune.”

In some ways it’s too bad we didn’t let him read our tea leaves, because we didn’t at that point know what our future would bring. Within five years, we would no longer be married, and sadly my returns to Shanghai would end.

P. S. Should one go to China? In view of the huge progress made by China in improving the infrastructure in recent decades, most travelers shouldn’t hesitate; people looking to broaden their horizons, who have some cross-cultural mileage under their belts and aren’t looking for superficial kicks or an experience of what they already know, are the best candidates. Prices though have gone up sharply; in 2001the Xinxin Hotel in Hanzhou cost $50 for a double; the average room rate now is $150.

                                                                                                                                  --J. D.

Short Trip to Greece or Travelling Without Herodotus

Note: Harry James, the author of this travel squib, hinted it'd been previously "butchered" in a MID East newspaper he doesn't want to name, and offered it to me to reprint if I wanted. Well, it was such a pile of debris I can't believe anyone actually would put such rubbish in print. I told him he'd have to revise extensively and put some content in the damn thing ... but after that he made himself scarce. You know Harry. So I finally did the job myself -- might as call me co-author, no hell, author!

By JD (sans Harry)

The cheerful, yacht-infested horizon of Bodrum drifted away behind us. The glistening white ferry throbbed and rumbled as it turned its bulk westward, aiming at a rocky outcrop some 5 kilometers away. Its blue & white Greek flag fluttered jauntily as off we chugged toward Greece on a warm September morning.

I’d stared yearningly for years at these tantalizingly close islands (at least four Greek islands can be seen clearly from Bodrum) from the Turkish side. Now I was on my way to see one – the nearest and commonest destination – Kos. The open-air three-decker was well populated but not packed by Turkish and Western tourists along with foreign residents of Bodrum, making a quick visa run.

It took barely 40 minutes for the propeller driven craft to reach Kos Town, which was evidence that the island was as close as it had always looked.

The only trouble was – Greece didn’t seem to have been informed of our arrival, mine or anyone else’s. Our ferry docked at Kos port simultaneously with one from another Turkish port. Out we trundled eagerly onto the receiving dock but suddenly the group came to a halt. As I stared in disbelief, another mob of arrivals now converged on the same narrow corner without even an open door to suggest ingress. Uncomfortable minutes, at least ten of them, each filled with 60 seconds, inched by painfully. The crowd behaved like a good bunch of souls--no one complained or cursed --and patiently adapted to stasis

Surely there’s a misunderstanding here! Surely, a big fat smiling Greek playing a bouzouki will leap out and shout, “Welcome to Greece!” But no, when they finally opened up, it was only a single narrow door– through which both groups trickled at a rate that could not be described as a “flow experience.”

Once we got inside, it was obvious that the Greeks were checking everyone thoroughly, as though for a civil service exam. At one point, a sop was thrown to the applicants – a “new line for Europeans” was opened– at which point the crowd rerouted itself appropriately and without a fuss. Yet the Greek customs man (small, not fat, not smiling) shouted “Silence!” The absurd comment hung in the air.

“Silence?” scoffed a quick-witted youth, “Hey let’s sing a song.” No Zorba figure however emerged to relieve the monotony.

Compared to the immigration process at this minuscule, seemingly insignificant seaport, Heathrow or JFK at rush hour would have been a breeze (as I cruelly kept repeating to people). I finally emerged on the other side of this constipated process a free man, or so I thought.

Little did I know that I was centimeters, no, millimeters, short of becoming a permanent resident (or detainee) of Kos due to a personal credit crunch that paralleled the disastrous one going on in the world at large.

However there was the usual perfunctory bus “tour” to get over with first. This one, led by a young woman with good intentions but poor judgment, did not rise above expectations. Dissent broke out first at Kos’s most famous sight, the Asclepion, where we had only a few minutes to see the ancient medical school where the island’s most famous resident, Hippocrates, (he of the famous oath) had taught in the 5th or 6th c. BC. I was not especially upset as I have a short museum attention span (that includes old rocks of any kind), but others complained bitterly. We sped through other minor sights that escape my memory.

The best of course, as always, was lunch. I’d long been anticipating my first real Greek salad in years. We were bussed up the steep eastern slope to a mountain village (Zia I believe) full of excellent views of the surrounding countryside and dozens of picturesque hotels and tavernas. We had lunch in the best known of the latter, The Olympus, where the group sat around separately in the neutral, desultory way of people who will never be more than strangers.

I ordered the long anticipated dish, plus rabbit stew and Greek beer. The food was decent but not spectacular. Quite a few of the diners entertained themselves (with no objection from the restaurant staff!) by throwing scraps of meat and French fries to an array of animals, cats, dogs and chickens, hungrily waiting on the street below. (I was amused by the way the chickens competed well for the French fries, picking them up in their beaks like worms, then down the hatch with a neat head toss). After lunch, there was time for a quick coffee in the atmospheric cafes, yes-real coffee, not Nescafe! I was delighted in one of these ancient bars to see a battered bouzouki sitting on a table (hmm, is that the one Zorba played?). The bus tape had included quite a few Theodorakis numbers that I’d enjoyed trying to identify.

[Descending the mountain slope, I spotted something on Kos that had intrigued me when looking from the Turkish side—a plume of whitish stuff rising in the air. What I’d imagined as an immense hot springs throwing off steam was actually a garbage dump! This was closed the year after.]

The brief bit of fun over, the irritable and increasingly rude group of mixed Western & Turkish tourists (they’d argued with the young lady guide the whole way) was brought back to Kos city for dispersal. I’d learned that Turkish Lira were not accepted in Kos (I’d paid by credit card for lunch and exchanged lira for euros with the tour guide to pay for the coffee), and so my first task was to get some of that coveted currency. As no banks were open on the weekend, I found an ATM machine easily enough. The damn fussy gadget rejected my US Visa card, which I had foolishly used in Turkey that morning to draw out Turkish lira that I now realized were worthless. Stupid card! Stupid bank! Or just plain stupid me. There might have been some limitation on the card that I’d forgotten. I tried my other, UAE based card. Confirming my suspicions of an international conspiracy directed at me, it also refused my request with the same bland but poisonous message: “This transaction has been declined, please try again later.”

Thanks dear, polite machine! (How I wished I could have wreaked a Terminator like destruction on the worthless mechanism in a reversal of the "I'll be back!" scene).

With no euros in my pocket, the charms of Kos rapidly receded. I considered my options. The last boat to Bodrum at 4pm was one of them, so I headed back to the port, guided by some friendly fellow passengers doing the visa run.

I thought: well, the Greeks didn’t want to let us in, so getting out will be a breeze. Wrong again. The same sticky line, same narrow door and same picky officials. When I’d inched (or centimetered) to the right window, behind the experienced departees and asked if I needed a boat ticket before boarding, the answer was sadly yes. In Turkey the option of buying a return ticket had been offered, but didn’t seem crucial since I was thinking of spending the night.

At this moment I understood the sinister implications of my series of small errors. No euros, no ticket! No ticket, no boat! And with those incredible sticklers behind the immigration desks on the lookout for the slightest faux pas, no boat could mean stuck in Kos for the rest of my life! Though deeply puzzled as to how I, an experienced traveler, at least so I thought, had fallen into such a trap, the boat's imminent departure prevented me from speculating on the deeper causes of my dilemma.

Instead an Odysseus like guile was required!

Quickly improvising, I went into the currency exchange business. Finding I enjoyed this line of trade quite a bit, I stood beside the boat ticket office offering excellent exchange rates for Euros, 31 to 50 to be exact. No one seemed to have this many euros, however, and so my chances diminished with the rapidly shrinking queue. The last man however, an affable Turk did and graciously swapped. What though if he hadn’t had any?

I made it onto the last ferry of the day – but not before learning that the privileged line for “Europeans” could have included me with my US passport but for my heroic humility in refusing any such thought and sticking it out with the Turks.

The explanation for this cash drought and near calamity was a fraud case that had temporarily closed down my UAE bank’s debit card operations. In apology for Greece, it seems that illegal immigration is rife on the islands, especially the outer rim such as the Dodecaleses. In the meantime, though, the Greek Tourism authority should cancel those TV ads that show the country as a nonstop Bacchanalia in utopia. I did not encounter one orgy.

Anyway, as a brief glance at tacky Kos--with its endless Euro-style sidewalk cafes and technicolor pix of fried chicken, hamburgers, French fries and Heineken revealed--the Turkish side is less mass-market and somehow more appealing. I rearrived in the city of Herodotus with a sense of relief. And by coincidence at that very moment I was reading the final pages of Ryszard Kapuscinski’s Travels with Herodotus wherein the author describes his journey to Herodotus’s birthplace. He writes,

"From the island of Kos, I sailed to Halicarnassus, where Herodotus was born, on a small ship. En route, the taciturn, aged sailor lowered the Greek flag on the mast and hoisted the Turkish one. Both were crumpled, faded, and free... The town lay well within the arc of the blue-green bay, on whose waters, in this autumnal time of year, many yachts were idling. The policeman whom I queried about the way to Halicarnassus corrected me–to Bodrum, he said, and that is how the place is now known in Turkish."

The lovely coincidence of arriving in Bodrum together (imaginatively) with an author I admired-- convinced me that in spite of the superficial and nearly pointless journey I’d made, there was perhaps a lot more significance to dig out of this place than I’d thought and what better way then to dig into the “father of history” – Herodotus himself?

I’d also learned something significant on my own: places that seem very near geographically may actually be very far away in other dimensions. Oh yes, and don’t forget to bring euros!

(Be sure to read the next exciting installment: Harry takes on Kos ATM minotaur)

Dollar a word free-lance writing

http://www.observer.com/2010/media/print-dream-dies

To my writing friends abroad and members of Sand & Free lance Forum in the UAE--here is a link to an article published the US about a remarkable review section published by the The National Daily News paper in Abu Dhabi. It seems that the former editor was paying a dollar a word to top rated scribblers (many from the NYC area) who were getting that rate for what I remember as very long and meandering articles. I read The Review carefully for several years and did notice the heavy hitting by-lines and the (impressively) mainstream creds of the contributors. And sent plenty of queries and manuscripts which were pretty much ignored by the editor. As an experienced book journalist with some respectable credits, I was stung and puzzled at the incomprehensibly high & mighty ways of a mere English-language daily newspaper in hot, sandy Abu Dhabi. When I read somewhere that the page editor (J. Shainin) was an ex-New Yorker employee, however, I began to better understand the difficulty of the task. I guess I was simply not prestigious enough for him. Apparently he did wonders for this review section, however, bringing in high editorial standards, along with the big names from NYC. The pay unfortunately has been halved or so I heard (see below link). Still I didn't get anything in The Review until after he left... so the following boast (and paycheck) is somewhat reduced by that circumstance.

In the event (hooray!) the page finally did accept a review from me of Colin Thubron's To a Mountain in Tibet (no surprise I'd choose this author). I'd had a kind of scheme half in mind to get an early copy of Thubron's book from his publishers and flog it to more prominent editors in the US if possible. However, the grind here prevented me from following thru on it -- and by the time I came back to the surface, the book was nearly out (February, 2011). My one ambitious query to Marjorie Kehe of the Monitor was too late.

I guess I can consider myself lucky getting it published at all I suppose, what with my overall lack of high powered connections. But doubly so in the case of The National who gave me a generous 1400 words to work with -- and an editing process that was far from superficial and definitely superior to other local copy desks I've dealt with. Their initial edit was very astute -- plus two rounds of changes after that. A rare opportunity in short to transcend the formula review and shitty grammar (and I hope I didn't waste it).

You may recognize the photo -- first time it was published though I offered it to Bloomsbury and have used it here to decorate my 2008 interview with CT. The photo was the result of many many embarrassing clicks in Thubron’s apartment – the "photo session" is the part of interviews that I most detest, but necessary to get editors interested as you all know.

This address below did work for me when I tried it.

http://www.thenational.ae/arts-culture/books/to-a-mountain-in-tibet-a-well-travelled-writer-loses-his-breath?pageCount=0http://www.thenational.ae/arts-culture/books/to-a-mountain-in-tibet-a-well-travelled-writer-loses-his-breath?pageCount=0

The source of the info about this remarkable Review page is not from anyone in the UAE but comes from the sharp reading skills of David Cozy an old friend at the Kyoto Journal (now online only) in Japan. The link he provided me -- bottom of page --is to an article on the former editor of the The National (The Review), (J. Shainin) with whom I enjoyed the fruitless editorial experience described above.

If you want to know how much i got paid, you'll have to ask me.

http://www.observer.com/2010/media/print-dream-dies

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