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)
Approaching kos by ferry
Ferry to Kos
Showing posts with label James Dalglish. Show all posts
Showing posts with label James Dalglish. Show all posts
Friday, August 19, 2011
Thursday, October 7, 2010
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
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
Tuesday, August 10, 2010
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.
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.
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