The Way of the World
Review by William Dalrymple
FT
Published: May 26 2008 01:59
The Way of the World
By Nicholas Bouvier
Translated by Robyn Marsack
Eland £12.99, 326 pages
FT bookshop price: £10.39
Literary travel writing, usually associated with the drumbeat of hooves
across some distant steppe, seems at the moment to be echoing instead
with the slow tread of the undertaker’s muffled footfall. Within the
last few years Ryszard Kapuscinski, Eric Newby, Norman Lewis and
Wilfred Thesiger have all followed Bruce Chatwin on their final journey.
To that list must now be added the name of another major talent.
Nicolas Bouvier, who died in his native Geneva in 1998 at the age of
69, is a writer much celebrated in France. His work was recently
translated into English (superbly, by Robyn Marsack), however, and is
not yet well known in the Anglophone world. Now Eland has brought out a
new edition of Bouvier’s most famous book with the wonderful, quirky,
original drawings of his travelling companion Thierry Vernet. All
credit to the publisher, for in The Way of the World it has exhumed
that rarest of things – a genuine masterpiece, an exhilarating,
innocent, perceptive and wholly enjoyable young man’s travel book, and
a discovery of the Asian road that by rights deserves to occupy the
same shelf as great classics of the genre such as Robert Byron’s The
Road to Oxiana or Eric Newby’s Short Walk in the Hindu Kush.
The Way of the World is a journal, recording the joys and pleasures of
leaving home and hitting the road for the first time. With him, Bouvier
brings his painter friend Vernet. The artist and writer take little but
their pens and brushes, their accordion (`to set the women dancing’)
and a battered old car. The result is intimate and immediate.
The pair dawdle and amble their way across Asia, stopping here and
there to hold exhibitions, or to write articles for the local press in
Belgrade, to teach English in wintery Tabriz for eight months, or to
help with archaeological excavations in the depths of the Hindu Kush.
There is no rush: it is as if they have all the time in the world to
stop and savour and experience. Apparently Bouvier took great pride
when middle-aged in telling people that he took longer to get to Japan
than Marco Polo did seven centuries earlier.
Like the best travel writers, all Bouvier’s senses are alert to new
smells, sounds and simple pleasures. His pen brings us soft white
cheese and fresh cucumbers and `the smell of lavash bread in fine
wafers dotted with scorch marks’; `sipping apricot liqueur and munching
nougat’ in a Persian nobleman’s boudoir; an account explaining that the
Balkan love of clear fresh water is such that they `would urge you to
walk five miles to reach a stream where the water was excellent’. We
hear of `the songs and flutes of an Armenian wedding’; of a courtyard
`where a pomegranate tree and a clump of French marigolds were
struggling against the first frosts’, and of a spring landscape
`pushing out of the earth millions of anemones and wild tulips that
within a few weeks would cover the hills with their fleeting beauty’.
There is innocence here, and a deeply romantic nature, and yet there
are also some remarkably perceptive insights. About the suppressed
urban rabble of Persia, a full 24 years before the Islamic revolution,
he notes: `Fanaticism is the last revolt of the poor, the only one they
can’t be denied.’ He realises the degree to which the books in the Old
Testament retain a relevance in this Middle Eastern landscape they can
never have elsewhere. Reading a copy of the Bible lent to him during a
brief spell in jail in Iranian Kurdistan, he writes that `the Old
Testament especially – with its thunderous prophecies, its bitterness,
its lyrical seasons, its quarrels over wells, tents and cattle, its
genealogies falling like hail – all this belonged here.’
Above all, there are some remarkable passages of prose, whose rhythms
and music are beautifully conveyed in Marsack’s translation. Here is
Bouvier describing a Persian teahouse in winter where porters gather:
`They settled down at the wooden tables in a sort of rumble of
well-being, steam rising from their tatters. Their ageless faces, so
bare and shiny with use that they let the light through, would begin to
glow like old cooking pots. They played draughts, lapping tea from
saucers with long-drawn sighs, or sat round a basin of warm water and
soaked their sore feet. The better off puffed away at a nargileh, and
between fits of coughing sometimes recited one of those visionary
stanzas for which Persia has had no equal over a thousand years. The
winter sun on blue walls, the fine scent of tea, the tapping of
draughts on the board – everything had such a peculiar lightness that
one wondered whether this bunch of horny-handed seraphim might lift off
in a great flapping of wings, bearing the tea house away.’
A few pages later he evokes them breaking into `one of those unearthly
Azeri laments – it was as if the windowpanes had been shattered and
everything that was powerful, lost and irreplaceable about Tabriz
seemed to burst into the room. Eyes moistened, glasses tinkled, the
song died away.’
What I loved most about the book was the way it brought back memories
of my own first big Asian road trip. Bouvier’s route overlapped with my
own journeys at many points. Yet what was even more pleasurable than
being reminded of forgotten places was the sensation of recovering the
raw intoxication of travel during a moment in life when time is
endless. When deadlines and commitments are non-existent; when the
constitution is elastic, and the optimism of youth undimmed; when
experience is all you hope to achieve and when the world is laid out
before you like a map, ready to be explored.
Being on the road, `deprived of one’s usual setting, the customary
routine stripped away like so much wrapping paper’, Bouvier makes you
more `open to curiosity, to intuition, to love at first sight’. As he
writes at the end of his introduction: `Travelling outgrows its
motives. It soon proves sufficient in itself. You think you are making
a trip, but soon it is making you – or unmaking you.’
William Dalrymple is author of `The Last Mughal: the Fall of a Dynasty,
Delhi, 1857′ (Bloomsbury)
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
