50 Book Challenge 2008
Rob
I've got some catching up to do with these.
‘What Am I Doing Here’, Bruce Chatwin
I read Chatwin’s travelogue ‘In Patagonia’ a few years ago and loved
it, but I’d never got around to checking out any of his other stuff.
This book, which he compiled shortly before his death in 1989, is a
collection of his essays, anecdotes and travel stories from the 1970s
and 80s. I bought it recently after listening to Werner Herzog’s
commentary on a DVD of ‘Cobra Verde’ (which was based on another Bruce
Chatwin book), on which he talks about his friendship with Chatwin and
their common love of travelling. It’s a diverse collection, but a
recurring theme is that of the nomadic/barbarian versus
settled/civilised way of life (it’s fairly obvious where his
sympathies lie). A fair chunk of it is given over to profiles of
various individuals; friends, people he interviewed when he was
working as a journalist, people randomly encountered on his travels.
Some of these are quite cool, like the one about Maria Reiche who
spent much of her life surveying the Nazca lines in Peru. But it’s the
travel stories that stand out – Afghanistan, China, on the campaign
trail with Indira Gandhi, on a boat trip on the Volga to the town
where Lenin grew up, yeti tracking in Nepal, investigating reports of
‘wolf children’ in India, in Ghana on the set of ‘Cobra Verde’. This
book is guaranteed to give you wanderlust (unless you already have it,
in which case it will make it worse).
‘The Afghan’, Frederick Forsyth
This one is a story about an undercover British agent who infiltrates
al-Qaeda and saves the world. It starts out fairly sensible but gets
exponentially silly towards the end. It’s not my usual cup of tea
(someone lent it to me), but it was OK. I liked the bits where his
geeky enthusiasm for hi-tech weaponry gets the better of him.
‘On the Heights of Despair’, Emil Cioran
An early work by the Romanian philosopher. Reading this was half of my
cultural background research for a trip to Romania. (The other half
was watching ’12:08 East of Bucharest’, which was more fun). I
finished it in a sleeping compartment on an overnight train crossing
Transylvania, which seemed appropriate for a book which is largely the
product of insomnia. This is his first book, written circa 1933 when
he was in his early twenties. Despair, loneliness, suicide, futility,
pain, death, apocalypse, and the ultimate meaninglessness of
everything – it’s all here in florid, lyrical prose. It’s flawed, and
a bit self-obsessed, but then he was very young and clearly going a
through a mental crisis when he wrote it. I might have been more
impressed had I read it twenty years ago, although it’s probably just
as well that I didn’t. I don’t regret reading it, but this sort of
thing doesn't work for me anymore. In retrospect I should probably
have picked one of his later books.