of the World (L'usage du monde):
"You probably haven't heard of Swiss-born Nicolas Bouvier if you live in
the UK. Yet across the Channel he is as influential as Jack Kerouac and
Bruce Chatwin, a cult travel writer whose books sell by the pallet-load,
even though he died more than a decade ago. Yet this month's new
publication of The Way of the World is the most important event in
travel literature this year.
As a child Bouvier's reading of RL Stevenson, Jules Verne and Jack
London made him impatient for the world. He recalled at the age of eight
'tracing the course of the Yukon with my thumbnail in the butter on my
toast'. His father encouraged him to travel and in 1953, without waiting
for the result of his degree, he left bourgeois Switzerland with no
intention of returning. In a small, slow Fiat, he and his friend Thierry
Vernet - whose stark illustrations are reproduced in this handsome Eland
edition - travelled across Europe and Asia over nineteen unforgettable
months, pausing in Belgrade, Istanbul, Tabriz and Quetta to paint, write
and wait tables, taking longer than Marco Polo - as Bouvier proudly
pointed out - to reach Japan.
Along the road no sensational, headline-grabbing event befell them. They
were not attacked by Baluch bandits or held hostage by an Afghan
warlord. They did not climb the Hindu Kush in search of lost treasure.
Instead they journeyed humbly, honestly and in near-poverty, failing to
get jobs in Turkey, dossing down in a provincial prison in Iran,
teaching French in Tehran to raise funds, and finding sanctuary in
Quetta in a bar run by a distracted, kindly ex-Welsh Guards officer with
'an air of something both luminous and shattered'.
Ten years in the writing, The Way of the World is a masterpiece which
elevates the mundane to the memorable and captures the thrill of two
passionate and curious young men discovering both the world and
themselves. Racy and meditative, romantic and realistic, the book is as
brilliant as Patrick Leigh Fermor's A Time of Gifts, but with its
erudition more lightly worn and as alive as Kerouac's On the Road,
though without a whisper of self-aggrandisement. The words of this
wandering poet have been lovingly and effusively rendered into English
by Robyn Marsack, his translator.
On every page a gem or two glitters, and the accumulation of colour,
detail and inspired metaphor produce an intensely hypnotic effect. Take
for example the description of young prostitutes in a Belgrade café who
had 'lovely, smooth, tanned knees, a bit dirty when they had just come
in from practising their trade on a nearby embankment, and well-defined
cheekbones where the blood throbbed like a drum'. Or the dancer who,
inclining his head 'listening to the keyboard as though it were a
stream'. Or the time spent on the road brewing tea and sharing
cigarettes, in the rare moments when intimacy borders on the divine. 'I
dropped this wonderful moment into the bottom of my memory, like a
sheet-anchor that one day I could draw up again. The bedrock of
existence is not made up of the family, or work, or what others say and
think of you, but of moments like this when you are exalted by a
transcendent power that is more serene than love.'
Martin Amis once wrote that young poets are forever taunted by subjects
which are no longer possible to write about in this ironic age: 'evening
skies, good looks, anything at all to do with love'. The fact that The
Way of the World is 40 years old works in its favour, coming fresh to
most English readers from a less cynical time. Through that distance
Bouvier enables us to rise above faddish celebrity and the sterility of
domestic despair, to remember that the world is a beautiful place and to
rejoice in humanity. He writes, '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.' If you read any travel book
this year – or indeed in the next forty years – this should be it.
The Guardian, 6 June 2007
For the whole article, go to:
http://tinyurl.com/2z9p84
