But of all these, one, in particular, has shown how utterly beautiful a brilliantly written travel book can still be. For every piece predicting its demise, another is announcing the arrival of some new talent: in the past few years, writers as diverse as Pankaj Mishra, William Fiennes, Suketu Mehta, Rory Stewart, and Peter Hessler have all produced masterworks that show the continuing vitality of the travel book, as well as its ability to reinvent itself for each successive generation. And yet this ancient form stubbornly refuses to die. It has recently become almost cliche to predict the extinction of travel writing in the internet and Google Earth age. Like epic poetry, but unlike the novel, the travel book has appeared spontaneously in almost all the world’s classical and medieval cultures, from the journeys of Hsuan Tsang in India and Basho in Japan, through the topographies of Ibn Battuta and Marco Polo, to the Celtic monks venturing westwards on their immortal wonder-journeys. Tales of travel take us back to man’s deepest literary roots, to the Epic of Gilgamesh and the wanderings of the Pandava brothers in the Mahabharata. Travel writing – an individual telling a story about a journey through a landscape – is one of the world’s most primitive forms of literature.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |