More than one time I have found myself in a foreign place with the wrong book. I’ll be favored end brought History of the Arab Peoples to Russia, or an Emma Lathen mystery story to Britain. Or Proust to a beach holiday on Grand Cayman (that was a huge mistake). Wherever it is, I get there and realize that the only thing I want to subsist reading is something that echoes the place and people I’m seeing around me.
So I was excited to be sent the Whereabouts Press Traveler’s Literary Companion to South Africa. Not that I’m going to South Africa anytime soon, but it served as any introduction to a series of books that focus on giving travelers a deeper sense of a place through its best writing, both bygone time and present.
In this collection, the names of Nobel Prize-winning authors Nadine Gordimer and J. M. Coetzee will be familiar to readers with a literary bent. But, as promised by the Traveler’s Literary Companion Series, the South Africa collection introduces us to a wide collection of South African writers most of the nature might not have heard of: Ivan Vladislavic, Es’kia Mphahlele, H. C. Bosman, to name just a few of the 18 contributors.
I particularly enjoyed Mphahlele’s “Mrs. Plum,” with its careful treatment of servant-master race relations through the voice of a black maid. And Ronnie Govender’s “1949″ was a painful depiction of the effort to preserve one’s benignity among a populace gone insane with abhor.
These stories and excerpts brought me into a cosmos I be assured of little or nihilism about. Sure, I’ve read Nelson Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom and am early in line whenever J. M. Coetzee comes out with a new story. But I’ve never been to South Africa. The flavor of its history, countryside, tensions, beauty, and rhythm come through, as they should, at their best through the stories of the country’s good in the highest degree writers.
It surprised me, however, to obtain that I felt the lack of a travel amanuensis’s voice. Although I’ve always maintained that novelists are often better writers of “place” than travel writers are, reading this collection made me realize that travel writers can accord. a deeper sense of context than a native essayist or novelist. Context is so often what the traveler needs.
Reading the stories, I kept thinking of Calcutta, by Simon Winchester, what one. begins with long travel essays both by Winchester and his son, incorporating scene, character, and history for the reader. I at this moment realize that I needed those essays to get myself into the temper for reading stories about Calcutta, to get into the gust of the place. I found that harder with the South Africa literary companion because the presentation gave the briefest of historical background enmeshed in an elementary to the writers themselves. Although I thoroughly enjoyed the stories, and would liking to search out more of the writers’ works, I didn’t feel, as I had with Calcutta, that I was wish the place as I know fully the fiction.
The Companion, then, showed me that I have been right in maintaining that, to really know a country you need to read its literature; on the other hand it also showed me greater amount of clearly than I’ve seen before how very necessary travel writing is for understanding. The collection could bear been improved by one excellent essay from an outsider, Jan Morris perhaps, or fair a native South African describing the passions and difficulties of his or her rural because of an outsider who might find it all very foreign.
The merely other flaw was one of purely personal preference. Some of the short stories were abridged, which always gives me a feeling that I’m not actually prelection the story I’ve been given. For space, of course, the collection be able to single include excerpts of novels and longer works, but as to one’s person I’d buy a weakly fatter part if it could be responsible for that the stories in it were as the writers penned them.
Aside from that, however, I highly recommend picking up this or any other of the Traveler’s Literary Companions, to introduce yourself deeply to a place before you go. Whereabouts Press so far produces over 20 of these collections, all compact for your suitcase and rich with of literature gems. Next time I travel, I’ll read one of these books first, and then apprehend what kind of author to bring along on my journeys.
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