Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
They’ve put an Inca flag up in the main square in Lima which is all bogus because, of course, the Incas didn’t have a flag. There’s quite a nice quote in the Isherwood about the Incas: ‘Much ritual, little spirituality. Much gold, little elegance. Much feasting, little fun.’ It’s a wonderfully satirical vision.
Your first book is by Christopher Isherwood, The Condor and the Cows: A South American Travel Diary.
Modern travel books on South America are so scarce and generally cliché-ridden that it is wonderful to find one so fresh, funny and perceptive as Christopher Isherwood’s beautifully written The Condor and the Cows. Isherwood, curiously enough, had no desire to write this book (he was commissioned by his American publishers), and developed a general distaste for the continent, and for the Andes in particular, which he found claustrophobic and gloomy. The book is appropriately sarcastic, curmudgeonly and iconoclastic, in a way that prefigures Paul Theroux’s Patagonian Express. Yet, whereas Theroux has little of interest to say about the Andes (his whole attitude towards the mountains was determined by altitude sickness), Isherwood shows continual curiosity in the politics, culture and history of the countries he goes through. In Ecuador, for instance, he goes out of his way to meet the leading Ecuadorean painter Guaysamin, and finds him a charismatic person who had begun to inspire an indigenous cultural revival. Many of Isherwood’s political judgments are very pertinent today. And he got the Incas absolutely right.
How?
He recognised the greatness of Inca civilisation without in any way idealising it, as do so many other writers. The Incas were as bloodthirsty as the Spaniards, and no less brutally imperialistic; and, as with the similarly romanticised Muslim civilisation in Spain, their downfall was greatly assisted by internal dissent. I think that Isherwood would have been in agreement with many of the views of the Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, who attributes to the Incas the gloomier side to his nation’s character, and who is critical of such present-day political correctness as replacing a statue of Pizarro in Lima’s main square with an entirely bogus Inca flag (the Incas, of course, never had a flag). Isherwood himself memorably characterised the Incas in terms of ‘Much ritual, little spirituality. Much gold, little elegance. Much feasting, little fun.’
Read full interview
Michael Jacobs was born in Italy and studied art history at the Courtauld Institute of Art. The Hispanic world has obsessed him since childhood and his numerous books include Andalucía, Between Hopes and Memories: A Spanish Journey, Ghost Train through the Andes, and The Factory of Light: Tales from my Andalucían Village, which was shortlisted for the 2004 Thomas Cook Travel Book Award. He is a broadcaster on Spanish National Radio and in 2002 was made the first foreign knight of ‘The Very Noble and Illustrious Order of the Wooden Spoon’. For the last two years he has been chairman of the Dolman Travel Book Award.
Modern travel books on South America are so scarce and cliché-ridden that it is wonderful to find one so fresh, funny and perceptive as Christopher Isherwood’s beautifully written The Condor and the Cows. Isherwood, curiously enough, had no desire to write this book – he was commissioned by his American publishers – and developed a general distaste for the continent, and for the Andes in particular, which he found claustrophobic and gloomy.
The book is appropriately sarcastic, curmudgeonly and iconoclastic, in a way that prefigures Paul Theroux’s The Old Patagonian Express. Yet whereas Theroux has little of interest to say about the Andes – his whole attitude towards them was determined by altitude sickness – Isherwood shows continual curiosity about the politics, culture and history of the countries he goes through. In Ecuador, for instance, he goes out of his way to meet the leading Ecuadorean painter Guaysamin, and finds him a charismatic person who had begun to inspire an indigenous cultural revival. Many of Isherwood’s political judgments are very pertinent today, and he got the Incas absolutely right.
How so?
He recognised the greatness of Inca civilisation without in any way idealising it, as do so many other writers. The Incas were as bloodthirsty as the Spaniards, and no less brutally imperialistic. As with the similarly romanticised Muslim civilisation in Spain, their downfall was greatly assisted by internal dissent.
I think that Isherwood would have been in agreement with many of the views of the Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, who attributes to the Incas the gloomier side to his nation’s character, and who is critical of such present-day political correctness as replacing a statue of [the Spanish conquistador] Pizarro in Lima’s main square with an entirely bogus Inca flag. The Incas, of course, never had a flag. Isherwood himself memorably characterised the Incas as: “Much ritual, little spirituality. Much gold, little elegance. Much feasting, little fun.”
*
Sara Wheeler recommends:
Read full interview
