Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
It’s about a journey in the 1950s from Belgrade to India. These friends try to go to India in a tiny battered Fiat and it takes them several years, and it probably describes the attraction of travel better than any book I’ve ever read.
The Way of the World by Nicolas Bouvier.
It’s translated from the French because I think he was Swiss, and it’s about a journey in the 1950s from Belgrade to India. They try to go to India in a tiny battered Fiat and it takes them several years, these friends, and it probably describes the attraction of travel better than any book I’ve ever read. They spend quite a lot of time in Turkey and Iran and Afghanistan. He is going to India and the book ends as he goes into Pakistan. A lot of it is set in cafés and one thing and another – it’s a diary. I remember a little bit in there when they’re setting out one morning into a semi-desert landscape and the rising sun catches the plumage of the quails and partridges, and it’s a magical moment when he just sees that this is what travel is all about.
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Roy Moxham is the author of Outlaw: India’s Bandit Queen and Me, A Brief History of Tea, an updated edition of Tea: Addiction, Exploitation and Empire, The Great Hedge of India, and The Freelander. A former tea planter in Nyasaland and later Malawi, he spent 13 years in Eastern Africa before becoming Senior Conservator of the Senate House Library, University of London.
