![]() ![]() Pico Iyer was the writer who showed me how to take the Open Road (also the title of his sublime study of the Dalai Lama). Paul Theroux's latest book is The Tao of Travel: Enlightenments from Lives on the Road (Hamish Hamilton, £16.99) Kapka Kassabova If you march your winter journeys you will have your reward, so long as all you want is a penguin's egg." Some will tell you that you are mad … And so you will sledge nearly alone, but those with whom you sledge will not be shopkeepers: that is worth a good deal. If you are a brave man you will do nothing if you are fearful you may do much, for none but cowards have need to prove their bravery. He wrote: "If you have the desire for knowledge and the power to give it physical expression, go out and explore. But in the Antarctic winter of 1911 Cherry trudged through the polar darkness and cold (-60C) to find an Emperor penguin rookery. Scott and four of his men (but not Cherry) died on the way back from the Pole. Cherry was only 23 when he joined the Scott Antarctic Expedition in 1912. This was Cherry-Garrard's only book: it thrilled me when I first read it, and it still inspires me, for its quiet power to evoke a place and time, for its correction of history (the unsparing portrait of Captain Scott), most of all for its heroism. The Worst Journey in the World, by Apsley Cherry-Garrard Sara Wheeler's latest book is Access all Areas (Jonathan Cape, £18.99) Paul Theroux "There are few sorrows," she wrote, "through which a new dress or hat will not send a little gleam of pleasure, however furtive." Indeed. Isn't that the best kind of life imaginable? She did not try to be an honorary man in a field still woefully dominated by that species. Stark glittered in the drawing rooms of London and loved a party having drunk her fill, she'd run off to peek out at the world from a solitary tent. The book is a heady mix of hardship and luxury, scholarship and mischief, loneliness and intimacy, and the oppositions give the prose its strength. ![]() A guest of the tribes, she conjures little girls in magenta silk trousers, their silver anklets frilled with bells the drumbeats of the Sultan's procession and veiled women bearing gifts of salted melon seeds. William Dalrymple's latest book, Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India (Bloomsbury, £8.99), won the first Asia House Literature Award, in 2010Ī Winter in Arabia describes Freya Stark's 1937 journey through the Hadhramaut, a region in today's Yemen. God only knows what Chatwin might have produced had he still been writing, now when we need him most. He also knew and loved the Islamic world – and such writers are now badly in demand. Yet to his fans, Chatwin remains like a showy bird of paradise amid the sparrows of the present English literary scene, and it is impossible to reread In Patagonia without a deep stab of sadness that we have lost the brightest and most profound writer of his generation. The pendulum of fashion has swung against Chatwin, and it is now unhip to admire his work. ![]() All three talents shine brightly on almost every page of In Patagonia, but it is his bleak chiselled prose that remains his most dazzling: he had a quite remarkable ability to evoke place, to bring to life a whole world of strange sounds and smells in a single unexpected image, to pull a perfect sentence out the air with the ease of a child netting a butterfly. Its opening page – telling of Bruce's childhood discovery of a piece of dinosaur skin in his grandmother's cupboard – is possibly the most imitated passage in modern travel literature.Ĭhatwin had three matchless gifts: he was a thinker of genuine originality a reader of astonishing erudition and a writer of breathtaking prose. But it is probably the most influential travel book written since the war. It is in the eyes of many his best, though it was not his most commercially successful (Songlines outsold it many times over). His first, In Patagonia, is a metaphysical exploration of "the uttermost part of the earth". When Bruce Chatwin died in 1989, at 48, he had published just five books: a small yet dazzling output.
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