Jason Eliots book, An Unexpected Light was/is the result of his travels through Afghanistan. We highly recommend it. Here is a particular jewel, a definition of what travel writing is. Enjoy. What after all was a travel book? That young Italian had started it all in the 13th century and had given the telling of tall tales from foreign parts its subsequent respectability. On the whole it had not changed much since Polo’s time: a man or a woman sets off for foreign parts ignorant of both the language and geography of the place, with an out of date map and borrowed phrase book, preys shamelessly for as long as the family trust fund will allow on the hospitality of the native people, and returns home to hastily record his or her first impressions in a semi fictional collection of descriptions that affirm the prejudices of the day. Then, reminded of the mediocrity of the experiences described and to ease the risk of any intellectual burden on the microscopic attention span of the reader, he or she retrospectively invents a fashionable quest around which the narrative can be twisted in every direction except towards the truth, fits it tidily with invented dialogues, speculative history, sweeping inaccuracies, mistranslations, verbose accounts of having braved hazards endured daily by ordinary local people without complaint, portrays as revelation long lists of trivial facts known to every local schoolchild, and bludgeons the original spirit of the endeavor in an attempt to appear erudite with the academic verbiage of out of print encyclopaedias, disguising all the while the discomfort of being at sea in an alien culture by resorting to the quirky condescending humour that its couch bound audience will think of as funny. The result? Only a confirmation of what everybody already knows: better to stay at home. -Jason Elliot, An Unexpected Light pp. 289-290
Posted on: Mon, 21 Oct 2013 08:00:05 +0000
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