more lists

I have been an avid reader of what I shall call travel fiction for decades. I use the term “travel fiction” as a difficult compromise- much of travel literature is clearly exaggerated or even completely fictional, yet it is classified somehow as “truth.” Meanwhile, many books call themselves fiction, yet read largely like travel books. The ones I normally like the best are those that combine fiction with travel successfully. I remember the first such book that fell into my hands when I was about 9 or 10- The Drifters by James Michener. Hardly a work of great literature, but at the time it seemed quite revolutionary to me at the time and I stayed up with my torch under my blankets in bed to find out what happened next.Soon after, my father found a bunch of expired lonely planets at the local library, on sale for 25p each. He brought them home to me and I read them all, underlining my favourite parts- from the consumption of guinea pigs in equator to growing penis gourds in parts of the Pacific. I suppose it is not surprising that some decades later I choose to pursue a doctorate in travel literature. Yet I actually prefer travel fiction, as it generally takes itself less seriously, not being burdened by the label of “truth.”

So in a fit of office boredom, I decided to construct my list of best travel fiction works. Not all the works are of great literary merit (in terms of writing, the first two are in some ways mediocre) but I included them due to the overwhelming attraction I felt to the story, its characters, its setting and the fact that it made me want to run to my closet and grab my sack, stuff in some underwear and do a runner. What did surprise me when I looked over what I had written, I was surprised how much Anglo-Saxon stuff was there, which struck me as odd. I don’t normally like reading Anglo-Saxon literature, I don’t even like reading much in English! But clearly this is a genre at which the Anglo-Saxon world excels, just as they also dominate heavily in the supposedly “non-fiction” travelogue industry….the reasons as to why can be the topic of someone else’s phd….

Just as a note though: I didn’t include Kerouac’s On the Road, as I could never get into it….nor is Greene’s the Power and the Glory on the list, as embarrassingly I have yet to read it!

 

1. The Beach. Alex Garland’s backpacker classic. I have read it several times. It is pure pulp fiction, but I find it addicting!
2. Shantaram. Gregory David Roberts. Again, pulp fiction. I never got into the mystical/spiritual parts, and I certainly do think it is more fiction than truth (but who cares!) yet the descriptions of the Indian underworld are incredible. Funnily enough, I once found myself being put up in a small hotel just down the road from Leopold’s, the café where much of the action takes place. So, some mates and I walked over to the café for a drink, and who did we run into? Gregory David Roberts. He apparently still goes there regularly, and is treated like a Bollywood celebrity by the staff. He looks every bit the ex-Australia convict he claims to have been.
3. A Moveable Feast. The Great Hemingway, who claimed “if the reader prefers, this book may be regarded as fiction.” Moving back some decades to the Paris in the 20s, I read this tale of the Lost Generation in school, and liked it so much I reread it in my free time. Probably the only time I genuinely liked something on the school curriculum.
4. Sheltering Sky. Paul Bowles. Twisted tale with some unforgettable characters. Odd echoes of it reappeared in Esther Freud’sHideous Kinky, which picks up on the same North Africa to the point of destruction theme.
5. In a Free State. V.S. Naipal. A gritty combination of foreignness, sex and sleaze.
6. Ilf and Petrov’s American Road Trip. A surreal work written by two Soviets during the Stalin era. Basically like Borat, circa 1935, these two oddballs drove across the US, observing capitalism up close.
7. Travesuras de la nina mala. Mario Vargas Llosa. The writer hits on every hot spot: Cuba in the early 60s, Paris’s left bank in the mid to late 60s, then moving on to protests in Trafalgar Square in the early 70s and glimpses of Tokyo’s weird business culture in the early 80s. all starting from Peru, naturally.
8. Tender is the Night. Fitzgerald. Although the Great Gatsby is the one that appears to have been classified as Fitzgerald’s great classic, I always preferred this one…
9. The Razor’s Edge. Somerset Maugham. I really don’t generally like American fiction. I normally avoid it deliberately. Yet three of my choices (Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Maugham) all represent a slice of Americans camped out in France in the interwar period. It is amazing how a relatively small expat community could inspire and produce such as rich volume of literature!!!
10. The Berlin Diaries. Christopher Isherwood. A variation on the Americans in Paris, this one features an Englishman in gritty and decadent interwar Berlin…..my literature teacher caught me reading it when I was about 12 and felt it was not “appropriate reading material” for some one of my age, which obviously increased my interest levels dramatically.
11. Cuba and the Night. Pico Iyer combined with El Pintor de batallas by Perez Revelte. These two have a series of common themes (jaded war photographers as protagonists, lost love) although in mood they are quite different.
12. The Asiatics. Frederic Prokosch. Published in 1935, this is another classic of the genre I suppose....Camus called it the first “geographical novel,” as its nameless protagonist zips from Lebanon to China.
13. Out of Africa. Karen von Blixen-Finecke. Ok, again, some might classify this as biography, but I am going to include it anyway….von Blixen-Finecke must have been an amazing character though, I doubt she needed to stretch her imagination too far….

Ok I had intended to make a list of 10, but I have got carried away here and should stop, before the list takes on a life of its own and extends into the hundreds….there is so much out there! And it all makes me wonder, where to next?