Customer Reviews

Eothen: Traces of Travel Brought Home from the East

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We read this for bookclub. It is a bit disjointed & self serving.

Kinglake's EOTHEN is so magisterially well-written that it is easy to overlook the book's sheer, surrealistic peculiarity. The book's strangeness starts with its title: what does the EOTHEN mean? (It's Greek for "from the east" with implications of "dawn" and "first light" -- the "ur-licht" from which the cultures of the West emerge.) Kinglake's traveler has only the most ghostly of pasts, vague memories of English landscapes, a Proustian sense-memory of a girl's arm on his sleeve, a deserted and eerie garden. We don't know who he is going or where he is going. We don't know the objective for his travels? And, throughout the book, the traveler's adventures are inflected by weird reveries, aural hallucinations, pjantasmic visions -- he seeks out Lady Hester Stanhope in one peculiar chapter (which the author's footnotes urge the reader to skip) and communes with this proto-Madame Blavatsky, signifying that the traveler in the savage lands of middle east always runs the risk of becoming either prophet/demi-god or exploitive conqueror. Throughout the text, the traveler encounters the plague and, ultimately, in an extraordinary reversal exposes himself to be, figuratively, the plague-bearer, the white man as the helpless agent of catastrophe to native cultures, the source of the very miasma that he has set forth to investigate. Like George Orwell in his essay about shooting an elephant in Burma, Kinglake's traveler finds himself revered as a demi-god but without any actual power to do good. It's a startling and prescient parable of the dark side of imperialism and one that those engaged in nation-building today should take into account. And did I mention that Winston Churchill claimed that Kinglake was the author who taught him to write. With Thomas de Quincy, Kinglake is the greatest stylist of the early Victorian period. EOTHEN, OR TRACES OF TRAVEL BROUGHT HOME FROM THE EAST