Customer Reviews

Mediterranean Winter: The Pleasures of History and Landscape in Tunisia, Sicily, Dalmatia, and Greece

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This is travel writing the way it was meant to be - Informative, concise and illuminating.

Kaplan relives his journeys from many years ago as he first travelled through the Mediterranean struggling with being a free-lance writer. Most of the book is recollections from more than 20 years ago although there are comments from recent trips back to some of the locations and a wonderful recent interview with Patrick Leigh Fermor, author of A Time of Gifts, and other well-known travel books.

The down-side of reporting on these decades-old journeys is that some of the spontaneity and opinion is lost. I find that sometimes I learn more from disagreeing with a travel writers' hasty opinion than in boring, well-edited neutral reporting. However, in this case, I think that the elapsed time has given this account nuances and a filtered content that add to the writing. It's as if the ensuing decades have concentrated the meaning and subtleties of the journey.

The part on Tunisia was replete with history of the Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans, Berbers, and Carthaginians. Sicily was filled with the Greek influences on this place. Dalmatia, in previous Yugoslavia, and Greece were well-represented.

I confess I particularly enjoyed the recent encouter with Patrick Leigh Fermor who in his 80's is working on the last book of the trilogy about his travels in the 30's on foot from Holland to Constantinople. If you haven't read his first two, you need to.

Kaplan also includes a list of books that he considers essential to understanding these regions. It is excellent and is a good start to understanding these areas in depth.

Overall, excellent and gripping - which is hard in travel writing.

I have become quite accustomed to reading insightful and throught provoking works by Robert Kaplan, but this one caught me by surprise. This work is an amazing achievement. Technically the book chronicles Kaplan's first venture into the Meditteranean, but it does much more than that. We see the Mediterranean through the eyes of a young man on eager to discover the world. What we also get however is the insight of a man who made this region his base for many years. The prose of journalist who has honed his craft for over twenty years. The reflections of a scholar who seems to have absorbed everything ever written in the english language about the places he visited.

We learn a great deal in this book. As is always the case with Kaplan we get an historical understanding for why a certain people are the way they are. It is astounding how much is commented upon and discussed in this slender volume. Kaplan has packed every page with his observations and reflections and while they are complex and replete with references to other works he somehow manages to keep his prose light and fluid. It is difficult to explain, but if you buy the book you will know what I am talking about.

Read this if you love the Mediterranean. Read it if you are fascinated by history or if you really enjoy profound lyrical prose.

Robert D Kaplan's latest book, "Mediterranean Winter: The Pleasures of History and Landscape in Tunisia, Sicily, Dalmatia, and Greece," is written in the tradition of what was known in the 1930's as "landscape companions." The most well-known practitioners of this lost art were Robert Byron, David Talbot Rice, Lawrence Durrell, and Patrick Leigh Fermor.(They were all children of the British Empire.) This book recounts a journey Kaplan took shortly afer graduating from college in the mid 1970's. Kaplan writes: "With this journey, I acquired the habit of searching books linked to landscapes and seascapes through which I traveled. Reading became surgery; a way of dissecting the surrounding landscape and may own motivations for being there."

This is not the tourism of our present age, which is an escape from the drudgery of work; this is travel as work. Every landscape, every ruin suggests a book or an author. Every train trip or boat ride fills another notebook with observations and reflections. Travel teaches us about history - the rise and fall of civilizations, the ebb and flow of empires.

Kaplan's prose is on overdrive when travels through northern Tunisia. He recalls on a bus trip: "...the sculpted, liver-hued steppe of northern Tunisia and the pinks of the southern deserts, with their vast blotches of salt; interior tablelands racked by lonely, bone-chilling winds and the grave, museum light of late afternoons; the smoking and hacking coughs of the other passengers wrapped like ghosts in their caftans in the pre-dawn darkness, drooping woolen sleeves concealing their hands; the comforting smell of tea, fresh bread, sharp cheese, and harissa at half-empty cafes where the bus stopped after sunrise, with their loud music, scabby walls, and bitter espresso served in whiskey glasses only a third full; the just-boiled eggs that would keep my hands warm in the bus, bought at a cafe or given to me by a friendly passenger with whom I might share may sunflower seeds."

Kaplan has said elsewhere that waited until middle age to write this book in order to avoid the purple prose of youth; however, there are some delightful moments of recidivism.

In Tunisia, Kaplan uncovers the layers of history of this north African country, focusing mainly on the Carthaginian era and the subsequent conquest by Rome. Rome is still everywhere present in the landscape of Tunisia, from the roads and aqueducts to the Colosseum at El Djem, and Kaplan illustrates this vividly.

Also fascinating is his journey through Sicily. In Sicily, he sees the legacy of the Crusades. In the 1100's, two brothers from Normandy, Robert and Roger of Hauteville, conquered Moslem Sicily and created a modern multicultural state, in which Normans, Latins, Greeks, and Arabs could live together and prosper. The historian John Julius Norwich describes this era in depth in "The Kingdom in the Sun."

Kaplan then travels to Tivoli, east of Rome, where he explores Hadrian's Villa. "Hadrian's Villa was the Versailles of the ancient world." This was the subject of Eleanor Clark's 1950 book, "Rome and a Villa." To his villa, Hadrian brought thousands of books, statues, and reconstructed landscapes to remind him of all the cherished moments of his past. Kaplan compares him to Jefferson and his Monticello.

After leaving Tivoli, Kaplan sails to Split on the Dalmatian coast. Here he ponders the life and times of the emperor Diocletian, while walking through his palace: "If Hadrian was a romantic aesthete who encouraged the arts, Diocletian who ruled the Roman Empire 150 years after him, was a nuts-and-bolts pragmatist who spent most of his life in military camps." Diocletian was the first Roman emperor to rule the empire from the Balkans. It was not long until Rome was sacked in 476 and the Balkans were annexed by Justinian to the Byzantine Empire. After Byzantium, there were invasions by the Slavs and the Turks. Kaplan is very good when describing the mixture of people and civilizations that inhabit this part of the world; it was the subject of one of his previous books, "Balkan Ghosts."

The book ends with an entertaining visit to a spry 88-year-old Patrick Leigh Fermor, a fellow literary traveler and adventurer, living on the Peloponnesian Peninsula. "The last pascha of the Mediterranean" was working on the third volume of his memoirs of a journey on foot from the Hook of Holland to what is now Istanbul. We can only hope that Kaplan is still traveling and writing when he reaches this stage of life's journey.

This historical essay by Kaplan which flows along a geographic journey from North Africa, to Sicily, Italy, Croatia, and Greece is a great read for anyone interested in the history of the Mediterranean. The book is part travelogue, part history, and part philosophy. The key test I have with this type of writing is whether the book leaves the reader with a nice roadmap for further in-depth exploration of the subject matter or some nice sideroads for further exploration...and this book gets five stars because it excels at just that. For example, I may be showing my ignorance but although I was aware of Lamb, and Byron, I had never heard of Fermor; although having read Norwich on Venice, I was ignorant of the Norman invasion of Sicily, etc. There is probably something like that for every reader who is not an expert in mediterranen history. It's easy to read, flows nicely, and worth one's time.

As in "Balkan Ghosts," Kaplan writes with great clarity and intelligence, weaving a fine travel narrative founded on extensive historical research. He writes with a unique and creative eye, and tends to focus on important yet little-known locales. He philosophizes quite a bit, but it is an intriguing, pleasurable philosophy. The following quote from his section on Greece crystallizes for me the special appeal of this type of writing, "...travel writing, rather than a low-rent occupation for the Sunday supplements, could also be a means to explore art, history, literature, and statecraft..." Precisely! Bravo, Kaplan!

Reviewed by David Lundberg, author of Olympic Wandering: Time Travel Through Greece

Impressions are akin to the distillates of grape rinds which when aged in the charred barrel of time yield the fine cognac of memories that become smoother and more satisfying with age. Mediterranean Winter is not an account of a recent journey or the nostalgic pining for youth but rather the mature reflections of a man whose impressions of a lifetime of world travel have been aged in the in the cask of the mind. Kaplan’s work is a delicate blend of autobiography, travel, philosophy, and above all, history. Like a fine cognac it is smooth, delicious, and relaxing.

The book commences with his very first journey, wanderings through Tunisia. My wife and I had the pleasure of traveling there in the mid 1990’s. His descriptions of Tebersouk rekindled my memories of that town in an early spring, a meal of runny eggs with fresh French bread, the quaintness of the village, and the heartfelt “Bon Jour” expressed by the school children. I still savor that crisp morning in the ancient Roman amphitheatre at Douga gazing in awe at the emerald green fields in the valley below and listening to the mellifluous exhaust tone of a moped as it serpentined the narrow road. I recollect gazing out our train window en route to El Djem and the sudden appearance of the Roman Colosseum replete with all its ancient glory. Sitting in the stands under the brazen Mediterranean sun it took but little imagination to hear the clanging of metal on metal and the roar of the crowds. But most of all, I shall never forget the warmth and kindness of the Tunisians themselves.

While Tunis brings back delicious memories his discussions of Sicily, Greece, and Dubrovnik elicit longings to visit these places so rich in history. I visited Athens, and like Kaplan who intended on staying but a few days remained eight years, I also, could have remained years. My wife too was seduced by Athens’ charm as an immigrant traveling from Eastern Europe to the United Stated. She remained captive to its charms for nine months. To this day she refers to Athens as ‘home’. Her final wish is that her ashes be scattered at Placa in Athens.

Kaplan imbues his travels with history. We are its products and what better ways can we understand ourselves than through history and what better way to understand history than to stand on its consecrated sacred soil. I found his historical discussions of such places as Sicily, Dubrovnik, and the southern Peloponnesus both intriguing and delightful. Perhaps most interesting of all was the reoccurring motif of the difference between the Byzantine and the Western ethos. Byzantine geography is so close and our history so intertwined but yet our consciousness is so divided. This is best exemplified by his encounter with the Russian seminary students in the Peloponnesus.

The best chapter is the last chapter entitled “The Last Pasha of the Mediterranean”. In it he chronicles a visit to a most amazing man, one who journeyed from his England to Istanbul on foot! Patrick Leigh Fermor is an erudite man in the twilight of his life. His villa in the remote southern outpost of Kardamyli in the Peloponnesus is a panoply of a lifetime of learning. Rooms are piled high with antique volumes of books, back issues of journals and magazines, artifacts, and maps. His most prized possession is the 1910 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica – “the last good one” which he keeps in the dinning room because as he puts it: “You should always have good reference works where you dine. The best sort of arguments start over dinner, and you must have the means available to settle them.” Here is a man who lived his life in conformity to David Hume’s dictum that the “two pleasures in life are study and society.” It is refreshing to know that there are men like Robert Kaplan who are heirs to the mantel of Patrick Leigh Fermor.

Kaplan made explicit what I knew implicitly that “divinity exists in beautiful memories” and the reason I travel is because “so much of commonplace existence is forgotten, while our journeys never are.”

Mediterranean Winter is not the book to begin with in reading Robert D. Kaplan books. It lacks the energy and presence that some of his other books have. John Julius Norwich in his Byzantine books covers much of this territory, and he obviously loves history. Kaplan loves travel more than history, and it appears difficult for him to reconstruct old travels from his journals.

These comments should not prejudice you against Kaplan's books. Start with Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power and you will be rewarded with energetic and informative travel writing that includes the history of the area in an enlightening way.

Then the reader will be in a position to choose from the other Kaplan books.