Customer Reviews

Passenger to Teheran (Tauris Parke Paperback S.)

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If you are fascinated by English travelers accounts of exotic journeys undertaken in the Golden age of Travel, then V. Sackville-West's record of her journey by rail and road from London to Iran in the 1920s will delight you. Her sensibility as a novelist and poet enrich this book of impressions and her strong personality shines through every comment on her adventures. Ms. West follows a meandering and leisurely land route to the Near East from England and, later, returns via Mother Russia, using all means available at the time: automobile, train, donkey, camel, and her own two feet. She braves bandits in the mountain passes of Iran; street beggars in Baghdad, English travelers who dismay and bore her at every turn. She conveys the pageantry of Iranian royalty during a Coronation; surveys the ancient landscape and ruins of Persian gardens on her tramps through the mountainsides of Tehran. She takes the reader on as a fellow passenger and you feel at once you are in the company of an exceptional, if eccentric, traveling companion. After reading this book, you would gladly follow her anywhere

For anyone who loves to travel to strange and distant lands - or wishes they could - this may be the quintessential travel book. Vita Sackville-West was a great friend of Virginia Woolf, and shared her gift for superb storytelling as well as her love of the language.

From the opening page, where she describes and beckons to fellow travelers, through the wild ride across the Yemeni sands and the drive over the mountains of Persia, the reader is enthralled.

She opens the door to travel in the 'teens, when a journey like this was truly arduous - and yet you are quite certain she always looked fabulous and was witty - at least after she'd had her tea.

It is a great regret that this book is out of print, as it is such a treasure.