Customer Reviews

The Way of the World

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
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The Way of the World takes me back to when a generation traveled the world with backpacks, motorcycles and VW buses. It is a travel log set in the late fifties, of two casual travelers in their early twenties, who set off on a trip from Europe to India to explore the backroads and see life in its essence as lived by the local people. The book paints the pictures of gypsys, artists, mountain families and ancient cities with bazaars, using local color and the eye of an artist. Those who have traveled with similiar resources will enjoy the challenges of the innovative repair of an old Fiat in the middle of a desert, the capricousness of venturing into another country with only pocketchange, and the discovery that most people in the world do have a love of strangers.

I envy him. I envy his travels and his writing. For me Bouvier writes the best travel novels. It s something different. He doesn't describe the country. he simply lives country's life. Stays somewhere in Anatolia for a month, then suddenly one day decides it is time. Time to go, time to travel.

A remarkable little book that doesn't fit any category.

It is hardly a travel essay. Bouvier gives no overview of the cultures he visits. His descriptions of sites and scenes are often minimal.

Nor is it a chronicle of a personal journey. Bouvier provides little internal monologue. Although he occasionally makes philosophical pronouncements, his tone is distanced and impersonal, curious and objective. He looks outward, not inward.

It reads more like a series of impressionistic short stories. I enjoyed most the literary snapshots of people in the 1950s in Yugoslavia, Turkey, Iran and Afghanistan. Against a remote backdrop of religious extremism, bribe-taking officials, and tyranny in one form or another, Bouvier finds individuals who love life, seek pleasure, chase irrational dreams, and give unselfishly to needy travelers. More than anything else, it is a book about hospitality in an inhospitable world.

The setting for the book is this lengthy road trip from Europe to the Khyber Pass back in the 50s. I did a similar trip in 1970.

The strength of the writing is all in the understanding and insightful nature of the descriptions of the daily doings. It's not exciting or hair-raising, though certainly it held my interest throughout. Quite a few times I read a paragraph where I stopped and commented to my sister or wife, "Listen to this". And then just read aloud that snippet.

The author and his buddy were a journalist and an artist taking a year long journey in a small and problem prone Fiat auto of the time. And stopping in towns where they would stay for a night or a couple weeks or even longer. They were trying to raise money from their work as they went along. Everybody understands that need, so they were on a more level footing with those who they encountered.

This is certainly a fine book, and I'd recommend it to any thoughtful person.

I bought this book on the strength of it having an introduction written by a favourite author, Patrick Leigh Fermor. Lke Fermor's "Time of Gifts", "The Way of the world" is a road story extraordinaire. Why? Because the writing is superb. It's erudite, concise and topical for today's reader in that Bouvier comprehends what makes the heart and soul tick of the people he meets. Especially relevant are the journeys through Serbia, Turkey, Iran and Afghanistan moreover he describes them in an objective but kindly manner; he is a humanist with an aesthetic sensibility.

It was the `50's, and two authors hit the road. Since having read it, I think that Jack Kerouac's work, with the subject title is vastly overrated. He bounced back and forth between the oceans that encompass America, and seemed to see so little. But Nicolas Bouvier, seven years younger, was so much more perceptive, and undertook a bolder and more arduous journey, in a beat-up Fiat, with his artist companion Thierry Vernet.

At 25 they simply did not have the financial resources to undertake the trip, so they "had to wing it," and more than once benefited from the kindness of strangers. As an epigraph, he quotes Shakespeare: "I shall be gone and live, or stay and die." And to those that have done it, the end of his preface rings true: "Traveling outgrows it motives. It soon proves sufficient in itself. You think you are making a trip, but soon it is making you - or unmaking you."

Bouvier was one of the trail-blazers along what would become known as the "hippie route to India" in the `70's. He is Swiss French, from Geneva; he meets Thierry in Yugoslavia. They travel on through Greece, Turkey, Iran, Pakistan, and into Afghanistan, with the book, but not the journey (apparently) ending at the Khyber Pass, between Afghanistan and Pakistan. It takes them 18 months to complete this portion (they "wintered" in Tabriz, Iran). They both have an astonishingly well-developed aesthetic sense, and are quite knowledgeable in a broad range of fields, particularly for their age. And they are observant, both of their surroundings, and human nature. They have a "knack" for dealing with government officials, and the people of the road.

Bouvier spins numerous memorable aphorisms: "It's very odd how revolutions which profess to know the people take so little account of their sensibilities, and fall back on slogans and symbols that are even more simple-minded than the ones they're replacing"; or, in terms of travel, "We denied ourselves every luxury except one, that of being slow." Considering where we are now, always plugged in, and "on-line," Bouvier makes an incredibly prescient observation for the `50's: "They lack technology: we want to get out of the impasse into which too much technology has led us, our sensibilities saturated to the nth degree with Information and a Culture of distractions."

Consider his descriptive powers, and insight in the following observation: "Time passed in brewing tea, the odd remark, cigarettes, then dawn came up. The widening light caught the plumage of quails and partridges...and quickly I dropped this wonderful moment to the bottom of my memory, like a sheet-anchor that one day I could draw up again...In the end, the bedrock of existence is not made up of the family, or work, or what others say or think of you, but of moments like this when you are exalted by a transcendent power that is more serene than love. Life dispenses them parsimoniously; our feeble hearts could not stand more."

This is also a book that should be required reading for the American military general staff: "The Afghans don't change their ways for Westerners. There was no trace of the spinelessness some second-rate Indians greet you with, or the phony psychic powers some of them claim. Is it the effect of the mountains? No, it's rather that the Afghans have never been colonized.... Thus there is no affront to wash away, no complex to heal. A foreigner? Simply a man."

The best portions of the book were their time in Yugoslavia, "Kurdistan," and at the Saki bar in Quetta. Perhaps it is the nature of travel, but I felt his anecdotes were too disjointed. There were numerous issues that were never explained, yet were central to the trip: Why winter in the bitter cold of Tabriz when it would have been much more enjoyable in Shiraz? Why end the book as he is to enter Pakistan, and there was apparently much more traveling ahead? How did they get back to Europe? Did he have his reunion with Thierry, and his new bride? His vignette of searching the Quetta "dump" for his lost manuscript is memorable; but it underscores the fact that all notes of his journey were lost there, and it was only 10 years later that the account was reconstructed in this form. Finally, though his observations about Islam seemed well-informed, he did get the Higerian century wrong - it was the 14th (p 98).

Eighteen years after Bouvier I undertook a very similar journey, making it all the way to Madras, before flying on to Singapore (since deck passage on a boat across the Bay of Bengal was "not recommended to people of European origins"). I didn't have even a beat-up Fiat, and had to rely on local buses and trains, probably to my overall advantage. I wish I had this book to compliment my "Lonely Plant" guide, for a journey that almost certainly can not be made in peace for a person "of European origins" for another two decades. And for sure, I would have seen so much more if I had had Bouvier's erudition. For his age, a 5-star book, for sure; in the fullness of time though, I'll give it 4-stars.

I love travel books and have read hundreds of them. This is the one that inhabits my dreams. The world it describes is lost forever---though it was only half a century ago, it seems as mythical as The Odyssey.

This is the tale of two twenty-something pals from France riding around Asia in a "rattletrap Fiat." In fact, the Fiat is one of the star players. The thing is constantly breaking down or being defeated by the weather and topography. Bouvier, an aspiring writer, and his friend Thierry Vernet, an aspiring artist, are both accomplished mechanics. But they cannot always fix the thing and they do not always have the parts, which leads to lots of negotiations with the locals.

This takes place in the 1950s (read: a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away), so the behavior of the locals might not be replicated today (read: don't try this at home). Still, you get a lot of little anecdotes from Serbia to Persia (Iran to you) to Afghanistan. One plus is Bouvier's writing ability. He can be quite poetic and fashion quite the sentence, and it holds together nicely through Robyn Marsack's translation from the French.

If you're looking for a lot of coming-of-age material, like you often see in travel writing, Bouvier's not your guy. Although he does include some of his opinions and notes on his health, the focus is really on the land and the natives. He is, then, more objective than subjective, and the book does not wax philosophical so much. To its credit, the book does include bits of history. Bouvier wrote the account years later using his journal and obviously did his homework to leaven the bread. Fans of travel writing should embrace this book, though some fans in this niche demand more personal ruminations from the author than Bouvier will provide.

The Way of the World captures the essence of Eastern Europe and Central Asia in the 1950s as well as the ramblings of our heros throughout their journey. The world that thety experienced and relate to us these many years later is a world that is lost to us. This was a world seeped in Cold War ethos as well as a world that was not as influenced by fundamentalist Islam. The writing is good, although there are passages which seem to go on forever, much like the plains and deserts that our heros crossed. If you enjoy travel books and books about far-away places, you will enjoy this one.