Customer Reviews

In Xanadu

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William Dalrymple travelled 12,000 miles overland from Jerusalem to Xanadu in order to retrace the journey of Marco Polo, and I think the Venetian probably had the easier trip--- in 1271 Marco Polo didn't have to smuggle himself along the Silk Route by burrowing into the back of a coal truck.

The author calls his journey a `quest' rather than a `vacation,' since it involved not only a goal, but also a great deal of hardship and suffering. However "In Xanadu" is an excellent book to take on vacation. It is a lucid and sometimes hilarious account of a very low-budget journey through Asia ($1100 financed the entire trip through Israel, Cyprus, Turkey, Syria, Iran, Pakistan, and the breadth of China.) And best of all, no matter how badly your own vacation turns out, you can always pick this book up and find Dalrymple in a more miserable spot than you are.

There is also beauty and moments of scholarly excitement when the author identifies some feature of the landscape with a passage from Marco Polo's journal. I particularly liked his description of a nocturnal train trip through Turkey. He sees dry flatlands transformed into lush pasturage and wonders at the source of water. Then the train comes upon a river, and Dalrymple unfolds his map:

"Its Turkish name, the Firat Nehri, meant nothing to me. Only when I followed the thin blue line down through Syria and out towards Baghdad, did I see the river's more familiar name --- the Euphrates....Is there another river which carries with it so many associations?...The river which ran through the Garden of Eden, one of the five rivers of the Apocalypse! Following its course on the map, its banks are littered with the names of the ancient cities it once gave life to: Mari, Nippur, Uruk, Larsa, Erdu, Kish."

The above paragraph is a rare flight of fancy for Dalrymple. His normal style is less flamboyant, laced with dry British humor where he tends to be the butt of his own jokes. Sometimes the reader is left to discover the humor of the situation through one of his dialogues. Here Dalrymple is in Kashgar, a Chinese city populated by the Muslim Uigurs. He is trying to explain through an interpreter, the lifestyle of the British `Chairman' Elizabeth II to an old mullah:

"Salindi [the interpreter] frowned. `He wants to know how many sheep, donkeys and camels your chairman owns.'

"'Tell him she owns no camels, but has very many horses and a great number of corgi dogs.'

"The information was passed on. The old man nodded his head as he listened.

"'Sir, this man is now asking about the dog which is called `khor-qi. He asks whether these `khor-qi' are good to eat.'

"'Tell the old man that they are delicious.'"

"In Xanadu" is travel writing in the grandly eccentric British tradition: a horrid climate and high adventure, laced throughout with dry wit. Be sure to get a copy for your next vacation. I'm going to loan mine to a friend who thinks she wants to visit Iran and Afghanistan (last year she trekked through Outer Mongolia). Either "In Xanadu" will dissuade her from her planned adventure, or else she is as bonkers as Dalrymple.

I enjoyed the reviews of this book, pretty funyy. This is a pretty good travel book; I like travel writing and have read a lot of it. Dalrymple's work is as good as anyone else. In addition to this, I recommend Caroline Alexander's "The Way to Xanadu." Dalrymple follows Marco Polor to Xanadu; Alexander follows Coleridge. Both end up at the same place, but follow very different routes to get there. Dalrymple follows Marco Polo's route along the silk road and he shares some pretty interesting history of all the places he visits. Alexander visits the places mentioned in Coleridge's diary in the period just before he wrote the fragment of a poem about Xanadu, which leads her to a variety of places including Florida, amazingly enough.

Erudite,funny, exciting, and amazing in its author's breadth of knowledge - especially considering his youth. Much enhanced by the attitudes of his female co-adventurers.

If you've read his other books like City of Djinns or the White Mughuls, then reading this book won't feel as good as those. But it surely is a remarkable journey told in a very lively, British style. And British style of travel writing generally includes certain jokes thrown at one's own expense. Mr. Williams, surely the finest writer of travel genre of our times, can twist sentences and pass on information very easily.

Mr. Williams is travelling through Silk Route and retells his story alongwith snippets of historical bits where required. His girl friend is also travelling which means he has a remark or two on or for her. But he travels and describes the places he visits and the atmosphere and the people and their food.

It is not a scholarly book by any standards but he gets his facts right.

Hilarious and informative, he decides to trace Marco Polo's route from the Holy Land to China and we get to
visit all the countries without putting up with the inconvenience.

This is an excellent first book by someone who's made quite a name for himself in travel writing - William Dalrymple. "In Xanadu" relates his journey following in the footsteps of Marco Polo to Xanadu, the old capital of the Mongolian empire. This was accomplished while he was a student at Cambridge and he got the idea because this was the first time most of the Karakorum highway was open to travellers, enabling him to follow about 80% of Polo's route for the first time in centuries.

The author (with two friends, one for wach half of the journey) went from Jerusalem through Cyprus, Syria, Turkey, Iran, Pakistan and China. Throughout his journey he researched the traces of Marco Polo and the other aspects of history. As such, he inserts lengthy historical digressions into the book. It's recommended that you persevere with them as they make the reading so much richer.

He writes with an energetic and lively humour. The journey was one to have made it impossible not to produce outrageous situations. They encounter every trouble imaginable from Red Guards to sickness and go through seemingly every mode of transport.

A great way to see 12000km and over five countries through the eyes of an eccentric and erudite your Scottish historian. A fabulous read that will leave you hungry for more Dalrymple.

Like all of Dalrymple's books to date, this early one is rich in scholarship, which is spoon fed to the reader in the author's inimitable style. Buy it!

I bought this after reading Dalrymple's Age of Kali. Sadly, as excellent as that book is, this one is a total mess. First of all, there is way way too much extra info on things unconnected to Polo's trek along the Silk Road. You basically need a degree in the History of the Middle Ages to figure out the obscure references. I got the idea Dalrymple was showing off. Considering he supposedly knows all this arcane stuff, how come this obvious well-educated guy spends much of his trip searching for people who speak English to help him? Did he not use his vastly developed cranium to think of buying a few phrasebooks before heading out? Or how about studying at least one of the languages used in the region?

Add to this he is, for want of a better word and no hate mail please, pussywhipped by the two females he travels with. One is so much of in a hurry to blitz across to the Indian subcontinent it's annoying beyond belief.

With much better editing, this could have been as brilliant as Age of Kali. It is still a decent read but Dalrymple would be wise to read "Chasing Che" to see how to put together a follow-in-the-footsteps-of-the-greats travel book.