I do apologise for my sluggardly behaviour as of late. I had awful connections--as in none--to my Tripatini pages. I have no real idea what went on, or how it was rectified, but if Ed Wetschler had something to do with it, which I am guessing he did, then thanks, Ed.
Anyway, back to literature. I've been reading Naguib Mahfouz's trilogy of books about Cairo life. Palace Walk (Bayn al-qasrayn (translation into English: Between the Two Palaces)); Palace of Desire (Qasr el-Shōq), and Sugar Street (Bein el-Qasrein), which collectively is known as his Cairo Trilogy, first published in the late 1950s. Superb stuff. My first Mahfouz book was, perhaps not surprisingly, The Journey of Ibn Fattouma (1972), which I think borrows heavily from the travel classic on the life and travels of the nonfictional Ibn Battuta.
Mahfouz was stabbed by a religious fanatic but survived. He died in 2006.
Paul Theroux met him in Cairo on the start of his epic walk through Africa recorded in his Dark Star Safari, (2002), which is a good read if you can handle Theroux's implied assumption that only he and he alone knows why humans should travel and why everyone else he meets are misguided and should jolly well stay at home. Theroux often meets literary heavyweights...Jorge Luis Borges in Buenos Aires in his Patagonian Express (1979), which also is a very good read.
I'm now reading a Bill Bryson. Bryson is a jolly fine read, too, although perhaps leaning into cliche a little. He redeems himself because he is often funny, pokes fun of himself as much as other people and before you know it, you've just finished 400 enjoyable pages in less than a week.
One author that's hard to find here, although on a recent trip to London, I saw his back catalogue has all be reprinted, is George Mackay Brown, who writes exclusively (I think) on the Orkney Islands of Scotland. I just finished his first novel Greenvoe (1952), which is superb. It conjures up a new world for you, and if you want to find a copy, succeed in doing so. He died in 1996.
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Nice post, have you been to Cairo yet? The last time I spent time there, people in the hubbly bubbly cafes talked a lot about Mahfouz because he was known to all the cafe owners personally. Like Paul Auster, who used to write in longhand on a yellow legal pad in the Brooklyn cafe below my apartment, Mahfouz was a cafe writer. In Cairo, the coffee is black and sweet; in Brooklyn it's "regulah" but still as inspiring....
Gretchen
Theroux is just like that. I loved Bryson's book about the home.
re: Chinua Achebe One of his first, if not his first, novels was Things Fall Apart, which came out 50 years ago. I read it on my first trip abroad, which was to West Africa. Things Fall Apart tells the story of a man who is desperate to assure his position at the top of the local food chain. Also recommended from that era: The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, a Ghanaian novel about the pressure to move up the ladder (or be trampled) in a post-colonial country. A riveting book, starting with the title.
I read a biography of Paton once - he must have been a remarkable man, and yes, principled indeed. I've always thought the opening sentence of Cry The Beloved Country is to South African literature what 'It was the best of times' was to Victorian. It says "There is a lovely road that runs from Ixopo into the hills. These hills are grass-covered and rolling, and they are lovely beyond any singing of it."-- they truly are that lovely.
I haven't read T F Apart, but I will now, thanks
Not sure if this is appropriate, but I'm in the happy position of receiving a regular supply of South Africa's best travel and nature books from a local publisher - Random House Struik; I post all my reviews at www.barefootclients.co.za/barefootbookshop
While not exactly a travel book, and while I found the style of writing quite irritating, Peter Harris' 'Birth' - about South Africa's first democratic elections - was gripping, and paints a picture of the country at the brink (fortunately, somehow, we never tipped over).
Kingsley Holgate's 'Afrika: Dispatches from the outside edge' is a remarkable journey around the continent by a wonderful man who's not only larger than live, but larger than almost anyone else you've ever seen.
Now I'm reading Chris Schoeman's 'Boer War Boy: Memoirs of an Anglo-Boer War Youth,' which is a very different kind of travel book: it's the experiences of a child (during his 8th, 9th, and 10th years) who, with hs father, was captured in South Africa by the British, sent to a prisoner of war camp in India, and finally managed to return home.
Travel takes many forms.
Africa's an irritating, frustrating, magnificent and inspiring continent that never ceases to appeal - I'm so fortunate to be able to read about it as part of my job.
Thanks Michael. I will try and find a few of this. I have read Alan Paton's Cry, The Beloved Country and superb Ah, But Your Land is Beautiful. He seemed to be a very interesting and principled man. Talking of African literature, I had the huge privilege of meeting and chatting to Nigeria's Chinua Achebe about a decade ago. Of course, his famed novel is Things Fall Apart, the title being a reference to W.B. Yeats, I think, and an answer to Conrad's Heart of Darkness. HofD is narrated as though the reader is on the boat going along the Congo and by Africa, while Achebe realised his readers and novel needed to be on the shore wondering what the hell that strange thing is doing floating by.
Thank you for the vote of confidence, Terry. I just read a long, long FB conversation about this and that were screwed up on FB, spammers and all. Let me know whatever happened to your Tripatini access happens again.
Says here, "...Dark Star Safari, (2002), which is a good read if you can handle Theroux's implied assumption that only he and he alone knows why humans should travel and why everyone else he meets are misguided and should jolly well stay at home." Exactly right.