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Granta: The Magazine of New Writing #94
Granta 94: On The Road Again
Featuring Jeremy Treglown following in the footsteps of V. S. Pritchett in Spain, Tim Parks on the joys and sorrows of commuting from Verona to Milan, and Christopher de Bellaigue tracking down the Armenians in Turkey. Plus Todd McEwen on Cary Grant’s trousers and new fiction by Ann Beattie, Tessa Hadley, and Jim Shepard.
256 pages, Paperback
Published July 26, 2006
4 people are currently reading
39 people want to read
About the author
Ian Jack
141 books10 followersIan Jack is a British journalist and writer who has edited the Independent on Sunday and the literary magazine Granta and now writes regularly for The Guardian.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
June 27, 2020
My new interest in travel writing brought my Mom to give me this book, and it is thoroughly enjoyable, a collection of short vignettes by various authors, from 2006. Great primer for people who want to give travel writing a whirl.
December 20, 2018
A refreshingly great selection of travel-related writing!
February 5, 2012
http://www.stevedow.com.au
WHEN English writer John Burnside was nine, he told himself willed flight was possible. Just jump from a height with bed sheets tied to your wrists. Not even his painful falls could dissuade him from the romance of solo travel.
At 14, Burnside fell in love with the late Amy Johnson, the Yorkshire-born pioneering aviator who in 1930 flew solo from Croydon, England to Darwin in a single-engine Gypsy Moth in 19 days. Johnson died 11 years later, crashing her plane into a Thames estuary on a more humble domestic journey.
She parachuted, but apparently drowned. “To disappear,” writes Burnside in his essay How to Fly in Granta’s evocative and engaging new collection of travel writing, “you had to be alone. That, for me, was the fundamental rule of flying.”
As an adult, Burnside longs for the lone wolf days when flying spelled intrepid adventure, the power of one, not the mere glamour of people criss-crossing the globe en masse in commuter comfort. “If the journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step,” he writes, “then my first step was to vanish into the crowds at the airport, the man nobody saw …”
The rider on this Granta collection, “where travel writing went next”, begs the question, and editor Ian Jack has chosen some wonderful answers. Travel writing, Granta shows us, can be a dreamlike escapism of the mind, or a meditation of existential angst. It can be achieved sitting in an internet café, travelling at the speed of broadband across the globe, with the World Wide Web throwing the world’s inequalities into unflattering juxtaposition, or it can be rumination on Western cultural imperialism, of plasma TVs and Robbie Williams CDs flooding the world. It can be reportage, or first-person essay, and can attempt to reconcile history with contemporary reality. The only rule here is finely calibrated writing.
Travel writing “isn’t meant to be fiction”, notes former Times Literary Supplement editor Jeremy Treglown, in his essay Closing Time that is, in fact, sandwiched between some fine examples of fictional travel writing. Treglown’s own piece recalls his journey following short story writer V.S. Pritchett’s 1920s route through Spain. In his time, Pritchett helped pioneer an “architecture of humanity,” writes Treglown, and a new form of travel writing, “one in which the subject was not buildings or art but the ordinary people of any place”.
Quite what Treglown is aiming for in his own travel writing is not clear, however. There’s a little criticism of Pritchett the writer as being something of a wide-eyed fantasist, sprinkled with some interesting writing on Spain’s transition to democracy. But Treglown sounds a little wide-eyed himself when he notes the young walking down the street with iPod buds in their ears, “apparently untroubled about whether and how all this can last”. But why would they be troubled? Why should they? They’re young, and Franco has been dead for 31 years.
Treglown notes the trend for contemporary travel writers to base their journeys on someone else’s. He may sniff that psychotherapist and erstwhile comedienne Pamela Stephenson’s travel writing is “naïve”, but Treglown’s academic approach seems wrapt in a formal British reserve that puts him at a remove from people. His character sketches of a young Bolivian woman and an older Spanish historical writer, for instance, could have been interesting, but end up on the page as belittled caricatures. Perhaps Treglown’s forthcoming study on Franco’s impact on Spanish culture will be more successful. “No one is interested in an Englishman with a notebook,” he writes. I doubt it’s the notebook that’s the problem.
Not to worry, though. There are some wonderful pieces here that more than make up for it, such as Georgian-born Canadian writer Tia Wallman’s first published essay, We Went to Saigon. The piece takes us back to 1967, when Tia, aged 15, and her 16-year-old sister, Joan, travel to Vietnam during the war to visit their somewhat eccentric father. Like the traits of some of the best fiction, this non-fiction piece is haunting and effecting because of what it leaves out, just as much for what it leaves in. Wallman finds a photograph of a young Vietnamese couple among her father’s belongings, torn in two. Was her father mad? What role did he play in the young couple’s interrogation?
Dutch-born Michel Faber’s contribution, Bye-Bye Natalia, is a quietly angry short story about a Ukrainian would-be internet bride. Natalia navigates the beggars and junkies near where British and American tourists “sit at open-air bistros, squinting bemusedly at misspelled menus, reassuring each other not to worry about making a mistake because everything is dirt cheap”. Travel writing and fiction combine as cutting commentary on neo-colonialism. Illuminating.
WHEN English writer John Burnside was nine, he told himself willed flight was possible. Just jump from a height with bed sheets tied to your wrists. Not even his painful falls could dissuade him from the romance of solo travel.
At 14, Burnside fell in love with the late Amy Johnson, the Yorkshire-born pioneering aviator who in 1930 flew solo from Croydon, England to Darwin in a single-engine Gypsy Moth in 19 days. Johnson died 11 years later, crashing her plane into a Thames estuary on a more humble domestic journey.
She parachuted, but apparently drowned. “To disappear,” writes Burnside in his essay How to Fly in Granta’s evocative and engaging new collection of travel writing, “you had to be alone. That, for me, was the fundamental rule of flying.”
As an adult, Burnside longs for the lone wolf days when flying spelled intrepid adventure, the power of one, not the mere glamour of people criss-crossing the globe en masse in commuter comfort. “If the journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step,” he writes, “then my first step was to vanish into the crowds at the airport, the man nobody saw …”
The rider on this Granta collection, “where travel writing went next”, begs the question, and editor Ian Jack has chosen some wonderful answers. Travel writing, Granta shows us, can be a dreamlike escapism of the mind, or a meditation of existential angst. It can be achieved sitting in an internet café, travelling at the speed of broadband across the globe, with the World Wide Web throwing the world’s inequalities into unflattering juxtaposition, or it can be rumination on Western cultural imperialism, of plasma TVs and Robbie Williams CDs flooding the world. It can be reportage, or first-person essay, and can attempt to reconcile history with contemporary reality. The only rule here is finely calibrated writing.
Travel writing “isn’t meant to be fiction”, notes former Times Literary Supplement editor Jeremy Treglown, in his essay Closing Time that is, in fact, sandwiched between some fine examples of fictional travel writing. Treglown’s own piece recalls his journey following short story writer V.S. Pritchett’s 1920s route through Spain. In his time, Pritchett helped pioneer an “architecture of humanity,” writes Treglown, and a new form of travel writing, “one in which the subject was not buildings or art but the ordinary people of any place”.
Quite what Treglown is aiming for in his own travel writing is not clear, however. There’s a little criticism of Pritchett the writer as being something of a wide-eyed fantasist, sprinkled with some interesting writing on Spain’s transition to democracy. But Treglown sounds a little wide-eyed himself when he notes the young walking down the street with iPod buds in their ears, “apparently untroubled about whether and how all this can last”. But why would they be troubled? Why should they? They’re young, and Franco has been dead for 31 years.
Treglown notes the trend for contemporary travel writers to base their journeys on someone else’s. He may sniff that psychotherapist and erstwhile comedienne Pamela Stephenson’s travel writing is “naïve”, but Treglown’s academic approach seems wrapt in a formal British reserve that puts him at a remove from people. His character sketches of a young Bolivian woman and an older Spanish historical writer, for instance, could have been interesting, but end up on the page as belittled caricatures. Perhaps Treglown’s forthcoming study on Franco’s impact on Spanish culture will be more successful. “No one is interested in an Englishman with a notebook,” he writes. I doubt it’s the notebook that’s the problem.
Not to worry, though. There are some wonderful pieces here that more than make up for it, such as Georgian-born Canadian writer Tia Wallman’s first published essay, We Went to Saigon. The piece takes us back to 1967, when Tia, aged 15, and her 16-year-old sister, Joan, travel to Vietnam during the war to visit their somewhat eccentric father. Like the traits of some of the best fiction, this non-fiction piece is haunting and effecting because of what it leaves out, just as much for what it leaves in. Wallman finds a photograph of a young Vietnamese couple among her father’s belongings, torn in two. Was her father mad? What role did he play in the young couple’s interrogation?
Dutch-born Michel Faber’s contribution, Bye-Bye Natalia, is a quietly angry short story about a Ukrainian would-be internet bride. Natalia navigates the beggars and junkies near where British and American tourists “sit at open-air bistros, squinting bemusedly at misspelled menus, reassuring each other not to worry about making a mistake because everything is dirt cheap”. Travel writing and fiction combine as cutting commentary on neo-colonialism. Illuminating.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews