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The New Granta Book of Travel
Granta has long been known for the quality of its travel writing. The 1980s were the
culmination of a golden age, when writers including Paul Theroux and Bruce Chatwin, James Hamilton-Paterson and James Fenton set out to document life in largely unfamiliar territory, bringing back tales of the beautiful, the extraordinary and the unexpected. By the mid 1990s, travel writing seemed to change, as a younger generation of writeres that appeared in the magazine made journeys for more complex and often personal reasons. Decca Aitkenhead reported on sex tourism in Thailand, and Wendell Steavenson moved to Iraq as foreign correspondent. What all these pieces have in common is a sense of engagement with the places they describe, and a belief that whether we are in Birmingham or Belarus, there is always something new to be discovered.
culmination of a golden age, when writers including Paul Theroux and Bruce Chatwin, James Hamilton-Paterson and James Fenton set out to document life in largely unfamiliar territory, bringing back tales of the beautiful, the extraordinary and the unexpected. By the mid 1990s, travel writing seemed to change, as a younger generation of writeres that appeared in the magazine made journeys for more complex and often personal reasons. Decca Aitkenhead reported on sex tourism in Thailand, and Wendell Steavenson moved to Iraq as foreign correspondent. What all these pieces have in common is a sense of engagement with the places they describe, and a belief that whether we are in Birmingham or Belarus, there is always something new to be discovered.
- GenresTravelNonfiction
429 pages, Paperback
First published November 3, 2011
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
February 19, 2024
2024 update I would not change much from my original review. It's a perfectly good read with a number of interesting pieces. I have to say overall that even though the writing standard is high, I found it all a little dull. I don't know why, perhaps just my mood.
original review Travel writing is a wide genre. Anything set in somewhere that is not here (whether close or far away), or about the actual process of travelling, can be considered as travel writing. This book is a wide ranging and varied set of travel writing. It contains a few essays in the form of the traditional travellers' journeys - stories of exotic and far away geographies, but mostly this is about people and societies. If you want traditional travellers' tales of exciting journeys in rarely trodden paths you will be disappointed, but if you want a view of society in different places this may well interest. Some of the essays are sad reminders of the state of the world, and in one case (The Paris Intifada) how physically close that sad world is!
As an anthology it is not surprising that some of the essays are of variable quality. There are sections of absolute 5 star brilliance, interspersed with less well written and less interesting essays. However, overall this is a worthy read and the brilliant essays are really brilliant.
There is no theme to the book, other than these can all be classified as travel writing - and if you are the type to sit and read a book end to end this can sometimes make the transition from one essay to the next a little jarring. But dip in and pick them out when you feel like a short read and you will find some real jewels in this book.
original review Travel writing is a wide genre. Anything set in somewhere that is not here (whether close or far away), or about the actual process of travelling, can be considered as travel writing. This book is a wide ranging and varied set of travel writing. It contains a few essays in the form of the traditional travellers' journeys - stories of exotic and far away geographies, but mostly this is about people and societies. If you want traditional travellers' tales of exciting journeys in rarely trodden paths you will be disappointed, but if you want a view of society in different places this may well interest. Some of the essays are sad reminders of the state of the world, and in one case (The Paris Intifada) how physically close that sad world is!
As an anthology it is not surprising that some of the essays are of variable quality. There are sections of absolute 5 star brilliance, interspersed with less well written and less interesting essays. However, overall this is a worthy read and the brilliant essays are really brilliant.
There is no theme to the book, other than these can all be classified as travel writing - and if you are the type to sit and read a book end to end this can sometimes make the transition from one essay to the next a little jarring. But dip in and pick them out when you feel like a short read and you will find some real jewels in this book.
June 27, 2018
Uma antologia de pequenas histórias de viagens, com uma grande diversidade de temas e estilos de escrita, que é o que uma antologia deve ser e que é parte do enorme interesse que este livro teve para mim. A outra parte, a maior, são os temas, por vezes surpreendentes mas quase sempre interessantes, que os autores abordam.
Já não são apenas relatos da exploração de partes remotas do mundo ou das primeiras grandes viagens de turismo de abastados europeus e americanos fazendo o seu "grand tour" das civilizações clássicas. Agora, os autores levam-nos a "viajar" a pequenos recantos irrelevantes, a "presenciar" acontecimentos marcantes, a "visitar" lugares na história ou mesmo nas mentalidades, até às ruas da prostituição barata da Tailândia (Lovely Girls, Very Cheap, de Decca Aitkenhead), a uma pequena cidade dos EUA, como tantas outras, que apenas se distingue por estar exatamente no centro do país (This is Centerville, de James Buchan), pelo vale do Mississipi abaixo durante uma das suas poderosas enchentes (Mississipi Water, Jonathan Raban), pela Sibéria pós-comunista (Siberia, de Colin Thubron), ao que significa ser homossexual numa tribo de índios do Amazonas (The Life and Death of a Homosexual, de Pierre Clastres), ao seio de um grupo de "terroristas" iraquianos (Osama's War, de Wendell Steavenson), atraídos a uma "tourist-trap" nas florestas do Congo (The Congo Dinosaur, Redmond O'Hanlon), a devolver um biscoito roubado da cabana do explorador Robert Scott, na ilha de Ross, Antárctida (Captain Scott's Biscuit, de Thomas Keneally) ou simplesmente numa saída noturna mágica, e um pouco louca, a uma montanha gelada do noroeste da Inglaterra durante um temporal de neve violento (Nightwalking, por Robert Macfarlane).
Concedo que muitas vezes estas histórias parecem-se mais com artigos de jornalismo do que com literatura de viagens, mas não me importo: fazem-me sonhar e ansiar por sair do conforto do sofá onde leio este livro, para descobrir mundos desconhecidos e empolgantes.
Já não são apenas relatos da exploração de partes remotas do mundo ou das primeiras grandes viagens de turismo de abastados europeus e americanos fazendo o seu "grand tour" das civilizações clássicas. Agora, os autores levam-nos a "viajar" a pequenos recantos irrelevantes, a "presenciar" acontecimentos marcantes, a "visitar" lugares na história ou mesmo nas mentalidades, até às ruas da prostituição barata da Tailândia (Lovely Girls, Very Cheap, de Decca Aitkenhead), a uma pequena cidade dos EUA, como tantas outras, que apenas se distingue por estar exatamente no centro do país (This is Centerville, de James Buchan), pelo vale do Mississipi abaixo durante uma das suas poderosas enchentes (Mississipi Water, Jonathan Raban), pela Sibéria pós-comunista (Siberia, de Colin Thubron), ao que significa ser homossexual numa tribo de índios do Amazonas (The Life and Death of a Homosexual, de Pierre Clastres), ao seio de um grupo de "terroristas" iraquianos (Osama's War, de Wendell Steavenson), atraídos a uma "tourist-trap" nas florestas do Congo (The Congo Dinosaur, Redmond O'Hanlon), a devolver um biscoito roubado da cabana do explorador Robert Scott, na ilha de Ross, Antárctida (Captain Scott's Biscuit, de Thomas Keneally) ou simplesmente numa saída noturna mágica, e um pouco louca, a uma montanha gelada do noroeste da Inglaterra durante um temporal de neve violento (Nightwalking, por Robert Macfarlane).
Concedo que muitas vezes estas histórias parecem-se mais com artigos de jornalismo do que com literatura de viagens, mas não me importo: fazem-me sonhar e ansiar por sair do conforto do sofá onde leio este livro, para descobrir mundos desconhecidos e empolgantes.
August 26, 2016
Not nearly as good as past Granta travel collections. All the narratives were completely forgettable, with the exception of "Lovely Girls, Very Cheap" by Decca Aitkenhead.
August 30, 2021
Published in 2011 is a selection from the previous ten years of Granta travel writing. All the pieces give pertinent historical background and cultural interpretation of the places described. The ones with a personal connection to the author such as Aird's Moss by Kathleen Jamie are the best. There's a very personal, cringeworthly account of Paul Theroux being captured for sexual favours and money when he was working in the Peace Corps in Malawi. I enjoyed reading this a book of historical travel to see what's different today from 15-25 years ago. Some of the the stories about conflict such as the Bainlieu in Paris, Congo and Kashmir show up that the situation is still the same if not worse 15 years later. There's a trip to the bottom of the ocean and a trip the the North Pole which are both well outside the normal travelogue. Another unusual format were the snippets from Bruce Chatwin's diaries published posthumously. There are notes to self such as getting the trots when travelling in Africa on crowded buses and trains. The report from the Mississippi floods of 1993 by Jonathan Raban is reminiscent of his brilliant book Badlands which has an incisive outsider's view of America through the lens of the media looking at the flood. There's a great account of the 2004 tsunami in Sri Lanka by John Borneman. It's a real-time account of the narrator's escape from the water as it rushed into the building where he was having a quiet coffee and enjoying the sea view. There's a massive disconnect jumping from story to story but this book is worth persevering with because of its variety.
July 11, 2024
Fine. I don't really think the introduction does a good job of pulling together multiple, disparate essays into something that should be considered for literary criticism. It's a collection of some of Granta's decent travel writing. Esquire or Harper's could do the same. The essays on traveling in Congo and the resistance fighting in Kashmir really did stand out for me.
December 17, 2015
This was a considerable disappointment. I enjoy superior travel writing, by which I mean the work of authors like Sir Richard Burton, Robert Byron, Jan Morris, Paul Theroux, Bruce Chatwin and Jonathan Raban. The last three are collected here, and Raban also contributes an introduction. Seeing their names on the contents page were, for me, part of the incentive for picking up this anthology.
Which turns out to be, largely, a collection of pieces by Oxbridge alumni about their adventures in some of the world’s nastier places. Disaster and woe are pervasive: there are accounts here of a devastating flood on the Mississippi (Raban), the way of life of an Iraqi insurgent (Wendell Steavenson), the 2004 Asian tsunami as experienced in Sri Lanka (John Bornemon), and life under the gun in Kashmir (Basharat Peer). Even when external circumstances are not as overtly threatening as these, the quantum of misery in most of the pieces is high.
Thus we are privy to the anxieties and feelings of dislocation suffered by a black refugee in England, newly arrived from Uganda (Albino Ochero-Okello), the trials of a homosexual in a primitive tribal culture (Pierre Clastres), the collapse of the Bengal jute industry (Ian Jack), and the mutual exploitation of locals and foreign tourists at Thai holiday resorts (Decca Aitkenhead). Paul Theroux contributes a short, shame-filled confession and W.G. Sebald writes of his compulsive, neurotic and possibly metafictional travels round Europe. Redmond O’Hanlon fails to find the Congo Dinosaur but worries about picking up AIDS instead — and paints, meanwhile, a repellent portrait of life in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Rory Stewart gives us Pakistan as a failed state in thrall to a failed religion. Bruce Chatwin’s contribution is just a notebook excerpt, while James Buchan’s portrait of a small Iowa town is sapless and boring.
I kept the tsunami story for last, because I am Sri Lankan. It was a thorough disappointment — bland, culturally naive and poorly observed.
Depressing as it was, O’Hanlon’s contribution was meaty and full of human and natural interest; I didn’t exactly enjoy it, but I admired it. Colin Thubron’s memoir of a journey through Siberia is excellent. The best piece in the book for me was the least pretentiously written: Decca Aitkenhead’s ‘Lovely Girls, Very Cheap’, which offers a devastatingly accurate account of sex and drugs tourism in Thailand. It kept me reading and nodding all the way to the end. This woman is a brilliant, empathetic observer.
Apart from these three fine pieces, this anthology is rubbish. Its character is perfectly distilled in one of the shorter essays, Andrew O’Hagen’s description of a voyage down the Clyde in a sewage scow in the company of a group of gluttonous old-age pensioners. This particular piece can stand as a metaphor for the whole book.
Which turns out to be, largely, a collection of pieces by Oxbridge alumni about their adventures in some of the world’s nastier places. Disaster and woe are pervasive: there are accounts here of a devastating flood on the Mississippi (Raban), the way of life of an Iraqi insurgent (Wendell Steavenson), the 2004 Asian tsunami as experienced in Sri Lanka (John Bornemon), and life under the gun in Kashmir (Basharat Peer). Even when external circumstances are not as overtly threatening as these, the quantum of misery in most of the pieces is high.
Thus we are privy to the anxieties and feelings of dislocation suffered by a black refugee in England, newly arrived from Uganda (Albino Ochero-Okello), the trials of a homosexual in a primitive tribal culture (Pierre Clastres), the collapse of the Bengal jute industry (Ian Jack), and the mutual exploitation of locals and foreign tourists at Thai holiday resorts (Decca Aitkenhead). Paul Theroux contributes a short, shame-filled confession and W.G. Sebald writes of his compulsive, neurotic and possibly metafictional travels round Europe. Redmond O’Hanlon fails to find the Congo Dinosaur but worries about picking up AIDS instead — and paints, meanwhile, a repellent portrait of life in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Rory Stewart gives us Pakistan as a failed state in thrall to a failed religion. Bruce Chatwin’s contribution is just a notebook excerpt, while James Buchan’s portrait of a small Iowa town is sapless and boring.
I kept the tsunami story for last, because I am Sri Lankan. It was a thorough disappointment — bland, culturally naive and poorly observed.
Depressing as it was, O’Hanlon’s contribution was meaty and full of human and natural interest; I didn’t exactly enjoy it, but I admired it. Colin Thubron’s memoir of a journey through Siberia is excellent. The best piece in the book for me was the least pretentiously written: Decca Aitkenhead’s ‘Lovely Girls, Very Cheap’, which offers a devastatingly accurate account of sex and drugs tourism in Thailand. It kept me reading and nodding all the way to the end. This woman is a brilliant, empathetic observer.
Apart from these three fine pieces, this anthology is rubbish. Its character is perfectly distilled in one of the shorter essays, Andrew O’Hagen’s description of a voyage down the Clyde in a sewage scow in the company of a group of gluttonous old-age pensioners. This particular piece can stand as a metaphor for the whole book.
September 1, 2016
In his comprehensive introduction to the "New Granta Book of Travel," Jonathan Raban entices by asking why it is we read travel narratives.
Raban says we turn to travel stories because they represent an escape, a means to "take us to places that we think of as being too dangerous, too difficult, or too expensive to visit for ourselves." We get to become a little familiar with places remote.
Travel stories, invariably written in the first person, also give us a way to talk about ourselves. It's all me, me, me and where the "I" of the story is not merely a reporter and an eyewitness but an active participant.
Many of the 23 stories in the "Book of Travel" are extremely personal, almost private. In "Trespass," Paul Theroux, recounts a sexual adventure 40 years before in Malawi in Africa where he came to understand what it meant to be an American, a foreigner and a wanderer among strangers.
Fleeing Uganda, Albino Ochero-Okello, seeks political asylum in England in "Arrival." British immigration officials send the frightened, wary asylum seeker on a solo public transportation journey from Gatwick airport to temporary lodging in a hostel in far away West London. The trip from airport to hostel is the Ugandan's introduction to English manners and rectitude. Among many marvels, he discovers that train travel in England takes place without the accompaniment of cattle, goats, pigs, chickens and varieties of agricultural produce.
In "When I was Lost," the author descends in an egg-like submersible three miles below the surface of the Atlantic. He discovers what isolation and detachment can really mean. Sexual tourism in Thailand is the subject of Decca Aitkenhead's "Lovely Girls, Very Cheap."
The story I liked most is "Airds Moss" by Kathleen Jamie. Hers is a ramble in the winter-brown moors of Lowland Scotland that lasts but an hour but conjures up eons of history and generations of family lore and memories. It's an unforgettable trek that takes on an epic scope.
Raban says we turn to travel stories because they represent an escape, a means to "take us to places that we think of as being too dangerous, too difficult, or too expensive to visit for ourselves." We get to become a little familiar with places remote.
Travel stories, invariably written in the first person, also give us a way to talk about ourselves. It's all me, me, me and where the "I" of the story is not merely a reporter and an eyewitness but an active participant.
Many of the 23 stories in the "Book of Travel" are extremely personal, almost private. In "Trespass," Paul Theroux, recounts a sexual adventure 40 years before in Malawi in Africa where he came to understand what it meant to be an American, a foreigner and a wanderer among strangers.
Fleeing Uganda, Albino Ochero-Okello, seeks political asylum in England in "Arrival." British immigration officials send the frightened, wary asylum seeker on a solo public transportation journey from Gatwick airport to temporary lodging in a hostel in far away West London. The trip from airport to hostel is the Ugandan's introduction to English manners and rectitude. Among many marvels, he discovers that train travel in England takes place without the accompaniment of cattle, goats, pigs, chickens and varieties of agricultural produce.
In "When I was Lost," the author descends in an egg-like submersible three miles below the surface of the Atlantic. He discovers what isolation and detachment can really mean. Sexual tourism in Thailand is the subject of Decca Aitkenhead's "Lovely Girls, Very Cheap."
The story I liked most is "Airds Moss" by Kathleen Jamie. Hers is a ramble in the winter-brown moors of Lowland Scotland that lasts but an hour but conjures up eons of history and generations of family lore and memories. It's an unforgettable trek that takes on an epic scope.
October 16, 2012
It's one of the best collections of Travel writing I have read. It goes beyond just the usual. Even the one by Paul Theroux who usually skims the surface is selected with care and is a brilliant piece. Must read if you like travel books.
July 3, 2013
A mixed bag of stuff, which is what anthologies should be. It was, though, a bit uneven in terms of writing styles and quality and at times it did not quite hold together as a collection.
January 28, 2013
Great writing. Didn't depress me that much until the end.
July 12, 2013
Some stories were good, some were bland, others were quite long-winded. Overall, I still like reading travel compilations.
October 20, 2014
Some of the pieces were thought-provoking, but I found some boring, some tedious, and a few not very well written. Also, way too many male writers. Are there really that few women travel writers?
August 21, 2018
Good collection of travel writing by some good writers.
April 3, 2016
Some pieces were really well written, incl the ones by Bruce Chatwin, Paul Theroux; two pieces that stood out for me were Congo Dinosaur by O'Hanlon and Decca Aitkenhead's Lovely Girls, Very Cheap.
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews