TraveLit--A blog about travel literature.
Even with the best of maps and instruments, we can never fully chart our journeys.
Barbarian in the Garden
By Zbigniew Herbert. First published in Polish, 1962. English translation by Michael March and Jaroslaw Anders, Carcanet, 1985; Harvest/HBJ, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986, 180 pp.
In Barbarian in the Garden, Zbigniew Herbert creates his own idiosyncratic Grand Tour. In Lascaux, Arles, and Albi, in Siena, Orvieto, Arezzo and San Sepolcro, the Polish poet, an Eastern European, seeks to apprehend the origins of Western culture. Read More
Cooper’s Creek: The Opening of Australia
By Alan Moorehead. Atlantic Monthly Press, 1987, 223 pp.
Reading accounts of disastrous journeys—so abundant in tales of early exploration—I find it hard to decide which disasters seem the most poignant: the ones caused by human failings or those determined by chance. Both types play a role in Cooper’s Creek, Alan Moorehead’s gripping story of the Burke and Wills expedition into the center of Australia, a vast region of rugged climate and terrain, where summer temperatures can reach 150 degrees, so hot that a match dropped on the ground can ignite. Read More
"To travel. An intransitive verb. A state of being, not a journey to a destination."
―Jonathan Raban, Coasting
Three in Norway by Two of Them
By J. A. Lees and W. J. Clutterbuck. Aschehoug, 1995 (1968 edition), 205 pp.
When my husband picked up Three in Norway by Two of Them at a library sale, drawn to the subject of Norway where he had lived as a child, we knew nothing about the book. Mainly we were surprised at the curious edition, which failed to identify the authors on the cover or even on the title page.
But it turns out the book is a classic. Read More
“Polar exploration is at once the cleanest and most isolated way of having a bad time which has been devised.”
― Apsley Cherry-Garrard, The Worst Journey in the World
Alone on the Ice: The Greatest Survival Story in the History of Exploration
By David Roberts. W.W. Norton, 2013, 368 pp.
Ever since I first read about Douglas Mawson in Lennard Bickel’s Mawson’s Will, I’ve wondered why this great Australian Antarctic explorer is so little known in this country, even by polar exploration fans. While Amundsen, Scott, and Shackleton have had fame and cultish followings, Mawson’s name, I find, tends to draw a blank. And yet his solitary trek in Antarctica was extraordinary—indeed, Sir Edmund Hillary called it “the greatest survival story in the history of exploration.” Read More