Books of the Month

'A Writer's World: Travels 1950-2000' by Jan Morris

This book collects together some of Jan Morris's best reportage and travel writing from the second half of the twentieth century. Even a cursory survey of the contents page proves that the book covers an enormous breadth of both place and time. Morris has been fortunate to have been witness to quite a few defining events, from the first ascent of Everest to the Eichmann trial and the fall of the Berlin Wall. For me though it's her descriptive writing that resonates most - her ability to capture a mood, and an atmopshere which, though it may have been a product of a bygone time, or may just have been all too fleeting, still makes you yearn to follow in her footsteps and try to experience it yourself. Here's a sample from her piece on the charms of Lebanon in the 1950s:

'Imagine a terrace table beside the sea in Beirut, during the brief moment of the Mediterranean twilight, when the shops are raising their shutters for the evening's business, and your restaurant rustles with the first silks and sibilances of the night. There are prawns on your table, perhaps, or red mullet from Sidon, fruit from the lush Bekaa valley, a gay white wine of Lebanon or some haughty vintage out of France. Around the bay the city rumbles, hoots and chatters: there's a clink of metal from some unseen smithy, a suggestion of spice and raw fish on the breeze, the echo of a blaring radio beyond the promenade, a distant clanging of trams - all the hot, heavy, breathless symptoms of an expiring Levantine day, like a sigh in the sunset.'

I don't know about you but I'm off to the travel agents right now...

Susan Tranter

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