“The Possibility That Lives in the Heart of a Literary Adventure”
Travel Blog • Michael Yessis • 02.08.05 | 5:21 PM ET
Tim Mackintosh-Smith’s upcoming fourth book, like his third, follows the wanderings of medieval traveler Ibn Buttutah. In anticipation of the book’s release, writer Theo Padnos takes a long look at the author’s career and the history of modern travel writing in a sprawling and intriguing essay in Saturday’s Yemen Observer. Padnos explores how Mackintosh-Smith fits into the modern literary travel writing-tradition set forth by Paul Theroux and Bruce Chatwin, whose book “In Patagonia” he deems a tipping point for the contemporary travel book. “It was stranger than any novel published that year, better written, more breathtaking and much truer,” Padnos writes. “It turns out now that some of the details in the text were invented but the book was good enough to supercede the reality it described and when it appeared, readers everywhere were reminded of how exotic travel narratives might be, how capacious, strange, and authentic. That’s why it’s lasted. That’s why all the worthwhile travel books, throughout history, have lasted. Because they seem to tell us something not just about a faraway place or an intrepid voyager but about life itself. The best travel writers have almost always been aware of this, of the possibility that lives in the heart of a literary adventure, and have written their books in such a way as to play, sometimes humorously, sometimes profoundly, with the parallels: life is a journey, a journey is life.”
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Michael Yessis is the cofounder and coeditor-in-chief of World Hum.
