Tom Bissell on Robert D. Kaplan and Travel Writing

Travel Blog  •  Jim Benning  •  06.21.06 | 7:51 AM ET

imageChasing the Sea author Tom Bissell doesn’t much care for the work of Robert D. Kaplan, the author of numerous books about travel and world affairs. In a new essay in the Virginia Quarterly Review, Bissell offers an extensive critique Kaplan’s work. He also has a few words for travel writers in general. “[T]he travel genre has much to answer for,” he writes.

He continues:

Travel writers are seldom scholars. They are, by inclination if not definition, transients and dilettantes. All that can save the travel writer and redeem his or her often inexpert perceptions of foreign people and places is curiosity, a willingness to be uncertain, an essential emotional generosity, and an ability to write. Even travel writers well equipped in all of the above are inevitably attacked for missing the point, getting all manner of things wrong, and generally mucking about in questions of history and scholarship to which—when compared to experts—they have only lightly exposed themselves. This does not mean the travel writer is incapable of insight, to say nothing of entertainment, and in some cases the travel writer’s fresh-eyed unfamiliarity with a place can be made a virtue. As Lord Palmerston once said, “When I wish to be misinformed about a country, I ask the man who has lived there thirty years.”

You tell ‘em, Lord Palmerston.

Bissell’s essay about truth in travel writing appeared on World Hum in February. He recently contributed to our review of the top 30 travel books of all time, celebrating Robert Byron’s “The Road to Oxiana.”

Tags: Shameless Self-Promotion, Literary Travel, News and Briefs


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