标题: 2022.09.16 六本必备的女性旅游书籍 [打印本页] 作者: shiyi18 时间: 2022-9-22 11:36 标题: 2022.09.16 六本必备的女性旅游书籍 Travel writing by women
What to read to follow the footsteps of great women travel writers
Six essential travel books
B1R7KD Irish Personalities, Dervla Murphy, Writer
Sep 16th 2022
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The travel writer cuts a familiar figure: a bookish wanderer, footloose with notepad and pen, scrambles up mountains and across cities “discovering.” He is bright, dashing and highly educated. He is white, middle-class and, often, British. Taming unruly lands with his civilised words, he shapes Western visions of far-flung places and those who live in them. Admirers call his writing evocative; critics call it neocolonial. Over the past two centuries, this figure often cast such a large shadow across travel writing that it seemed there was no room for others. But ideas of travel writing are changing. Readers want more diverse voices. And women are, and always have been, great explorers. Here are six of the best books about travel by female writers.
Travels in West Africa. By Mary Kingsley. Penguin Classics; 736 pages; £14.99 and $25
Mary Kingsley was one of those formidable Victorian ladies who scythed through jungles with parasols and waded into swamps wearing long skirts, high collars and a necklace of leeches. For “Travels in West Africa”, published in 1897, Kingsley made her way across western and equatorial Africa, becoming the first European to enter parts of Gabon and the first woman to climb Mount Cameroon. Her writing is direct, practical and remarkably sanguine; after falling 15 feet onto nine 12-inch spikes in a game pit, she remarks: “It is at these times you realise the blessing of a good thick skirt.” Not only a great adventurer, she was also an eloquent admirer of West Africa who challenged many contemporary prejudices. For her, it was “a wall of dancing white, rainbow-gemmed surf playing on a shore of yellow sand”, “a great mangrove-watered bronze river” or “a vast aisle in some forest cathedral” saying always “Come back, come back, this is your home.”
Full Tilt. By Dervla Murphy. Overlook Press; 256 pages; $22.95. Eland; £14.99
When she was ten, Dervla Murphy was given a bicycle and an atlas; within days, she had planned her first trip to India. That was in December 1941; in January 1963, she began to cycle from Dunkirk to Delhi with a notepad in one pocket and a .25 pistol in the other. “Full Tilt”, published in 1965, is the collection of letters she sent home as a makeshift diary. Murphy writes as she must have cycled: with energy, determination and directness, one eye on the road ahead and another on the countries beyond. Her writing is peppered with twinkling good-humour; the Afghan embassy, for example, has “the most kindly ways of trying to thwart one”. Murphy was cheerful and dauntless: she said she never needed courage as she was never afraid. This book, one of 26 she wrote, is a reminder of how to live life at full tilt. Read our obituary of Murphy, published in June 2022.
Travels with Myself and Another. By Martha Gellhorn. Penguin; 320 pages; $17. Eland; £14.99
“Travels with Myself and Another” is vivacious, self-deprecating, intolerant, witty and scandalous—like listening to a glamorous aunt who holds her diary in one hand and a large whisky in the other. Whether traversing China via sampan with her husband Ernest Hemingway (the “U.C., or Unwilling Companion”), trailing elephants in East Africa or searching for submarines in the Caribbean, Martha Gellhorn writes in staccato prose so sharp you could spear a man with it. As she said, instead of “a proper travel book”, “Travels with Myself and Another”, from 1978, is “an account of my best horror journeys.” People everywhere are nasty, brutish and smelly. But Gellhorn, best-known as a war reporter, is saved from snarkiness by her humour, her daring and her deep feeling for the natural world. She writes with a poet’s love of the land and a war reporter’s zest for life. (We reviewed a biography of Gellhorn, nearly two decades ago.)
All God’s Children Need Travelling Shoes. By Maya Angelou. Knopf Doubleday; 224 pages; $15.95. Virago; £9.99
Most travel books are about leaving home; “All God’s Children Need Travelling Shoes”, from 1986, is about searching for one. The fifth instalment in Maya Angelou’s seven-part autobiographical series, it recounts the years the African-American writer spent in Ghana in the early 1960s and her trips to Berlin and Venice as part of a theatrical company. Ghana through Angelou’s eyes is majestic, sweeping, “plump with promise”; she spends fascinated nights in the company of activists and writers, “lambasting America and extolling Africa,” even as she becomes aware that she has been “swept into an adoration for Ghana as a young girl falls in love, heedless and with slight chance of finding the emotion requited.” Powerful in its eloquent evocation of cultural fault lines and written with poetic precision, “All God’s Children Need Travelling Shoes” describes a journey into Africa that is a journey into oneself. Read our obituary of Angelou, published in June 2014.
Looking for Transwonderland. By Noo Saro-Wiwa. Catapult; 272 pages; $15.95. Granta; £10.99
After moving to Britain as a child, Noo Saro-Wiwa viewed Nigeria—her birth country and a place she considered a “tropical gulag”—with embarrassment and dread. A four-and-a-half-month trip—made in 2007-8, more than a decade after the execution of her activist father, Ken Saro-Wiwa—changed her perspective. “Looking for Transwonderland”, published in 2012, is a vivid, humane, extremely funny account of Nigeria as seen through the eyes of someone who is neither of an insider nor fully an outsider: a native daughter returned after an absence of many years. Under Ms Saro-Wiwa’s pen, its “buttock-clenching excitement” springs to life. But she is also unflinching in her portrayal of corruption in a country that has “lurched from one kleptocracy to the next.” Ms Saro-Wiwa observes that the social fabric of an extended family does not suit a free-market economy: having many desperate dependents heaps inexhaustible pressure on successful members, pushing them towards bribery and nepotism. “Looking for Transwonderland” is a rollicking read, elevated into a state-of-the-nation narrative by its incisive analysis of the problems and power of modern Nigeria. Read our review, from January 2012.
Small Bodies of Water. By Nina Mingya Powles. Canongate; 272 pages; $18 and £9.99
Nina Mingya Powles is white and Malaysian Chinese; she had moved between Wellington, New York and Shanghai before the age of 15. “By then,” she writes, “home was a slippery word.” In this collection of shimmering essays, she reflects on the waters that connect and divide us. Like her first book “Tiny Moons: A Year of Eating in Shanghai”, “Small Bodies of Water”, from 2021, is a meditation on movement, migration and belonging that twists and turns like a river: impossible to contain and always surging swiftly onwards, asking “Where is the place your body is anchored? Which body of water is yours?”
