Way of the World - Couverture souple

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 0748661255 ISBN 13 : 9780748661251

A propos du livre

Biographie de l'auteur

Bouvier was born in 1929 near Geneva, where he died in 1998. He used travel to escape the box in which he felt his bourgeois background had potentially imprisoned him and, once free, he learned through travel the value of being over doing. When he did travel, he liked to take it very slowly, and was proud to note that it had taken him longer to get to Japan than Marco Polo.

The youngest of three children of an enlightened and intellectual family (his father was a librarian), Bouvier's early reading of RL Stevenson, Jules Verne, Jack London and Fenimore Cooper made him impatient for the world. He was encouraged to travel as a teenager by his father, who perhaps sensed that there was no holding his insatiable son in the rigorously controlled emotional world of the Bouvier household.

It was during a three-day trek in Finnish tundra, in bivouacking under the stars, that he realised the nomadic state had something to teach him. Without waiting for the result of his degree, in 1953 he left to join Thierry Vernet in Yugoslavia with no intention of returning.

The fruit of this companionable journey of a year and a half, The Way of the World, was only published some eight years later in 1963. Bouvier continued his travels, through India to Ceylon and thence to Japan. From his experience of Ceylon in 1955 came The Scorpion-Fish, a novel first published in 1981, and from Japan, which he was to live in for more than a year and to revisit in the 1960s and 1970s, came a distillation of experiences, The Japanese Chronicles, which were honed and rehoned, and published in their final version in 1975.

Présentation de l'éditeur

In 1953, twenty-four-year old Nicolas Bouvier and his artist friend Thierry Vernet set out to make their way overland from their native Geneva to the Khyber Pass. They had a rattletrap Fiat and a little money, but above all they were equipped with the certainty that by hook or by crook they would reach their destination, and that there would be unanticipated adventures, curious companionship, and sudden illumination along the way. The Way of the World, which Bouvier fashioned over the course of many years from his journals, is an entrancing story of adventure, an extraordinary work of art, and a voyage of self-discovery on the order of Robert M. Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. As Bouvier writes, “You think you are making a trip, but soon it is making—or unmaking—you.”

Détails de l'édition

• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 0748661255
• ISBN 13: 9780748661251
• Reliure: Broché
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible