The Way of the World - Couverture souple

Bouvier, Nicholas

 
9780907871538: The Way of the World

Synopsis

A Cult Classic, "The Way of the World" is one of the most beguiling travel books ever written. Reborn from the ashes of a Pakistan rubbish heap, it tells of a friendship between a writer and an artist, forged on an impecunious, life-enhancing journey from Serbia to Afghanistan in the 1950s. On one level it is a candid description of a road journey, on another a meditation on travel as a journey towards the self, all written by a sage with a golden pen and a wide infectious smile. It is published here for the first time in English with the Vernet drawings which are such a dynamic part of its whole.

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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

A Cult Classic, "The Way of the World" is one of the most beguiling travel books ever written. Reborn from the ashes of a Pakistan rubbish heap, it tells of a friendship between a writer and an artist, forged on an impecunious, life-enhancing journey from Serbia to Afghanistan in the 1950s. On one level it is a candid description of a road journey, on another a meditation on travel as a journey towards the self, all written by a sage with a golden pen and a wide infectious smile. It is published here for the first time in English with the Vernet drawings which are such a dynamic part of its whole.

Les informations fournies dans la section « A propos du livre » peuvent faire référence à une autre édition de ce titre.