"I am as much Chinese as French," wrote Gustave Flaubert, author of Madame Bovary. He longed to escape his Europeanness and become one with the perfumed, enchanted East. The great experience of his youth was a trip to Egypt, then seen, with its camels, palm trees and inexact morals, as the epitome of all the East could offer a buttoned-up, repressed Westerner.
Alain De Botton is widely perceived as a rising star in the British literary establishment. Still only 33, he has written books attempting to popularize Proust, philosophy, and falling in love, and several are already available in Taiwan in Chinese translations. Now he offers us his thoughts on travel, his own experiences interspersed with those of a range of literary figures, Flaubert among them.
The central problem with this book is that De Botton is no traveler. He opens with a quick trip to Barbados, currently a fashionable destination for the London elite, follows it with brief forays to Madrid (five days), the English Lake District (three days), Provence and Amsterdam, and even manages to get himself to the Sinai desert. Most foreign residents of Taiwan will nevertheless be excused for thinking of this as pretty tame.
But, De Botton would reply, that is not the point. The point to him is not where you go but what you see. A traveler can circle the globe and see less than someone of a more perceptive disposition who takes a walk round his own bedroom. In fact, he ends by doing just that, and the book even contains a photo of his bedroom, complete with shelves of learned volumes with their titles carefully in focus, to prove it.
He gazes at giant aircraft coming in to land at London's Heathrow airport and muses on the fact that only hours before they were setting off from Malaysia, Java or Singapore. It's the mind, the imagination, that's the greatest of all travelers, he muses. The body often finds travel tiresome. Books are cumbersome items to travel with, and most of the books he wants when traveling remain annoyingly at home.
De Botton is essentially a bad traveler, and this book is his justification for being just that. When he's abroad he's uneasy, fending off feelings of cultural displacement by analyzing minute details such as an Exit sign at Amsterdam's airport. He only relaxes again when, sooner rather than later, he gets back home. There among his books he can once again be lord of all he surveys, handing down potted versions of his favorites to lesser mortals without the leisure to read them.
He craftily makes a virtue out of his own physical lassitude, admiring the mundane details of highway service stations and then referring the reader to the paintings of Edward Hopper in justification. These, to De Botton, do not represent the dreary face of modern life but a wistful beauty that is there if only you look hard enough for it.
His quick trip to the English Lake District perfectly encapsulates his approach. This area has some 50 modest mountains dramatically sited within a rather confined area. But De Botton doesn't take the trouble to climb a single one of them. Instead, he takes a short car ride, listens to an animal rummaging about in a bush, and then drives back to his hotel where he remarks on the patterns the rain is making on the windows.
Spectacular views, however easy of access, interest him no more than splendid beaches or fabulous temples. Instead, he prides himself on the thoughts he can summon up from regarding the minutest particulars, and justifies his disdain for what most other people enjoy about travel by placing himself next to great literary names plucked from his well-stocked shelves.
This, in other words, is an anti-travel book. It's title ought really to be "The Art of Staying at Home."
Ultimately it's his style that gives this author away. What other contemporary 33-year-old would write a sentence like "It had not always been thus"? The reason for this disdainful affectation of the antique is that De Botton wants you to think what a superior kind of person he is. He wants to be a classic writer, an essayist in some hallowed, timeless style. Every chapter title begins with the word "On" -- On Curiosity, On the Exotic, On the Sublime. This is how people titled their essays 200 years ago. De Botton wants to be seen as being on a par with classic English essayists like Hazlitt or De Quincey. Thinking of himself as an instant classic lies behind every sentence of this infuriating, mannered, affected, and ultimately deeply supercilious book.
But De Botton is an instant classic only in the sense that instant coffee is coffee -- in other words, hardly at all. As Hemingway wrote in Green Hills of Africa (elsewhere numbingly infuriating because it's almost entirely a record of shooting large animals for pleasure) no one can sit down to write a classic. What eventually becomes classic is what was in its own time fresh, innovative and original. If you consciously aim for classic status all you become is an artificial and self-admiring copy of somebody else.
Any innocent buying this book is likely to be profoundly disappointed. He might even have a good case for asking for his money back. The Art of Travel? Surely you'd have a right to expect whole chapters on the great destinations of the world, on India, China, Mongolia, Madagascar, South America, Iceland, Southeast Asia. No way. Instead, it's the fly on the windowpane that gets the bulk of the attention.
De Botton could probably claim to be the world's worst traveler. There's nothing wrong with that. But he insists on making a virtue of his shortcomings by penning a book on precisely the thing that runs most directly against his nature. It's as if the Pope had written a thriller or a book on fine food, assuming that because of who he is every thought that enters his head is certain to be of interest to his flock of devoted and grateful admirers.
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