Cultured Travel Guide Books - The Art of Travel |
 |
List Price: $25.00
Our Price: $6.50
Your Save: $ 18.50 ( 74% )
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
|
|
Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 910.202
EAN: 9780375420825
ISBN: 0375420827
Label: Pantheon
Manufacturer: Pantheon
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 272
Publication Date: 2002-07-30
Publisher: Pantheon
Release Date: 2002-07-30
Studio: Pantheon |
| Spotlight Customer Reviews: |
Customer Rating:  
Summary: Banal, purple and ultimately boring
Comment: I opened this book in pleasurable anticipation of a good read but almost from the first line became irritated by De Botton's use of similes and adjectives, many of which border on the absurd. The decline of winter is `like that of a person into old age'. Cloudless skies are likened to `signs of recovery in a patient upon whom death has passed sentence'. A steely grey sky has - of course - to be `ominous'. But not just ominous: it has to be `like one in a painting by Mantegna or Veronese, the perfect backdrop to the crucifixion of Christ or to a day beneath the bedclothes.' and so it goes on. At times I was reminded of the laboured similes in a Rowan Atkinson comedy. Page 17 is a prime example of De Botton's laboured, Victorian style and deserves a lengthy quotation:
`Awakening early on that first morning, I slipped on a dressing gown provided by the hotel and went out onto the veranda. In the dawn light the sky was a pale grey-blue and, after the rustlings of the night before, all the creatures and even the wind seemed in a deep sleep. It was as quiet as a library. Beyond the hotel room stretched a wide beach which was covered at first with coconut trees and then slipped unhindered towards the sea. I climbed over the veranda's low railing and walked across the sand. Nature was at her most benevolent. It was as if, in creating this small horseshoe bay, she had chosen to atone for her ill-temper in other regions and decided for once to display only her munificence. The trees provided shade and milk, the floor of the sea was lined with shells, the sand was powdery and the colour of sun ripened wheat, and the air - even in the shade - had an enveloping, profound warmth to it so unlike the fragility of northern European heat, always prone to cede, even in midsummer, to a more assertive, proprietary chill.
`I found a deck chair at the edge of the sea. I could hear small lapping sands beside me, as if a kindly monster taking discreet sips of water from a large goblet. A few birds were waking up and beginning to career through the air in matinal excitement. Behind me, the raffia roofs of the hotel bungalows were visible through gaps in the trees. Before me was the view that I recognized from the brochure: the beach stretched away in a gentle curve towards the tip of the bay, behind it were jungle-covered hills, and the first row of coconut trees inclined irregularly towards the turquoise sea, as though some of them were craning their necks to catch a better angle of the sun.
`Yet this description only imperfectly reflects what occurred within me that morning, for my attention was in truth far more fractured and confused than the foregoing paragraphs suggest. I may have noticed a few birds careering through the air in matinal excitement, but my awareness of them was weakened by a number of other, incongruous and unrelated elements, among these a sore throat that I had developed during the flight, a worry at not having informed a colleague that I would be away, pressure across both temples and a rising need to visit the bathroom. A momentous but until then overlooked fact was making its first appearance: that I had inadvertently brought myself with me to the island.'
De Botton never loses an opportunity to demonstrate how much he or his quasi-anonymous companion `M' has read. While a single cloud hangs `shyly' above the bay, the mysterious `M' (is she head of MI6?) puts on her headphones and begins annotating Emile Durkheim's On Suicide. She would.
The author's idea of travel seems to consist in boarding planes, catching trains, filling up at gas stations and hiring cars. He seems to have a horror of engaging with the real world of people and chatter and tears and sweat, as opposed to the worlds of art and literature and posy criticism. His is the infuriating voice of the tour guide that gets between you and a work of art, the voice that tells you what to think, the voice that prevents you making up your own mind about the works of Hopper or Van Gogh or Wordsworth or Ruskin.
The book is little more than a hotch-potch of regurgitated university lecture notes interspersed by some very amateurish attempts at descriptive writing. `A black-eared wheatear is looking pensive on a conifer branch ... humans and sheep stare at one another in wonder. After a moment the sheep sits down and takes a lazy mouthful of grass, chewing from the side of her mouth as though it was gum ... Another sheep approaches and lies next to her companion, wool-to-wool, and for a second they exchange what appears to be a knowing, mildly amused glance.'
Here's some more, and I promise that this will be the last example of the purple slush you will have to wade through when (or if) you read this book:
`The rain, which continued to fall confidently despite the promises of the landlord, gave us a sense of the mass of the oaks. From under their damp canopy, rain could be heard falling on 40,000 leaves, creating a harmonious pitter-patter, varying in pitch according to where the water dripped on to a large or a small leaf, a high or a low one, one loaded with accumulated water or not...'
De Botton does not teach us how to travel so much as how not to travel. He stops the hire car to look at an olive orchard but he can't be bothered to get out of the car and walk through it. He reads a brochure in a Madrid hotel, but is too timid to go out and rub shoulders with the locals in one of that city's many wonderful restaurants, preferring to dine on a bag of crisps in his bedroom, flicking over the pages of travel brochures.
In his section on Ruskin, De Botton demonstrates a fundamental misconception about art, which he seems to think can be reduced to words on paper. As a graduate of the University of Cambridge he seems to have a pretty impoverished knowledge of aesthetics. Has he never read Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Representation? Has he never read Isaiah Berlin's The Roots of Romanticism? Has he never attended to Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations or appreciated that abstracts (like `beauty') cannot be objectivised, let alone searched for?
De Botton is not a traveller; he is a package tourist, and not a very adventurous or imaginative one. He's the guy who asks the tour guide the question to which he already knows the answer. Can you imagine Bruce Chatwin describing clouds as seen from an aircraft window? That's what De Botton does. Can you imagine T.E. Lawrence comparing a view of the desert with what he saw in a travel guide? Can you imagine Hilaire Belloc sitting in his hotel room eating a bag of crisps instead of mixing with the locals? Or Turner staying inside because there was a nasty storm outside and he didn't want to get wet?
There were moments when I felt so impatient with the banalities of The Art of Travel that I felt like flinging the book across the room. The impression I came away with was that De Botton sees art not as an end in itself but as a means to an end. Through art, he can become an `expert', and as an expert he will be able to publish books, figure in television documentaries, become a celebrity and make lots of money. Art for art's sake? Travel to travel sake? Forget it: anything and everything De Botton sees he has to analyse to death.
But it is not only the banality, the purple patches and neo-Victorian writing that mar The Art of Travel: it lacks direction and unity. To the last page, I could never make up my mind whether it was about art or travel. Lifting pictures of art works from the Internet and printing them in black and white - or in this case grey and grey - simply didn't work for me. I looked at them, but only because I felt I had to. I felt they were an insult to the great artists who painted the originals.
De Botton has achieved what I would previously have thought impossible: he has managed to make art and nature boring. Even from a purely academic point of view, the book is pretty well useless as it has no bibliography. That is idle and unforgivable.
Basic Flying Instruction: A Comprehensive Introduction to Western Philosophy
Seven Stories from Blackwood's Magazine
Customer Rating:
Summary: Travel essays with a sly charm
Comment: There's a certain self-effacing charm about Alain de Botton's writing that creeps up on you and which eventually becomes irresistible. Not one to shy away from big topics (love, philosophy, status, travel, Proust) he manages to bring you to fresh insights on each theme in a completely charming, highly readable fashion.
I've also seen him a few times on a BBC series about different philosophers, and the same charm is evident in person. He just seems like an altogether smart, together, sweet guy. It appears that he is quite successful, despite the disparate and commercially unpromising topics he chooses to write about. I hope that he is, because his seems to me to be a talent that deserves to be rewarded.
These essays are well-written, quirky, and rewarding.
Customer Rating:
Summary: I'd inadvertently brought myself to the island
Comment: So Alaine de Botton discovers on his trip to the Bahamas. I read and reread this book for such lines--sly takes on old chestnuts, in this case, Wherever you go, there you are.
Each chapter's title page includes a list of places discussed and the "guide" employed in that chapter. Chapter 1, "On Anticipation," lists Barbados and Hammersmith, London, as the places and author J.K. Huysmans as the guide. Another chapter, "On Eye-Opening Art," has Provence as its place and Vincent Van Gogh as its guide. (Oh, and there are pictures! Black and white, as befits the stately and philosophical tone.)
In listing his "guides," de Botton admits that one's perception of a place is always filtered--through paintings, literature, guidebooks, or a personal account by a recently returned friend. And in fact de Botton writes of "the curious phenomenon whereby valuable elements may be easier to experience in art and in anticipation than in reality."
This book will have you running to your notebook to copy down great line after great line. A travel writer myself, I recognize the Art of Travel as the perfect anti-guidebook, a guide about WHY we travel, and a meditation on how humankind's search for happiness -- "in all its ardour and paradoxes"-- is most poignantly revealed in how we travel.
Customer Rating:
Summary: An excellent voyage!
Comment: I highly recommend this book for those who love travel and art (or both). Whether you're a traveller or a dreamer this book will have something for you. The book contains two themes. The first is travel itself. How we experience it, our memories of it, where we travel, and what we encounter. The other theme is about art and how it shapes our travels, how artists have travelled and viewed/dreamed of travel.
I found the book very original. The author juxtaposes his own experiences with those of famous artists, poets, and thinkers. Each chapter is devoted to an aspect of travel. Whether it be experiencing the sublime, disappointment, meeting the exotic, or the method of your transport.
The book is not overbearing and neither is the author. You can tell he has travelled, but this is not a "look at all the countries I have collected in my travels" type of read. His involvement is to introduce the same or contrasted feelings or experiences someone more famous has encountered.
To conclude, this book will have you up and ready to travel in no time, or at least, looking at the map dreaming about your next destination or adventures.
Customer Rating:
Summary: The art of looking at things ...
Comment: It's always a nice thing when you read something spot on that's either close to what you believe or something you have experienced. De Botton is quite good at that, as in being able to phrase insights and observations you never realized were there bur are. I expected this one to be more about the actual travelling. To me the book should have been titled 'The Art of Looking At Things That Seem Unfamiliar, Bleak Or Uncommon At First Sight But Do Possess Certain Qualities If You Are Willing To Take Your Time To Look' but I guess that is a bit to long. Then again, it doesn't really matter for De Botton manages to make this one a breeze through read anyway, and while at it, actually gives you the idea you read something that mattered.
|
| More Reviews |
| Editorial Reviews: |
Aside from love, few actvities seem to promise us as much happiness as going traveling: taking off for somewhere else, somewhere far from home, a place with more interesting weather, customs, and landscapes. But although we are inundated with advice on where to travel, few people seem to talk about why we should go and how we can become more fulfilled by doing so. In The Art of Travel, Alain de Botton, author of How Proust Can Change Your Life, explores what the point of travel might be and modestly suggets how we can learn to be a little happier in our travels.
|
|
|
|
|
