European Reading Challenge #4

I read this travel narrative for the European Reading Challenge 2024

Eothen, or Impressions of Travel brought Home from the East - Alexander William Kinglake (1809 - 1893)

In 1834, the journey started in the Habsburg town of Semlin (Serbian: Zemun), across a river from Belgrade, which was more or less run by the Ottoman Turks. Kinglake is young, in his mid-twenties, an Eton and Cambridge smarty-pants. As he passes Niš, Serbia he expresses the nonchalance of Western Europeans apt to shrug over the atrocities of the Ottomans in Balkan Europe: 

... the only public building of any interest that lies on the road is of modern date, but is said to be a good specimen of Oriental architecture; it is of a pyramidical shape, and is made up of thirty thousand skulls, contributed by the rebellious Servians in the early part (I believe) of this century: I am not at all sure of my date, but I fancy it was in the year 1806 that the first skull was laid.

He's talking about the Skull Tower, still a destination for patriotic Serbians.

Detached, yes. Conceited, surely. Maddening, definitely. But a writer down to his toes: he took nine years to write this book, indicating he wanted to get it right. Kinglake's power to write comes out of his "rapturous and earnest" reading of Homer before he was packed off to school: "You feel so keenly the delights of early knowledge; you form strange mystic friendships with the mere names of mountains, and seas, and continents, and mighty rivers; you learn the ways of the planets, and transcend their narrow limits, and ask for the end of space...." While searching for the site of Troy, he notes the "beautiful congruity betwixt the Iliad and the material world."

True, he makes vile statements about the Orthodox Church. He feels contempt for the stereotypically decadent Ottomans. And his descriptions of Grecian women border on the prurient, which is unexpected in a Victorian author. He writes off whole segments of humanity: “These Arab women were so plain and clumsy, that they seemed to me to be fit for nothing but another and a better world." I can only suggest to hardcore readers of Victorian travel narratives, be prepared to make allowances for the ignorance and prejudices of a younger world.

Being a light-minded person and a reader that wants the writer to make me laugh, however, I thought these harsh minuses were balanced by Kinglake's sense of comedy. In the first chapter he writes a funny dialogue showing the pitfalls of using an interpreter and works in a parody of extravagant flattery. His description of the economic rationale of haggling instructs while it impresses with its mock scholarly, adversarial tone in favor of the local vendors against the vexed Europeans who wonder why they can't be told a fair price from the get-go.

On Cyprus he was invited to dine with a Greek family whose children had traditional names. He reports, "Every instant I was delighted by some such phrases as these, 'Themistocles, my love, don’t fight.’ ‘Alcibiades, can’t you sit still?'—'Socrates, put down the cup.'—'Oh, fie!  Aspasia, don’t.  Oh! don’t be naughty!'” Clearly, Kinglake was burdened with what is popularly known as a sense of humor and readers who are too will understand that comic impressions of the world just come to us, unbidden, and usually, luckily for the prim touchy world, go unsaid.

After Cyprus, in the other half of the narrative, our writer went to Beirut, then to the Holy Land, Cairo, and Damascus. In other words, out of the scope of this reading challenge, but more interesting because more introspective. In Cairo he goes through a time of pestilence. His undergraduate insouciance is finally shaken as his banker, his doctor, his landlord, his donkey boy, and his magician all die of the plague.

Basically, though written in the early Victorian era, Kinglake and his writing feels modern. He calls to mind Robert Byron and Graham Greene because he is a member of the “I Hate It Here” school so popular in the boom of Thirties travel writing. But he’s also modern because avoiding the learned content of history, sociology, and politics, the young writer writes about his own responses, his own impressions and his own search for meaning and freedom.

Jan Morris, no slouch in the travel narrative herself, says that this was her favorite travel book.

On the Internet: Librivox and Online Text