Nicolas Bouvier (1929–1998)

After the epic drive from Switzerland to India in a Fiat Topolino, described in L’usage du monde, Bouvier continued to Sri Lanka, where his travels ground to a halt for some seven months of 1955 while he lived in a small hotel in the fort-town of Galle, then something of a backwater, writing and watching the ants going up and down his walls. He seems to have had something of a crisis of motivation, which he blames on the climate and the general air of lethargy, but loneliness and the news show more that a girlfriend left behind in Europe was about to marry someone else clearly played their part as well.

He didn‘t publish this short account of what he saw during his time on the island until some 25 years later, but it is as fresh and ironic as the earlier book, if a little more claustrophobic, full of detailed and slightly absurd observations of his neighbours in the Galle backstreet where he was staying, the insect life in and around his room, and his own mental state, culminating in a bizarre encounter with a cigar-smoking deceased Jesuit who was very helpful in correcting the prose of articles he was writing in English for a paper in Colombo.

Definitely not helpful travel-advice, but beautiful writing and quite a moving account of what it is like to be young and cut off for a lengthy period from contact with your peers. show less

On croit qu'on va faire un voyage, mais bientôt c'est le voyage qui vous fait, ou vous défait.

Travel writers often go to great lengths to impose themselves, their own structures and reasons, on the world around them. Mostly, as we might expect, the world is unsatisfactory and fails to meet up to the high standards the writer sets. This conflict can be very creative — for instance in Robert Byron or Bruce Chatwin — but it sometimes leaves you wondering why they ever bother to leave show more home.

Nicolas Bouvier is at the opposite extreme. He takes the much more difficult path of trying to concentrate on what he learnt from the world, the things he found beautiful, strange or absurd, even in the most ordinary, unpromising situations. He's always trying to get beyond cultural preconceptions and react to what he sees on an aesthetic, human level. We don't get to hear much about conventional tourist sights like mosques, mountains, or palaces, but a lyrical passage can suddenly take shape from the fall of the snow on a beggar's coat, the vultures on a Pakistani rubbish dump, or a group of porters drinking tea in a backstreet café in Tabriz.

Le soleil d'hiver sur les murs bleus, la fine odeur de thé, le choc des pions sur le damier, tout était d'une légèreté si étrange qu'on se demandait si cette poignée de vieux séraphins calleux n'allait pas s'envoler avec toute la boutique dans un grand bruit de plumes.

That little phrase "légèreté si étrange" seems to sum up what Bouvier is all about. It's not a book you should read in big chunks; it has to be dipped into and enjoyed in bite-size portions. If you read too much at once, the strangeness has time to evaporate, and the lyricism loses its lightness a bit.

Writing wasn't something that Bouvier found easy. This book was nine years in the making. The only occasion in the whole book where Bouvier allows himself to display irritation is in a short apostrophe to the reader near the end, where he talks about his frustration at how long it's taking him to write the book. By contrast, the perpetually irritated Robert Byron worked up his notes into a "spontaneous" travel diary in only a year.

It's obviously an absurd enterprise to try to drive from Switzerland to the Khyber Pass in a decrepit Fiat Topolino that can barely get to 30 km/hr and frequently has to be lifted bodily over obstacles, but Bouvier doesn't hit us over the head with his achievement. It's not a challenge, there's no clock ticking (two Swiss without a timetable between them!), and it's almost irrelevant whether they get there or not. Bouvier's modesty is a little reminiscent of Thesiger, who would have been punting around the Iraqi marshes at about the same time as Bouvier and Vernet were chugging east in their Cinquecento, but Bouvier doesn't share Thesiger's obsession with becoming part of the cultures he's writing about. He always manages to convey his affection for the people he encounters (even a sleeping customs officer is described with fondness and humanity), but he doesn't want to learn their genealogies or swear blood-brotherhood with them. He would almost certainly have got on well with Laurence Sterne and his notion of the Sentimental Traveller. It's easy to see how Bouvier's laid-back, passive approach made this book a cult classic for the hippy generation, but it's definitely more than that: however much the world has moved on since 1953-54 (Iran and Afghanistan in particular), Bouvier's way of looking at other people and cultures surely still has a lot to teach us. show less

A wonderful and illuminating book about the travels of two young Swiss men travelling from Geneva to the Khyber Pass from June 1953 to December 1954, when the world appears to have been a more accessible and safer place.
Bouvier's descriptions of the locations are absorbing and authentic. Starting the main narrative in Yugoslavia (remember when there was a Yugoslavia) Bouvier and his travel companion, Thierry Vernet, set off in a car to travel to India. This is not fast paced book and is show more evocatively descriptive. It is not romantic, as it appears to truthfully point out all the awful aspects of travel, but it makes one nostalgic for a place and time, which one could now never have visited, but which sound so vivid and real, although we are often very glad we are not there, as it is too hot or too cold.
There are passages where Bouvier reminds you of the primal or spiritual dimension of travel, that reaches beyond curiosity to some more basic nomadic need, but they are self depreciatory and not fanciful.
Most magically, the travellers reach Tabriz in Azerbaijan and "..you yawn, stretch out, fall asleep. In the night the snow falls, covering the roofs, smothering shouts, cutting off roads… and thus you spend six months in Tabriz, Azerbaijan."
I cannot think of a travel writer now who would accept that one morning on their travels they wake up and have to spend six months waiting for the snows to melt.
Wonderful. show less

Ces notes de voyage de Nicolas Bouvier ont été publiées en 2012, soit bien après sa mort. Comme c'est du matériel brut, la narration est logiquement plus décousue, le style moins ciselé que dans ses livres. On retrouve néanmoins les belles tournures, les descriptions de peintre dont il est coutumier. On y trouve aussi plus de réflexions personnelles que dans ses livres, comme par exemple sur ses ennuis de santé.

Une chose est bigrement frustrante dans tous les textes de Nicolas show more Bouvier: on se sent soi-même tellement idiot devant tant de culture, lorsqu'il mentionne des figures historiques qui ne nous disent rien ou si peu, et lorsqu'il fait référence à des écrivains qu'on ne connaît pas. show less