You Go, Girl

I think of Jan (formerly James) Morris as the energizer bunny of travel writers: 83 she is, if not necessarily still going, at least still assessing and evaluating and appreciating (link, for which thanks to Joel). I've read a lot of her stuff over the years but the one that sticks on my shelf is a little item that I gather irritated some of her faithful readers. That would be Last Letters from Hav, a charming little jeu d'esprit, casually structured as a novel so as to provide her with a chance to talk about all the places she'd been and the traces they inscribed on her memory. It is a charming and good natured and, okay, sentimental read. It was nominated for thee Booker Prize that year and that, I suspect, may be why polite critics get so sniffy: how dare she presume to compete with the likes of Keri Hulme, who won the prize (for The Bone People) --or, for that matter, with Iris Murdoch, Doris Lessing, Peter Carey and J.L. Carr, the other contenders.

Hav has a Turkish air, but there is a little bit of everything: German electric fittings (undermined by a Russian power plant); a French Maison de la Clugture ("one of Le Corbusier's less inspired works") and, of course, a Chinese Pagoda:

The fundamental shape of the building is, of course, that of the pagoda, the most unmistakably Chinese of forms, with its wide eaves and its gently tapering flanks--the Arabs were to be left in no doubt, not for a moment, as to the identity of the Master. In the five bridges there is apparently a direct refernce to the five bridges over the Golden Water River in the Forbidden City, an allusion that would imply to the Chinese themselves, if hardly to anyone else, the presence here of the imperial authority. The moat itself, with its nine unblinking eye-pools, is claimed...to be a figure of the Lake of Sleepless Diligence, while the high corridor which bisects the ground floor of the building, west to east, is said to be exactly aligned upon Tian Tan, the Tem;ple of the Heavens in Beijing. Finally... the whole edifice, so complex and deceptive, is a sophisticated architectural metaphor and maze.

--Jan Morris, Last Letters from Hav 96-7 (Vintage Paperback ed. 1988)

Fo;r my money, it is not all that far from Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, recognized as a modernist classic. I suspect that Morris does not lose any sleep over the fact that she did not win the Booker; I hope note, for I'd cetainly rather read her than any of those who did.