16 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC TRAVELLER INDIA | MAY 2018
VOICES FAULTY COMPASSPETER ERIK FORSBERG/AGE FOTOSTOCK/DINODIA PHOTO LIBRARYF
our years ago, before setting off to
visit a friend in South Africa, I received
a list with the subject line: “Read-
ing”. The mail contained a smorgasbord
of recommended titles as pre-departure
homework, and it opened with the obvious:
Nelson Mandela’s A Long Walk to Freedom.
“I’m trying to think of books relevant to
the places we’re going—i.e. rural Zululand,
the Midlands and Cape Town,” my friend
wrote, “Because apartheid history is still so
relevant, it’s a must as far as themes go.”
There would be beaches, vineyards
and safaris, leavened by race, politics and
conflict. “For getting to the heart of South
Africa at her worst, any Jonny Steinberg
— for gangs (The Number), for HIV (Three-
letter Plague), for xenophobia (A Man of
Good Hope),” he continued. “For 1990s race
relations and impressive prose: Coetzee’s
Disgrace. For a new novel about Cape
Town by a prodigal young black writer: The
Reactive.” That was 50 per cent of the mail.
I ended up 100 per cent not following it at
the time.
But the idea, I realised, was sound. Since
then I have been approaching places I am
about to visit with literary ferocity, foraging
for reading that will offer a diffused sense of
their cultures and illuminate contours you
neither expect nor prepare for in travel. I am
still a champion of travel guides, pragmatic
prose for navigating journeys. But I’ve also
become a champion of the kind of sight-
seeing-agnostic prose that won’t just hawk
you a place but telegraph to you its funda-
mental essences. It’s my travel pre-game.
Before visiting Hong Kong last year I me-
ticulously searched for all the books I could
find set in that city. I ended up reading two.
Gweilo by Martin Booth was an unheraldeda case for
Prose Before
the Prosaic
memoir dwelling on the author’s childhood
years in British-held 1950s Hong Kong, just
after the war. It was funny and poignant, and
fashioned such a strong sense of time and
place that I felt like I was getting to know the
city–or at least a version of it already. Along
with the novel The Piano Teacher, it was the
gentlest, most perceptive introduction I
could have had to Hong Kong.
Later in the year I plunged head-first
into the cliché, consuming The Sun Also
Rises before passing through immigration
in Madrid. Until that trip, I had never felt
any urgency to read Ernest Hemingway’s
decadent fictional account set before the
civil war, a definitive part of the canon.
Suddenly, it became unavoidable, and boy,
was it a relief to have another Great Bookout of the way. (I also studied my Spanish
diploma course notes before boarding that
flight. Hemingway can help you find the
local soul, Libro de Ejercicios can help you
find the local cerveza.)
The heady medley of books and boarding
passes has consistently thrown up flavour-
ful combinations. For Germany there was
Monuments Men, for Jakarta, there was
Krakatoa, for Scandinavia, there was crime
fiction. The street-level view of Copenhagen
was classically beautiful, but the page-level
view in The Purity of Vengeance revealed a
latent darkness. It wasn’t that one version
was more valid than the other, just that its
surface charms could also be read along-
side its seamier impulses.
To visit a place without reading about it
is no longer an option, even if that readingjust happens to be smaller portions pillaged
online–narrative journalism or investigative
pieces about the cities in question. I know
people aren’t actively looking for the crum-
my parts when they travel, but sometimes
a place is only as revelatory as its crummy
parts. So while I need to drink the local beer
and see the local monuments, I also need to
read the local paper if I can and ingest the
socio-political context, thanks very much.
To ignore the weight of Germany’s past
or Poland’s hyper-nationalism or South
Africa’s racial politics is to travel through a
deracinated la-la land purged of historical
meaning. You might as well be in Narnia.
Lastly, there is the collateral mind-
widening that accompanies the return
from a new place. They say books take you
to lands unknown. Sometimes lands take
you to books unknown. A trip to Israel led
me to the landmark Jerusalem by Simon
Sebag Montefiore, a visit to Indonesia
directed me to its literary supernova, Eka
Kurniawan and a return from Auschwitz
alerted me to Hanns and Rudolf, an account
of its kommandant.
These weren’t books that had beeped
on my radar when they first arrived into
the world, backlit by high praise. But those
travels prompted serendipitous discover-
ies once home. The first trip after deplaning
usually ends up being to the library.¾PRACTICAL GUIDES ARE USEFUL
TRAVEL PREP, BUT FOR A REAL FEEL OF
A NEW PLACE, LOOK TO LITERATURELands take you to
books unknown
B h av ya d o r e
is a Mumbai-based
freelance journalist and
has written for various
national and international
publications. She writes
on criminal justice issues,
culture, books and sports.