The Happy Ant-heap: and Other Pieces - Softcover

Lewis, Norman

4.03

33 ratings by Goodreads

9780330370479: The Happy Ant-heap: and Other Pieces

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0330370472 ISBN 13: 9780330370479

Publisher: Picador, 1999

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'Norman Lewis is ninety. He has been travelling since he was a young man and now collects his recent travel writing into this delightful volume, full of aphrodisiacs made from seals' penises and "vulture lung soup". Lewis is the classic "I-am-a-camera" travel writer. He sees, but he does not judge. This is the perfect book to go travelling with this summer: off-beat, uninhibited and wise' Robert McCrum, Observer

'The essays span the continents, from Europe to Africa to Asia to South America to Oceania; they have in common an enviable descriptive power, a touch of the bizarre and a great deal of style. . . There is a brilliantly frightening piece on the Mafia and its total control over everyday life in Sicily. . . Such is Lewis's breadth of experience that, writing about aphrodisiacs in Liberia, he can mention a trip he once made to the Yemen, where he became acquainted with the men who dive for oysters, an encounter with Hemingway in Havana, where Ernesto was desperately trying to reverse increasing impotence, and then a return to Italy, where a Neapolitan once introduced Lewis to the local sovereign remedy: a tin of Spam' Geoffrey Moorhouse, Daily Telegraph

'He is one of the two or three greatest living travel writers, with a prose style of unmatched wit and subtlety, full of images as startling as a Verey light. . . Despite the bleakness of most of his subject matter, Lewis is such a fine and amusing writer - and also such an intensely moral and humane one - that he can make even the most horrible situations both bearable and instructive... . at ninety his literary voice is completely of the moment' William Dalrymple, Sunday Times

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Review:

This retrospective collection from Norman Lewis is culled from over 70 years of travel. Containing new as well as previously published work, it recalls some of his most memorable journeys throughout Europe, South America, Asia and the Pacific. With such an astonishing reach, both in terms of time and distance, Lewis convincingly provides the reader not only with a magical diversity of geography, but also with a comprehensive slice of history. His vast experience inevitably means that one story sparks off another. Investigating aphrodisiacs in Liberia reminds him of Ernest Hemingway's impotence for instance, and this discursive approach, along with his unquenchable human interest in his subjects, is one of the great pleasures and strengths of the book. Whether he is charting the despoliation of a Spanish fishing village by the arrival of mass tourism, chronicling the trials of Mafioso in Sicily or claiming to be one of the few people to have been tipped by a taxi driver in Burma--"an unforgettable moment of illumination between the cultural and spiritual divide between east and west"--his responses remain fresh and undulled. And all this despite the fact Lewis, more than anyone, can legitimately claim to have "been there, seen it" a hundred times over. Although one, of course, doubts that he ever bought the T-shirt. --Nick Wroe

Book Description:

This is the perfect book to go travelling with this summer: off-beat, uninhibited and wise' Robert McCrum, Observer

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