The Way of the World - Softcover

Bouvier, Nicholas

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0907871534 ISBN 13: 9780907871538

Publisher: Eland Publishing Ltd, 2007

Synopsis

Rare Book

About this title

Review:

Nicolas Bouvier's passionate and exhilarating travel stories have inspired generations of young Europeans onto the road. --Rory Maclean, author of Magic Bus

Bouvier is that rare author who alerts the reader to the transcendent dimension of travel. This courageous alchemy makes Way of the World a masterpiece. --Jason Elliot, author of An Unexpected Light: Travels in Afghanistan

As good a novel as it is tough and relentless. --Evening Standard

About the Author:

Bouvier was born in 1929 near Geneva, where he died in 1998. He used travel to escape the box in which he felt his bourgeois background had potentially imprisoned him and, once free, he learned through travel the value of being over doing. When he did travel, he liked to take it very slowly, and was proud to note that it had taken him longer to get to Japan than Marco Polo.

The youngest of three children of an enlightened and intellectual family (his father was a librarian), Bouvier's early reading of RL Stevenson, Jules Verne, Jack London and Fenimore Cooper made him impatient for the world. He was encouraged to travel as a teenager by his father, who perhaps sensed that there was no holding his insatiable son in the rigorously controlled emotional world of the Bouvier household.

It was during a three-day trek in Finnish tundra, in bivouacking under the stars, that he realised the nomadic state had something to teach him. Without waiting for the result of his degree, in 1953 he left to join Thierry Vernet in Yugoslavia with no intention of returning.

The fruit of this companionable journey of a year and a half, The Way of the World, was only published some eight years later in 1963. Bouvier continued his travels, through India to Ceylon and thence to Japan. From his experience of Ceylon in 1955 came The Scorpion-Fish, a novel first published in 1981, and from Japan, which he was to live in for more than a year and to revisit in the 1960s and 1970s, came a distillation of experiences, The Japanese Chronicles, which were honed and rehoned, and published in their final version in 1975.

About this edition

• Publisher: Eland Publishing Ltd
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0907871534
• ISBN 13: 9780907871538
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 320