Wilfred Thesiger: My Life and Travels - An Anthology
A review
by George Kalogeris
09/25/2020
There are passages in Wilfred Thesiger's book, My Life & Travels, An Anthology, where I often wondered what I would do in his position. Whether facing wild animals with a single bullet left in an untrustworthy gun, or travelling with companions in unsafe regions, who were revealed to be outlaws; what would I do?
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The answer is simple. I wouldn't have been there in the first place.
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And that is the one simple reason to read this anthology of Thesiger's travel writings.
He has travelled like the great explorers of the 19th century, mostly on his own two feet, in inhospitable yet breathtaking lands and written about both the discomfort and beauty in the same upper-class, British, dry, understated way that by implication, gets your heart racing. His meticulous and dreary counting of bedbugs (there were sixty) while in Iraq show a perverse, and dare I say it, "mad dogs and englishmen" sort of stiff upper lip that both attracts and repulses at the same time. The reader thinks, why didn't he just go sleep somewhere else? Well, because then he might not have an amusing and strange event to write about. His non-chalant recounting of a beating he received in Africa makes one wonder if he isn't going too far in recounting obviously painful memories. He writes about the violence that "it is not something to be repeated". Unless you're at the club old chap. Although the dry writing can be off-putting, the description of lands now forever changed by their inhabitants and invaders, and the toils made to get there are enough of an invitation to get the reader going, if only in her own mind.