Asian Travelogue
BEICHMAN, ARNOLD
Asian Travelogue A Nostalgia for Camels. Revieved by Arnold Beichman By Christopher Rand. press representative. International Little, Brown. 279 pp. $3.75. Confederation oj Free Trade Unions It...
...For example, Mr...
...Rand's work suffers especially for being between the covers of a book instead of between the two advertising columns of the farther reaches • of the New Yorker, where such footloose correspondence can be read as effortlessly as watching the late show on TV...
...Tin just an amateur and I don't really know...
...The major reason for offering opinions so modestly is that usually the opinion isn't much more than a cliche which, tossed against an Afghanistan background, sounds terribly significant and sophisticated...
...Confederation oj Free Trade Unions It probably isn't fair to light into a literate travel book for the dubious purpose of delivering a sermon...
...Then you describe everything, sucking up every detail into a huge vacuum cleaner and shaking out the bag on paper...
...And the lesson for the day is that the New Yorker canon, of which Mr...
...An old tribesman waves a leafy branch over the Faqir's head to drive away the flies, "and there seemed to be devotion — affection — in the Faqir's relationship with this man and the others in his circle...
...Rand happens to be a keen political observer with an honorable tour of duty as a correspondent in the Far East...
...And as we went along I felt it was all he needed to say...
...Rand's observations on Vinoba Bhave, who walks through India begging land for the landless, ends: "Many have thorough faith in his predictions, too, I think, though I cannot tell if they are right...
...This rubric also obviates research, thought and reflection...
...I wasn't thinking so much of a political conflict—between slogans of Pakhunistan and Pakistan—but of a larger one: the conflict of the machine age against spice and variety in human life...
...End...
...A British sergeant, asked what he thinks of his Gurkhas, says: " 'They're good blokes.' It was all he said on the subject in our three hours' drive...
...a walk with Vinoba, a battalion of Gurkhas...
...Rand knows better and he should do better...
...But there's no way out...
...And it is a strain, because the more Mr...
...Turn to the next chapter on Tenzing...
...The topic must be exotic— flight to Urumchi, the Faqir of Ipi...
...Rand's Asian travelogue is the most exaggerated example, simply won't do any more in a world of Bandung, Krishna Menon, Mao and Sukarno...
...The ending always trails off...
...Rand strives for this simplicity the more empty the prose must become, until the words and content are so meaningless they might just as well be describing Puddleby-on-the-Marsh or Ossining-on-the-Hudson...
...You must never venture an opinion unless it is utterly essential, but then you bashfully water down the opinion by using parenthetical phrases like "I would dare to guess," "I wondered," "I was told,' "I suspect," "I gathered,' "it seemed...
...Such a sentence is on a par with something being "mute evidence" of something else...
...in fact must trail off, pointlesslv...
...I'm not sure that by these excerpts I am satisfactorily documenting my irritation at this artificial straining for simplicity and its inevitable pretentiousness...
...Why he insists on using this involved, controlled technique page after page about an area of the world which the West needs better to understand, I can't say—unless he wants his book to be used as a ready reference manual by would-be winners of $64,000 quiz shows...
...First you strive for simplicity, emphasis on Anglo-Saxon words rather than Latin-rooted words...
...I think Mr...
...Rand follows a rigid formula undeviatingly in his eleven unconnected chapters...
...and the less point the more heightened the mood of monochromatic sobriety and painful honesty after all...
Vol. 40 • May 1957 • No. 21
