TRAVEL WRITING

I have come across a discussion on the Lonely Planet website: ‘Is travel writing dead?’

No, it’s not but it has shifted towards the mainstream culture with whatever such a move usually entails.

I have just finished reading Christos Tsiolkas ‘Dead Europe’. It’s a piece of fine literature and not popular travel writing genre. This is how I personally like to ‘travel’. The main character Isaac is a photographer (!) who travels from Greece through Venice, Prague, Berlin, Paris, Amsterdam to Cambridge. He experiences the guts of places rather than world heritage sites. This is a portrait of Europe different from frequented trails: dark, moody, melancholic, shady. Yet, it is beautifully written.

‘We met outside the final suburban Metro stop on the eastern line. Whereas I had descended into the underground from a clean, pristine Paris, I ascended into a bare concrete vault, littered with rubbish and cigarette butts. There was graffiti on every spare surface, and a homeless woman was peeing on the concrete. I walked past her and she screamed out for money. I ignored her. Outside the station was a huge concrete car park and a long stretch of motorway; beyond that, empty, barren fields. Behind the fields, blocks of grey high-rise apartments stretched for miles across the blighted plain. The sky was dark with threatening clouds’

Christos Tsiolkas ‘Dead Europe’ 2005