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Golden Earth: Travels in Burma (1952)

af Norman Lewis

MedlemmerAnmeldelserPopularitetGennemsnitlig vurderingOmtaler
1505180,890 (3.87)12
Like most travelers in Burma, Norman Lewis fell in love with the land and its people. Although much of the countryside was under the control of insurgent armies-the book was originally published in 1952-he managed, by steamboat, decrepit lorry, and dacoit-besieged train, to travel almost everywhere he wanted. This perseverance enabled him to see brilliant spectacles that are still out of our reach, and to meet all types of Burmese, from District officers to the inmates of Rangoon's jail. All the color, gaiety, and charm of the East spring to life with this master storyteller.… (mere)
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Viser 5 af 5
4.5 Beautifully written travel memoir that provides such a vivid picture of Burma and its very diverse population in the early 1950s. ( )
  mmcrawford | Dec 5, 2023 |
Superb book! Incredibly well-written (where has that sort gone in today's world?) travelogue of Burma following WWII. Some info is dated, but so what? Tis an absolute delight reading what a country is like in a given era and especially by a master storyteller like Lewis! Unfortunately, my copy was purchased in Yangon and is a photocopy reprint probably done in India, though it does not say so. I will be buying a hardcover of this...and it will be worth every penny! ( )
1 stem untraveller | Apr 21, 2018 |
There are so many very good reviews of this book I'll just second the statements that this is an extremely well-written book by someone who could write (he passed away in 2003), with a sense of dry humour that found just the right phrase to describe the scarey mongrel dogs that are still as common as gnats in Burma, and nights fighting off cockroaches encroaching on his turf. I read a library copy so couldn't tick my favourite expressions, but one was described the unappealing, gaudy local crafts on sale in a pagoda arcade perfectly in one word--"misguided". I've been to Burma 10 times over the past 25 years and the products for sale and the observation hasn't changed one iota. Another truism, "apart from occasional articles of silver jewellery, woven cloth is the only article of artistic interest produced in the mountains of the Indo-Chinese peninsula [and that is disappearing as factory-made textiles become more available]." He summarizes, "Art is sometimes protected by poverty, and civilisation can be the destroyer of taste." That line I copied into my iPhone.

Other reviews have compared him with Theroux for such comments, but as that reader commented, he seems a less emotional Theroux, and the negative is balanced by descriptions of a nature so beautiful in parts, and people so gracious and giving that if the recipient feels (s)he has been given undeserved money or a gift, it is immediately marked to be given to the first available charity.

This is a lovely, albeit dated book of Lewis' backpacking, hitchhiking travels in a very rustic Burma of the 1950s, peppered with bits of history and useful information about the country, much of which remains true today although Myanmar in many ways is a very different country today. I only wish Lewis could return to update this wonderful book; it would be a page-turner. ( )
  pbjwelch | Jul 25, 2017 |
Evocative travel memoir of Burma, post WWII, visiting out of the way places. A window onto a vanished world (though even today Burma is magically different). ( )
  DramMan | Dec 20, 2015 |
For many of its practitioners, travel writing is entirely a romantic venture by which the writer imagines himself as the hero of his own account, tramping his way through uncharted sands like Lawrence of Arabia. A more modest writer might see things less conceitedly and make himself the fool instead; but surely only a truly self-effacing one could resist the temptation of making himself the central character in his own travel book.

One such writer was the late Norman Lewis, a prolific traveller whose ego rarely made an appearance in any of his works. He once described himself as a semi-invisible man, a writer of “revealing little descriptions” who, in words that were always well considered, got the heart of a place by examining its history and its people. In particular, he was interested in the indigenous people he met in the many countries he visited, those whose entire existence was—and in many cases still is—threatened by our ever-changing world.

Lewis had an exceptional gift for capturing the atmosphere of a country on the cusp of social or political change. In A Dragon Apparent (1951), about his travels in what was known then as Indo-China, he writes of Vietnam during a period of violent transition; and in Golden Earth (1952) details a war-stricken Burma that is already starting to develop in a most severe and baleful way. These books would likely have been considered classics even if Burma and Vietnam had changed little in the years following their publication. But it is true that they are made all the interesting in light of the Vietnam War and Burma’s military junta.

Golden Earth is the lesser known of the two: surprisingly little appears to have been written about it online, as manifestly brilliant as it is. It opens memorably with a surge of description, with “Burma spread as a dark stain into the midnight sea,” and a “moonlight too weak” to reveal fully a breath-taking spectacle of golden pagodas. Yet by the very next page Lewis has shifted moods entirely, and is now explaining how, through “a slow process of compression and corruption”, officials handling his travel documents have managed to confuse his name with Thirty Bedford Square, the address of his publisher. Thus for the rest of his trip he is known as “Monsieur Thirsty Bedford”.

Lewis had sense of humour like no other travel writer. His works were often funny, though rarely did he crack wise. His wit instead came from his remarkable ability to deconstruct the absurd using his typically dry, detached style. At his funniest, his prose read like that of S.J. Perelman, a writer Lewis admired and later befriended. But unlike Perelman, Lewis was never intent on merely making his reader laugh. In fact, often the most humorous parts of his books were also the most revealing. A perfect example of this can be found in the first half of Golden Earth, where Lewis describes his ordeal of eating a meal by which “all European prejudices about food had to be abandoned”.

Lewis dines in what he calls “a murky grotto” in which a cook stands, naked to the waist, with “a snippet” of intestine dangling from his finger. A lesser writer might have had his fun with this image and moved on, but here Lewis take the opportunity to make fun of himself too, and later, after conceding to try the dish, is impressed find that it is surprisingly edible. This is typically open-minded of Lewis, who never let a bad experience tarnish his image of country or its people. A few pages later, he is trying sleep and is startled by something he “half-dreamed half-thought” climbing up the leg of his camp bed. He soon discovers that he is sharing the bed with a scorpion, but again, resists the urge to grouse.

Of course, the reader understands why Lewis is reluctant to complain: compared to the people that Lewis writes about, his grievances seem inconsequential. Within the very first few pages of Golden Earth we hear how pirates have held up a ferryboat and killed three members of the crew, and similar incidents have become almost a daily occurrence. The Burma portrayed throughout the book is one of fear and unrest, where insurgents and warlords are commonplace, and the country’s post-colonial government can do little to stop them. Yet aside from this, Lewis is overwhelmed equally by the country’s breath-taking natural beauty and the kind generosity of the Burmese.

Their standard of living has been better in the past—this is practically undisputed fact—but Lewis wants to know specifically if things were better in the days of British rule. Apparently it is commonly agreed: “Better?” they say. “Why even bring it up? Everyone was well off then.” British rule, we’re told, brought several enduring changes to Burma that completely transformed its once-agrarian society. Up until that point, kings had ruled the country, perhaps the most infamous of which being King Mindon Min. He is remembered largely for his attempts to modernise his kingdom, his sheer brutality, and for his great many children, of which seventy were of royal birth.

Hsinbyumashin, one of his queens, dominated the last days of Mindon’s rule, and ordered that almost all possible heirs to the throne be killed, so that her daughter Supayalat and son-in-law Thibaw would become queen and king. What ensued was a long and brutal ceremony during which the siblings were placed in red velvet sacks and respectfully beaten to death in a festival lasting six days. “Clearing” is the word Lewis uses to describe the massacre, “cleared” being the current Burmese euphemism for such planned killings. As for the sacks—no doubt the reader has already guessed why these were made of red velvet: it was to “camouflage any unseemly effusion of royal blood”.

A great admirer of Herodotus, Lewis was a historian at heart, though he was also too gifted in other ways to be confined to that title. His accounts, as bold and brimming with description as they were, rarely took the form of step-by-step reportage. When Lewis did adopt the familiar style of most travel writers, he did so only briefly, and never to give the reader a greater impression of himself. The place and its people were always his priority; he was only ever a casual observer, a chronicler of the exotic, whose job it was to inform and entertain the reader, never to impose his personality upon them.

By revealing so little about himself, Lewis was able to say more about his subject and fill his accounts with more “revealing little descriptions”. Golden Earth paints a fascinating portrait of Burma at a notably turbulent time, and yet Lewis doesn’t stop there. As he reels through a substantial portion of its history, he also attempts to offer the reader an idea of how the average Burmese behaves and thinks. We are told that they are not a resentful people; they are, as a whole, accepting of Westerners, and their hospitality is sometimes so great that it borders on embarrassing. Lewis is treated like an old friend wherever he goes and with whomever he speaks, and frequently feels bad for taking so much in exchange for so little.

We learn, too, (though Lewis himself has his doubts) how the women of Burma enjoy “absolute equality” to men, and that long extracts from the ancient Laws of Manu can be quoted in support of this contention. Buddhism is the country’s main religion, and at first the Burmese can seem rather pious. But as Lewis explains, 1950s Burma is more modern than it at first seems. It is surprisingly British in some respects too, and Lewis does not find it especially strange when he encounters a man enjoying a Penguin D.H. Lawrence, or a Director of Prisons who quotes Chaucer. He is, however, amused to meet a restaurant owner who is eager to serve him egg and chips, despite Lewis’s insistence that he’d much rather try something more exotic.

Lewis seems genuinely beguiled by Burma. Looking beyond the fighting and unrest, he gathers a sense of what it is truly about, and fancies it a land where “the condition of the soul replaces that of the stock market as a topic of polite conversation”. Burma’s obvious political problems aside, he believes that it is a most exceptional country, better in many ways to our own: it is fertile, reasonably populated, and free from the damaging myths of colour, race or caste. “All that is necessary,” he concludes, “is to cure the people of their infantile craving for trash from overseas,” for unnecessary consumption has no place in Burmese life.

As for Burma’s communist incursions: Lewis predicts an incurable dictatorship that will lead to civil war. But never in the pages of Golden Earth does Lewis sound terribly pessimistic. He was an optimist in many ways, and this quality is the golden thread that can be found in all of his travel books. While he may have been interested highlighting man’s darkest propensities, he seemed to believe equally that man had the ability to do good. Otherwise he wouldn’t have written so fondly of the great many countries he visited. Lewis certainly saw plenty of good in the Burmese he met, and this mesmerising account is teeming with the same exuberance and compassion that he claimed to witness on this unforgettable trip. ( )
1 stem jacksharpwriter | Jun 19, 2014 |
Viser 5 af 5
For many of its practitioners, travel writing is entirely a romantic venture by which the writer imagines himself as the hero of his own account, tramping his way through uncharted sands like Lawrence of Arabia. A more modest writer might see things less conceitedly and make himself the fool instead; but surely only a truly self-effacing one could resist the temptation of making himself the central character in his own travel book.

One such writer was the late Norman Lewis, a prolific traveller whose ego rarely made an appearance in any of his works. He once described himself as a semi-invisible man, a writer of “revealing little descriptions” who, in words that were always well considered, got to the heart of a place by examining its history and its people. In particular, he was interested in the indigenous people he met in the many countries he visited, those whose entire existence was—and in many cases still is—threatened by our ever-changing world.

Lewis had an exceptional gift for capturing the atmosphere of a country on the cusp of social or political change. In A Dragon Apparent (1951), about his travels in what was known then as Indo-China, he writes of Vietnam during a period of violent transition; and in Golden Earth (1952) details a war-stricken Burma that is already starting to develop in a most severe and baleful way. These books would likely have been considered classics even if Burma and Vietnam had changed little in the years following their publication. But it is true that they are made all the more interesting in light of the Vietnam War and Burma’s military junta.

Golden Earth is the lesser known of the two: surprisingly little appears to have been written about it online, as manifestly brilliant as it is. It opens memorably on a surge of description, with “Burma spread as a dark stain into the midnight sea,” and a “moonlight too weak” to reveal fully a breath-taking spectacle of golden pagodas. Yet by the very next page Lewis has shifted moods entirely, and is now explaining how, through “a slow process of compression and corruption”, officials handling his travel documents have managed to confuse his name with Thirty Bedford Square, the address of his publisher. Thus for the rest of his trip he is known as “Monsieur Thirsty Bedford”.

Lewis had a sense of humour like no other travel writer. His works were often funny, though rarely did he crack wise. His wit instead came from his remarkable ability to deconstruct the absurd using his typically dry, detached style. At his funniest, his prose read like that of S.J. Perelman, a writer Lewis admired and later befriended. But unlike Perelman, Lewis was never intent on merely making his reader laugh. In fact, often the most humorous parts of his books were also the most revealing. A perfect example of this can be found in the first half of Golden Earth, where Lewis describes his ordeal of eating a meal by which “all European prejudices about food had to be abandoned”.

Lewis dines in what he calls “a murky grotto” in which a cook stands, naked to the waist, with “a snippet” of intestine dangling from his finger. A lesser writer might have had his fun with this image and moved on, but here Lewis takes the opportunity to make fun of himself too, and later, after conceding to try the dish, is impressed to find that it is surprisingly edible. This is typically open-minded of Lewis, who never let a bad experience tarnish his image of a country or its people. A few pages later, he is trying to sleep and is startled by something he “half-dreamed half-thought” climbing up the leg of his camp bed. He soon discovers that he is sharing the bed with a scorpion, but again, resists the urge to grouse.

Of course, the reader understands why Lewis is reluctant to complain: compared to the people that Lewis writes about, his grievances seem inconsequential. Within the very first few pages of Golden Earth we hear how pirates have held up a ferryboat and killed three members of the crew, and similar incidents have become almost a daily occurrence. The Burma portrayed throughout the book is one of fear and unrest, where insurgents and warlords are commonplace, and the country’s post-colonial government can do little to stop them. Yet aside from this, Lewis is overwhelmed equally by the country’s breath-taking natural beauty and the kind generosity of the Burmese.

Their standard of living has been better in the past—this is a practically undisputed fact—but Lewis wants to know specifically if things were better in the days of British rule. Apparently it is commonly agreed: “Better?” they say. “Why even bring it up? Everyone was well off then.” British rule, we’re told, brought several enduring changes to Burma that completely transformed its once-agrarian society. Up until that point, kings had ruled the country, perhaps the most infamous of which being King Mindon Min. He is remembered largely for his attempts to modernise his kingdom, his sheer brutality, and for his great many children, of which seventy were of royal birth.

Hsinbyumashin, one of his queens, dominated the last days of Mindon’s rule, and ordered that almost all possible heirs to the throne be killed, so that her daughter Supayalat and son-in-law Thibaw would become queen and king. What ensued was a long and brutal ceremony during which the siblings were placed in red velvet sacks and respectfully beaten to death in a festival lasting six days. “Clearing” is the word Lewis uses to describe the massacre, “cleared” being the current Burmese euphemism for such planned killings. As for the sacks—no doubt the reader has already guessed why these were made of red velvet: it was to “camouflage any unseemly effusion of royal blood”.

A great admirer of Herodotus, Lewis was a historian at heart, though he was also too gifted in other ways to be confined to that title. His accounts, as bold and brimming with description as they were, rarely took the form of step-by-step reportage. When Lewis did adopt the familiar style of most travel writers, he did so only briefly, and never to give the reader a greater impression of himself. The place and its people were always his priority; he was only ever a casual observer, a chronicler of the exotic, whose job it was to inform and entertain the reader, never to impose his personality upon them.

By revealing so little about himself, Lewis was able to say more about his subject and fill his accounts with more “revealing little descriptions”. Golden Earth paints a fascinating portrait of Burma at a notably turbulent time, and yet Lewis doesn’t stop there. As he reels through a substantial portion of its history, he also attempts to offer the reader an idea of how the average Burmese behaves and thinks. We are told that they are not a resentful people; they are, as a whole, accepting of Westerners, and their hospitality is sometimes so great that it borders on embarrassing. Lewis is treated like an old friend wherever he goes and with whomever he speaks, and frequently feels bad for taking so much in exchange for so little.

We learn, too, (though Lewis himself has his doubts) how the women of Burma enjoy “absolute equality” to men, and that long extracts from the ancient Laws of Manu can be quoted in support of this contention. Buddhism is the country’s main religion, and at first the Burmese can seem rather pious. But as Lewis explains, 1950s Burma is more modern than it at first seems. It is surprisingly British in some respects too, and Lewis does not find it especially strange when he encounters a man enjoying a Penguin D.H. Lawrence, or a Director of Prisons who quotes Chaucer. He is, however, amused to meet a restaurant owner who is eager to serve him egg and chips, despite Lewis’s insistence that he’d much rather try something more exotic.

Lewis seems genuinely beguiled by Burma. Looking beyond the fighting and unrest, he gathers a sense of what it is truly about, and fancies it a land where “the condition of the soul replaces that of the stock market as a topic of polite conversation”. Burma’s obvious political problems aside, he believes that it is a most exceptional country, better in many ways to our own: it is fertile, reasonably populated, and free from the damaging myths of colour, race or caste. “All that is necessary,” he concludes, “is to cure the people of their infantile craving for trash from overseas,” for unnecessary consumption has no place in Burmese life.

As for Burma’s communist incursions: Lewis predicts an incurable dictatorship that will lead to civil war. But never in the pages of Golden Earth does Lewis sound terribly pessimistic. He was an optimist in many ways, and this quality is the golden thread that can be found in all of his travel books. While he may have been interested highlighting man’s darkest propensities, he seemed to believe equally that man has the ability to do good. Otherwise he wouldn’t have written so fondly of the great many countries he visited. Lewis certainly saw plenty of good in the Burmese he met, and this mesmerising account is teeming with the same exuberance and compassion that he claimed to have witnessed on this unforgettable trip.
 
The three strengths of Golden Earth are Lewis’ desire to get off the beaten path, his historical research, and his ability to write. Strangely, the latter is all too often missing from so-called ‘travel writers’. In Lewis’ writing, though, you’ll find a master scene setter and a knight of understated humour. Here, for instance, is Lewis describing his presence at a formal reception: ’Fortunately, Orientals are not obsessed by the necessity of keeping up polite conversation. It is sufficient to contribute an occasional remark; to produce for the benefit of those sitting opposite, a smile, which, indeed, tends after a time to stiffen into the kind of grimace produced at the demand of the old-fashioned photographer.’
Golden Earth is a pleasure to read, and informative of the character and history of Burma.
 
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Like most travelers in Burma, Norman Lewis fell in love with the land and its people. Although much of the countryside was under the control of insurgent armies-the book was originally published in 1952-he managed, by steamboat, decrepit lorry, and dacoit-besieged train, to travel almost everywhere he wanted. This perseverance enabled him to see brilliant spectacles that are still out of our reach, and to meet all types of Burmese, from District officers to the inmates of Rangoon's jail. All the color, gaiety, and charm of the East spring to life with this master storyteller.

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