“Is travel writing dead?” is the question posed to some of the best of the genre in the latest issue of Granta magazine (138: Journeys). Of course, the very fact that it has been put to travel writers such as Pico Iyer, Robert Macfarlane, Rana Dasgupta and Geoff Dyer makes it clear that travel writing, in the editors’ estimation, is definitely not dead — though in their individual ways the writers try to give the reader a sense of how it’s changed, and continues to change, since its “popular peak in the 1980s”. That’s a solid enough nudge to drive the reader back to older writing. That nudge also came with news this week of the death of Robert B. Silvers, founder and editor of The New York Review of Books .
On his watch, NYRB for decades set standards not just for reviewing and political commentary, but also travel writing, excelling in international despatches that did not just provide a sense of place and time, but also caught a country/society/region at the cusp of change, so that the writing continued to give context years later. Some of the best of these despatches were collected into an anniversary volume in 2013 edited by Silvers, The New York Review Abroad: Fifty Years of International Reportage. And to read the book again this week is to wonder, as does Granta editor Sigrid Rausing in her introduction to Journeys , how will we recollect the revolutionary times we are living through? Or, what travel reportage is currently being conducted that may help us, in time to come, put in context the shape-shifting political developments around the world? What may be the iconic images of these times?
In his brief, one-paragraph introduction, Silvers put the challenge like this: “… many writers of these reports set to clarify some corner of history they thought was misunderstood, particularly the ways people were being treated and mistreated by governments and their neighbours. In some cases they took considerable risks in order to observe and understand baffling violence.”
From April 1984 — appropriately 1984, as the article itself makes clear — there is an interview with Natalya Viktorovna Hesse, a friend of physicist and human rights activist Andrei Sakharov and his wife Elena Georgievna Bonner who emigrated from the Soviet Union to the United States, and brought a deeper picture of Sakharov’s detention in the town of Gorky, now renamed Nizhny Novgorod. Hesse’s meetings with Sakharov would take place on the street, “at a prearranged place and a prearranged hour”. The Sakharovs’ apartment was bugged, so anything spoken there would be heard by the authorities. Also, when they went outside, the apartment would be searched. So: “This man with a bad heart — suffering from acute hypertension — is forced to carry this bag every time he leaves home, even if only for ten minutes.” It contained his manuscripts, diaries, notes, even photographs, and a radio receiver.
Another snatch from Hesse’s interview captured the absurdity of such intense surveillance. She recalls Bonner telling her that once looking out a window at the trash on the street outside their apartment, she (Bonner) told Sakharov: “You know, Andrei, I think I’ll photograph this, take a picture and send it to the West. Let them look at this wonderful landscape.” Soldiers arrived the next day, and cleared the trash.
Also from a 1984 issue of NYRB , and included in the anniversary volume, is William Shawcross’s report “The Burial of Cambodia”. It’s a tour of Tuol Sleng, a school in Phnom Penh that had been converted by Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge into an interrogation centre, or as the sign at its gate said, “extermination centre”. It had by the time Shawcross got there, in 1980, been turned into a museum by the Vietnamese after they invaded Cambodia and drove out the murderous Khmer Rouge, bringing to an end a genocide that left at least one-fifth of the country’s people dead. Around 16,000 people, mostly Khmer Rouge cadres who the party thought had turned on it, were brought to Tuol Sleng, writes Shawcross. Hardly any of them got out alive, but before being put to their death, they were photographed and underwent thorough interrogation, their “confessions” meticulously filed.
Today Tuol Sleng is a sobering stop on the tourist’s itinerary in Cambodia, before she moves on to the splendours of Siem Reap. But it is Shawcross’s snapshot of the museum from the eighties, when the Vietnamese were still in control of the country with the Khmer Rouge trying to regroup on the Thai border, that you get a sense of the Vietnamese attempt to shape the historical narrative. It helps explain the current edgy relations between Vietnam and Cambodia, so that some Cambodians refer to the anniversary of the day the Vietnamese swept into their land as “liberation” while others call it “invasion”.
