Not sure what that was about… ( )

An intriguing book with such flowing descriptive language. What a life he had, and he only opened up a few areas. His childhood with his crazy aunts in Wales, then years back with his Spiritualist family in Enfield, the early years of his marriage and tumultuous time with his Sicilian wife Ernestina, war years in Nth Africa in the Intelligence Corps, and finally a period with his family in Italy.
Graham Greene had "no hesitation in calling him one of the best writers, not of any particular decade, but of our century".
When I started reading my next book club assignment, it seemed so flat, no life in the prose ...
This was a gem of a book to pick up in an op shop.

Norman Lewis is an author famous for travel literature, but his autobiography is not much about travel. Perhaps "I came, I saw. An autobiography" can best be characterized as the story behind Lewis''s later travels. This impression is strengthened by the last pages of Chapter 22 (pp. 329 - 337) are all short references to future travels and books written by Lewis. In the older (pre-1996) edition these were the last pages of the book.

As the book is not about his travels, it relates episodes of the authors life and formative years. The choice of material is rather uneven. The first 150 pages are about the author's youth growing up in England. There are no direct references to dates or time, but indirect clues suggest that this episode is situated in the 1920s and 30s. This part of the book is rather boring.

The next 45 pages (Chaps 9 - 13) cover some of Lewis earliest travels with Ernestina, a friend, to Spain, a few weeks before the outbreak of the Civil War and a trip to Aden. Obviously, the coverage of these chapters is far too short.

The rest of the book, Part 4, from p. 205 to p. 237, is about World War II. Having learnt Arabic during and after the trip to Aden, Lewis is stationed in Algeria during the largest part of the war. He described Algeria, particularly Philipsville {sic!} (Philippeville, now Skikda) as a thoughrouly decadent city in the 1940s, with a strong resentment in the local population against the French colonial rulers. Thus, Lewis sketches Algeria as follows: "This was a country where ripe fruit hung for the picking on every tree and if a man wanted a woman there was always an unpaid Arab girl around about the house to be pulled into a quiet corner. The Algerian had grown to expect the instant satisfaction of his slightest desire" (p.222).

In the original edition, the book ended after the war. In the new edition of 1996, 50 pages were added to describe the author's time spent in southern Italy in the 1960s and 70s. These chapters are bland and uninspiring.

Altogether, the book is rather uninspiring and boring. ( )