Originally published on Green Man Review.
These three volumes are part of the Armchair Traveler series launched by London-based Haus Publishing in 2004. Indeed, without ever leaving the comfort of your living room, you can gain some sense of the past and present of these three cities (and several more along the way) from Canadian-born journalist Nicholas Woodsworth’s writings about them. The overall title for this trilogy refers to his very plausible belief that the Mediterranean Sea is a “liquid continent,” whose ports are linked by commerce and migration and shared history. In this telling, people who live in the cities, towns and villages around the sea’s edge have more in common with each other than they necessarily do with inland residents of their own countries. Woodsworth’s take on globalization is simply this, cultural and commercial exchange. Given this interpretation, he argues that globalization “has been with us for a very long time” (Alexandria, p. 53).
Since we received them all in the same package, I read all these books in order. To be honest, I can’t imagine that anyone would read just one or two of them, or read them out of order. They are as sequential as any serial would be. One literally picks up where the one before left off. In fact, the transitions as Woodsworth travels from city to city are every bit as fascinating as his experiences in the title cities themselves.
The journey begins with Woodsworth riding the train from Cairo to Alexandria. In a brief flashback, he lets the reader know that his fascination with Mediterranean culture grew out of his marriage to Jany, a schoolteacher from Aix-en-Provence, where he now lives. Once in Alexandria, he takes a room at the Union Hotel, a shabby and undistinguished building not far from the Corniche, the road that curves along the city’s waterfront. He spends most of his time walking around the city, seeing the sights. These include the contemporary version of the famous Alexandria Library as well as the archeological dig at St. Sabah, a Greek Orthodox church abandoned when Nasser’s Egyptianization policies decimated the city’s foreign population in the early 1950s. These visits prompt him to muse about the city’s past. He eats in small restaurants and makes the acquaintance of a few locals, who tell him stories about their pasts, which prompt him to indulge in even more musings about the city’s past.
After Alexandria, the storyline gets more complicated. Somewhat masochistically, Woodsworth decides to travel from Alexandria to Istanbul (his original next destination) by land and sea rather than air. The first hundred pages of Venice describe that journey in rather harrowing detail. Among the places he visits en route are Aqaba, Damascus (which he didn’t like at all), Aleppo, Latakia, Ankara and Izmir. Just as he’s arriving in Istanbul, he has a phone conversation with Jany that changes his itinerary completely. She has a break from teaching and wants to spend it with him in Venice. So, off he goes, just like that.
Even though Jany managed to find, through her far-flung network of acquaintances, a very nice apartment for them to use, Woodsworth clearly found Venice disappointing. It was far too crowded with tourists to offer the relaxed and enjoyable experience he obviously sought. He only manages to redeem the visit when he decides to shift his attention away from the usual tourist attractions and focus instead on the city’s considerable maritime history. This he undertakes with the kind of enthusiasm that I have when I start a new field research project, activating a network of informants, conducting interviews, visiting interesting “scenes.” Interestingly enough, once he embarks on this phase of his visit, on around page 175 of the book, Jany disappears from the narrative until close to the end when they are preparing to leave the city.
At last Woodsworth returns to Istanbul in the third book. Once again, he takes a circuitous route, stopping in the Italian port of Ancona, from there embarking on a long side excursion to Albania (hardly a popular tourist spot), where he visits the capital city of Tirana and the port of Durres. He also stops in Gallipoli, where he learns and passes along several depressing facts about the extremely bloody World War I battle that took place there. So once again, Woodsworth is eighty pages into the book before he actually arrives at his destination. And he spends some time visiting the usual tourist attractions, like the Aya Sofya and the Galata Tower. He manages to find a nice apartment to stay in, this one in a French school. This city prompts him to ponder its transformation from Constantinople, a great Byzantine city, to Istanbul, the center of the Ottoman Empire. He offers his own explanation for the fall of that empire, perhaps a bit oversimplifying the significance of its sheer size as a deterrent to efficient military and civilian administration — I mean somehow the British managed to do it, and the Ottomans were no slouches at running bureaucracies! Here he finally finds happiness by going out fishing with three cronies he meets at the Beyoglu Municipal Research Centre.
Although I must admit that I never quite figured out what possessed Woodsworth to undertake the months-long journey that became the basis for these books (I hope he got a nice advance from Haus Publishing to cover all these odd expenses!), I’m very glad he did. Even though I have read many other books, both fiction and non-fiction, about Alexandria, Venice and Istanbul, I learned a lot more about these cities from perusing these books. Of course I can easily imagine a second trilogy emerging from the same theme, featuring, say, Athens, Barcelona and Marseilles.
Each of these clothbound books is small enough to fit in a large pocket — 5 inches by 6 and 5/8 inches, running between 200 and 300 pages long. They are attractively designed, with regional maps on the endpapers, wide margins, and the occasional black and white illustration by Jaroslaw Dombrowski. They would make a great gift for someone who travels, or dreams of traveling, in this part of the world.
(All from Haus Publishing, 2008)
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