A
Short Walk in the Hindu Kush by Eric Newby
Preface by Evelyn Waugh
For more than a decade following the end of World War II, Eric Newby
toiled away in the British fashion industry, peddling some of the ugliest
clothes on the planet. (Regarding one wafer-thin model in her runway best,
he was reminded of "those flagpoles they put up in the Mall when the Queen
comes home.") Fortunately, Newby reached the end his haute-couture tether
in 1956. At that point, with the sort of sublime impulsiveness that's forbidden
to fictional characters but endemic to real ones, he decided to visit a
remote corner of Afghanistan, where no Englishman had planted his brogans
for at least 50 years. What's more, he recorded his adventure in a classic
narrative, A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush. The title, of course, is a fine
example of Newby's habitual self-effacement, since his journey--which included
a near-ascent of the 19,800-foot Mir Samir--was anything but short. And
his book seems to furnish a missing link between the great Britannic wanderers
of the Victorian era and such contemporary jungle nuts as Redmond O'Hanlon.
At times it also brings to mind Evelyn Waugh, who contributed the preface.
Newby is a less acidulous writer, to be sure, and he has little interest
in launching the sort of heat-seeking satiric missiles that were Waugh's
specialty. Still, A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush is a hilarious read. The
author excels at the dispiriting snapshot, capturing, say, the Afghan backwater
of Fariman in two crisp sentences: "A whole gale of wind was blowing, tearing
up the surface of the main street. Except for two policemen holding hands
and a dog whose hind legs were paralysed it was deserted." His capsule
history of Nuristan also gets in some sly digs at Britain's special relationship
with the violence-prone Abdur Rahman:
Officially his subsidy had just been increased from 12,000
to 16,000 lakhs of rupees. To the British he had fully justified their
selection of him as Amir of Afghanistan and, apart from the few foibles
remarked by Lord Curzon, like flaying people alive who displeased him,
blowing them from the mouths of cannon, or standing them up to the neck
in pools of water on the summits of high mountains and letting them freeze
solid, he had done nothing to which exception could be taken.
Newby also surpasses Waugh--and indeed, most other travel writers--in another
important respect: he's miraculously free of solipsism. Even the keenest
literary voyagers tend to be, in the purest sense of the term, self-centered.
But A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush includes wonderfully oblique portraits
of the author's travel companion, Hugh Carless, and his wife, Wanda (who
plays a starring role in such subsequent chronicles as Slowly down the
Ganges). There are also dozens of brilliant cameo parts, and an indelible
record of a stunning landscape. The roof of the world is, in Newby's rendering,
both an absolute heaven and a low-oxygen hell. Yet the author never pretends
to pit himself against a malicious Nature--his mountains are, in Frost's
memorable phrase, too lofty and original to rage. Which is yet another
reason to call this little masterpiece a peak performance. --James Marcus
- Amazon.com Paperback: 260 pages
Lonely Planet; ISBN: 0864426046; (September 1998)
Love
And War in the Apennines by Eric Newby
Book Description When Italy made peace in the summer of '43,
50,000 Allied POWs, Eric Newby among them, walked away from their prison
camps. But Italy was occupied by the Germans, and the camps were behind
those lines. Newby went to the mountains where, with the help of locals,
he evaded the retreating enemy.
Italian peasants sheltered him for more than three months. In this classic
memoir of WW II, Newby recalls these selfless people. . .their unchanging
lifestyle, the funny, bizarre and dangerous incidents, his hopes of the
local girl who later became his wife.
"An exciting story, superbly told." (Punch) Of related interest: Carlino
by Stuart Hood and Passages to Freedom by Joseph S. Frelinghuysen, both
available from B-O-T.
Paperback: 276 pages ; Dimensions (in inches): 0.62 x
7.74 x 5.08
Publisher: Lonely Planet; ; (March 1999)
ISBN: 0864427654
The Last Grain Race by Eric Newby
When just 18 years old the author sailed from England for Adelaide
on one of the few remaining merchant sailing ships.
(Paperback - March 1999)
Out of Print
