The World, The World

Sometimes when you go to the library looking for something, you come home with something that proves to be a real treasure. Such was Norman Lewis' The World, The World. It is a book well worth going to the library and reading from beginning to end.

To call Lewis a travel writer would limit the scope of his writing. This particular book is part memoir, part cultural anthropology, and part political commentary. His descriptions of various places in the world are superb - as his obituary says, Lewis could make even a lorry interesting. His commentary about his marriage into an Italian Mafioso family and  as a member of the British Intelligence Corps during WWII, reflects a man with a zest for life and adventure. As he continued to travel to places whose cultures were still relatively untouched, his personal perspective became increasingly political.

Lewis goes to Indo-China -before the Vietnam war, before Nixon blasted it "back into the stone age." He spends time in Guatemala where oppression by the few, leads to the killing fields described by Rigoberta Menchu. He listens to Castro in Cuba and observes Castro's rise to power during the Cuban Revolution. He travels to Thailand when "staged experiences" for the tourists just were discovered to be lucrative and as it began to flourish as a center of the sex trade . He harshly describes how evangelicals, bandits, and the greedy all pressed their agendas on peoples who had lived peacefully together for centuries.

Lewis was fortunate to get an early manuscript published by one of the leading publishers in England - and his descriptions of the "courtship" process are hilarious. He had been ready to send a manuscript to a small publishing house when a friend challenged him to start at the top - a "what do you have to lose."

The pattern of his life becomes established with this bit of luck: travel somewhere where most people do not or cannot go. Then hole up somewhere for a year or more and write (I always wonder how people pull this off - I mean, where does the money come from to rent a house - and pay a housekeeper, modest as the house may be).

One writing place was the coast of Wales, where his housekeeper sings her way to God. Another was a small and isolated fishing village on the coast of Spain before developers destroyed the place with hi-rise condos and parking lots.

I will carry Norman Lewis around with me for a while: his thoughtfulness, his ease with the English language, his gift for describing people and places. And for the commentary of his life. The cultures he observed and their destruction. And the ways humans evolve of living together in communities.

In this connected global world, isolated places rapidly are ceasing to exist. We watch wars and oil spills as they happen. Protesters march in the streets and in our living rooms. Cell phones are ubiquitous. Immigration is not about starting over somewhere else without any connection with people left behind. As a cartoon in the New Yorker quipped: "honey, someday we can retire and sit on the couch and watch travel videos" - thanks to the likes of Rick Steves and Rudy Maxa.

Perhaps when we look at our own lives, we will discover that all of us have a little bit of Lewis within us - whether we have traveled far from home or not.

Elizabeth