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Mediterranean Winter, by Robert D. Kaplan
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In Mediterranean Winter, Robert D. Kaplan, the bestselling author of Balkan Ghosts and Eastward to Tartary, relives an austere, haunting journey he took as a youth through the off-season Mediterranean. The awnings are rolled up and the other tourists are gone, so the damp, cold weather takes him back to the 1950s and earlier—a golden, intensely personal age of tourism.
Decades ago, Kaplan voyaged from North Africa to Italy, Yugoslavia, and Greece, luxuriating in the radical freedom of youth, unaccountable to time because there was always time to make up for a mistake. He recalls that journey in this Persian miniature of a book, less to look inward into his own past than to look outward in order to dissect the process of learning through travel, in which a succession of new landscapes can lead to books and artwork never before encountered.
Kaplan first imagines Tunis as the glow of gypsum lamps shimmering against lime-washed mosques; the city he actually discovers is even more intoxicating. He takes the reader to the ramparts of a Turkish kasbah where Carthaginian, Roman, and Byzantine forts once stood: “I could see deep into Algeria over a rib-work of hills so gaunt it seemed the wind had torn the flesh off them.” In these austere and aromatic surroundings he discovers Saint Augustine; the courtyards of Tunis lead him to the historical writings of Ibn Khaldun.
Kaplan takes us to the fifth-century Greek temple at Segesta, where he reflects on the ill-fated Athenian invasion of Sicily. At Hadrian’s villa, “Shattered domes revealed clouds moving overhead in countless visions of eternity. It was a place made for silence and for contemplation, where you wanted a book handy. Every corner was a cloister. No view was panoramic: each seemed deliberately composed.”
Kaplan’s bus and train travels, his nighttime boat voyages, and his long walks in one archaeological site after another lead him to subjects as varied as the Berber threat to Carthage; the Roman army’s hunt for the warlord Jugurtha; the legacy of Byzantine art; the medieval Greek philosopher Georgios Gemistos Plethon, who helped kindle the Italian Renaissance; twentieth-century British literary writing about Greece; and the links between Rodin and the Croa-
tian sculptor Ivan Mestrovic. Within these pages are smells, tastes, and the profundity of chance encounters. Mediterranean Winter begins in Rodin’s sculpture garden in Paris, passes through the gritty streets of Marseilles, and ends with a moving epiphany about Greece as the world prepares for the 2004 Summer Olympics in Athens.
Mediterranean Winter is the story of an education. It is filled with memories and history, not the author’s alone, but humanity’s as well.
- Sales Rank: #950733 in eBooks
- Published on: 2011-11-23
- Released on: 2011-11-23
- Format: Kindle eBook
From Publishers Weekly
Many recent travel memoirs have focused on the personal minutiae of a journey, but Atlantic Monthly correspondent Kaplan (Balkan Ghosts) is a breed apart. Similar to classic writers like Lawrence Durrell and Henry Miller, Kaplan relates only a scant amount of detail about himself and why he's traveling. Particulars about quirky characters and minor annoyances are rare. Instead, he uses graceful prose to describe the history of the ground on which he walks and his absorption with events that happened centuries before he bought his first plane ticket. A visit to Carthage isn't merely a cozy ride through a pleasant landscape; as his train surges forward, he summons up the first foreign invasion from the Phoenician city-state of Tyre. With his lyrical writing style, Kaplan makes factual summations into slowly unraveling, luxurious tales. "The founding of Carthage is clothed in sumptuous myth," he writes. Sometimes, however, this approach interferes with coherence. The richness of the prose and the depth to which Kaplan delves into the past can make his actual travel experiences somewhat jarring. (When he collects a $40 check for freelance work from the Christian Science Monitor, it's as if Hannibal had suddenly strolled into the American Express office.) But generally, the discord between Kaplan's everyday reality and his intellectual wanderings makes for a sweet mix. And because he dips so liberally into history and goes into such detail about ancient peoples, it doesn't matter that Kaplan's visits to the Mediterranean actually took place in the 1970s. His love for antiquity, much like his writing, is timeless.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
Kaplan was an unknown freelance writer 28 years ago when, fresh from college, he embarked on the journey this volume chronicles. The author has since worked his way to the summit of the travel-writing business through such works as Eastward to Tartary (2000). The newness of the travel experience, and discovering ways to best digest it, is, therefore, a theme in Kaplan's recollection of this formative trip, which runs parallel to his description of people and places. Unerring avenues into a locale's historical and contemporary personality are works by other travelers. Thus allusions to titles ranging from antiquity (Sallust's Jugurthine War) to the present are interwoven with Kaplan's itinerary, which culminates in meeting, in a remote part of Greece, with British travel author Patrick Leigh Fermor. Kaplan observes that "real adventure is not about risk but the acquisition of knowledge." That comment may well stand as the precept of this mellow, evocative tour of the Mediterranean in the off-season. Sure to delight Kaplan's many fans. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
“In this colorful book, we watch the author—America’s premier traveler and ‘muddy boots’ analyst—grow from an uncertain twenty-year-old to an adept, mature commentator. The book cuts back and forth across the decades, from the docks of Tunis to the sunburned hills of Sicily and across to Athens, which Kaplan early recognized (and loves) as the world’s first third-world city. The book is like a glass of retsina—thrilling, but likely to cause a catch at the back of the throat—as one regards, through Kaplan’s eyes, the slaughter and cruelty that have always accompanied the glories of Mediterranean civilization.”
—Geoffrey Wawro, professor of strategic studies at the U.S. Naval War College, anchor of the History Channel’s Hardcover History
“Mediterranean Winter is a beautiful book. We have come to expect carefully articulated and cogent history from Robert Kaplan, but what is unexpected here is the lyrical grace of his writing, and also the deep, personal attachment to the places and people he introduces us to. I felt as if I were traveling by his side on this unusual journey to some of the world’s most ancient civilizations.”
—Jane Alexander, former chair of the National Endowment for the Arts
Most helpful customer reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
In the footsteps of Patrick Leigh Fermor…
By John P. Jones III
…as well as others.
I’ve read a number of the works of Robert Kaplan, starting with Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History) some three decades ago. Most recently, I read a Vine offering of his, In Europe's Shadow: Two Cold Wars and a Thirty-Year Journey Through Romania and Beyond, about Romania. He brings a powerful erudition to his works, and therefore they are always most worthwhile, though at times he seems to lack empathy for “the ragged people” to use a phrase from Simon and Garfunkel’s “The Boxer.”
This work concerns Kaplan’s trips to the central Mediterranean region, namely Tunisia and Sicily, in the winter of 1975-76, as well as the coast of Dalmatia and parts of Greece, between 1971 and 1978. And it concerns his re-visits to these areas over the subsequent decades. On his trips in the ‘70’s, he was “just a kid,” often stayed in the part of town “where the ragged people go,” and could not possibly have known the historical background to the places visited. In short, he was like a lot of us who traveled in our ‘20’s… trying to take it all in, and hoping to gain the historical and cultural perspective later. Certainly a leading practitioner of youthful travel and write-about-it-later is Patrick Leigh Fermor, who walked from the coast of Holland through Nazi Germany to Constantinople in the 1930’s; decades later he would describe this walk in three volumes, commencing with A Time of Gifts: On Foot to Constantinople: From the Hook of Holland to the Middle Danube (New York Review Books Classics). Kaplan mentions Fermor on page 13. Like Fermor, Kaplan wrote about his youthful travels decades later, overlaying his initial experiences with scholarly erudition on the rise and fall of civilizations in these ancient lands.
Kaplan’s Mediterranean trip starts, as it does for so many, when he arrives at St. Charles station in Marseilles. He notes the influx of people from the Med’s southern shore, and the corresponding change in the city’s character. Soon, he is on a boat for Tunisia, and with his latter knowledge tells the tale of the initial settlement of Carthage by the Phoenicians in the 9th century BCE. Kaplan says that it was in Tunisia that he really learned to think about the Roman Empire… and he goes on to describe the area’s destruction in the Punic Wars. Then the Vandals came, and subsequently the Arabs. Both Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky drew major artistic inspiration from the country. One of Kaplan’s guides is Flaubert’s By Gustave Flaubert - Salammbo (Penguin Classics) (7/26/77), which he repeatedly references. There is a bit of the author in his accounts, but mainly it is the history and culture of the country.
Sicily was the biggest surprise, since I knew the least about it, and Kaplan traveled from end to end, and up to down. Corinth established Syracuse as a major colony. Aeschylus would write Prometheus Bound (Dover Thrift Editions) there. Archimedes would die there, in fighting during the Punic Wars. Roger, and his son, Roger II, originally from Hauteville, near St. Lo, in northern France, would establish and rule a cosmopolitan and generally tolerant kingdom at Palermo, which was the second most populated city in Europe in the early 12th century (after Constantinople).
Kaplan traveled up the boot of Italy, and devoted a chapter to Hadrian’s villa at Tivoli, and repeatedly referenced Marguerite Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian (FSG Classics). He crosses the Adriatic, and experiences Diocletian’s palace at Split, and later incisively describes how Dubrovnik (formerly Ragusa) was able to maintain its independence as a city-state for so long.
His last country of call is Greece. One again, I found his descriptions of Mistra, near ancient Sparta, equally informative. For the finale, Kaplan ventures down into Mani, the southern most peninsula of mainland Greece, to the town of Kardamyli, to see “the last pasha of the Mediterranean,” in his home. “The walking sticks I had seen, the layers of sweaters and the ruddy complexion spoke of a healthy life in chilly rooms.” The year is 2002, and Kaplan’s host is the 87-year old Patrick Leigh Fermor (who would remain active until his final day, at the age of 96). Georgios Gemistros Plethon was a philosopher in the Middle Ages, and resident at Mistra. Fermor and Kaplan were discussing him, and Kaplan says of Fermor: “Here in full force was the erudition that flavor’s every page of Fermor’s books: the unearthing from expert sources of what is so worthwhile to know, but which so few of us do know.”
Kaplan continues the tradition as a spiritual fellow-traveler of Fermor’s. 5-stars.
18 of 18 people found the following review helpful.
Entertaining, thought-provoking and intelligent.
By USAF Veteran
This is travel writing the way it was meant to be - Informative, concise and illuminating.
Kaplan relives his journeys from many years ago as he first travelled through the Mediterranean struggling with being a free-lance writer. Most of the book is recollections from more than 20 years ago although there are comments from recent trips back to some of the locations and a wonderful recent interview with Patrick Leigh Fermor, author of A Time of Gifts, and other well-known travel books.
The down-side of reporting on these decades-old journeys is that some of the spontaneity and opinion is lost. I find that sometimes I learn more from disagreeing with a travel writers' hasty opinion than in boring, well-edited neutral reporting. However, in this case, I think that the elapsed time has given this account nuances and a filtered content that add to the writing. It's as if the ensuing decades have concentrated the meaning and subtleties of the journey.
The part on Tunisia was replete with history of the Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans, Berbers, and Carthaginians. Sicily was filled with the Greek influences on this place. Dalmatia, in previous Yugoslavia, and Greece were well-represented.
I confess I particularly enjoyed the recent encouter with Patrick Leigh Fermor who in his 80's is working on the last book of the trilogy about his travels in the 30's on foot from Holland to Constantinople. If you haven't read his first two, you need to.
Kaplan also includes a list of books that he considers essential to understanding these regions. It is excellent and is a good start to understanding these areas in depth.
Overall, excellent and gripping - which is hard in travel writing.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
Start with another book
By Forest7
Mediterranean Winter is not the book to begin with in reading Robert D. Kaplan books. It lacks the energy and presence that some of his other books have. John Julius Norwich in his Byzantine books covers much of this territory, and he obviously loves history. Kaplan loves travel more than history, and it appears difficult for him to reconstruct old travels from his journals.
These comments should not prejudice you against Kaplan's books. Start with Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power and you will be rewarded with energetic and informative travel writing that includes the history of the area in an enlightening way.
Then the reader will be in a position to choose from the other Kaplan books.
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