So It Goes: Travels in the Aran Isles, Xian and places in between - Nicolas Bouvier

£14.99

Translated by Robyn Marsack

Translated here for the first time into English, this collection of shorter travel writings from the golden pen of Nicolas Bouvier covers journeys undertaken in the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s. In the Aran Isles in mid-winter, he glories in the extremities of the wind outside while inside, feverish, he is enchanted by local tales which hum like a kettle on the fire. In Xian, he pays homage to the civilised brilliance and understatement of his guide, while in Korea he experiences the unchanging beauty of the Buddhist temple at Haeinsa and is marked forever by his climb of volcanic Halla-San. And the roots of his interminable curiosity and amusement are traced back to his childhood reading, and to the bitter war he conducted at the age of eight to rid himself of his arch-nemesis, Bertha.

Published for the first time in English, this is the final element in Eland’s homage to Bouvier. We already publish his cult classic The Way of the World: Two men in a car from Geneva to the Khyber Pass, as well as The Scorpion-Fish and The Japanese Chronicles.

‘Nicolas Bouvier was a writer of rare grace and subtlety.  Every essay here shimmers with imaginative insight and wry humour. He has long been known to cognoscenti.  Now, perhaps, his stature will be more widely recognised: one of the most brilliant, penetrating and individual travel writers of his time.’  Colin Thubron

Translated by Robyn Marsack

Translated here for the first time into English, this collection of shorter travel writings from the golden pen of Nicolas Bouvier covers journeys undertaken in the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s. In the Aran Isles in mid-winter, he glories in the extremities of the wind outside while inside, feverish, he is enchanted by local tales which hum like a kettle on the fire. In Xian, he pays homage to the civilised brilliance and understatement of his guide, while in Korea he experiences the unchanging beauty of the Buddhist temple at Haeinsa and is marked forever by his climb of volcanic Halla-San. And the roots of his interminable curiosity and amusement are traced back to his childhood reading, and to the bitter war he conducted at the age of eight to rid himself of his arch-nemesis, Bertha.

Published for the first time in English, this is the final element in Eland’s homage to Bouvier. We already publish his cult classic The Way of the World: Two men in a car from Geneva to the Khyber Pass, as well as The Scorpion-Fish and The Japanese Chronicles.

‘Nicolas Bouvier was a writer of rare grace and subtlety.  Every essay here shimmers with imaginative insight and wry humour. He has long been known to cognoscenti.  Now, perhaps, his stature will be more widely recognised: one of the most brilliant, penetrating and individual travel writers of his time.’  Colin Thubron

So It Goes: Travels in the Aran Isles, Xian and places in between
ISBN: 978-1-78060-114-4
Format: 192pp hardback
Place: Ireland/Scotland/Switzerland/China

Author Biography

Nicolas Bouvier was born in 1929 near Geneva. Without waiting for the result of his degree, in 1953 he left for Yugoslavia with no intention of returning. The fruits of this journey of a year and a half which ended at the Khyber Pass, were published some eight years later as The Way of the World. Bouvier continued through India to Ceylon and thence to Japan. From his experience Japan, where he was to live for more than a year and to revisit in the 1960s and 1970s, came a distillation of experiences, The Japanese Chronicles, which were published in their final version in 1975. He died in 1998 in Geneva.

 Robyn Marsack won the Scott-Moncrieff Prize in 1988 for her translation of Bouvier’s The Scorpion-Fish, and went on to translate his classic L’Usage du Monde / The Way of the World.