Nicholas Rankin at Literary Review:
Norman Lewis (1908–2003) was arguably the finest English travel writer of his generation. Other contenders for the title – Robert Byron, Peter Fleming, Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, say – were all Oxford-educated, but Lewis was a product of Enfield’s grammar school and its public library. A devotee of the classics – Herodotus, Suetonius, Chekhov, Turgenev – he was attracted southwards. Federico García Lorca was his favourite poet. He gracefully reconfigured his first book, Spanish Adventure, written at twenty-six, into his last book, The Tomb in Seville, at the age of ninety-four. Just as a matador conceals his sword behind a bright muleta cape, he masked a tragic sensibility with a comic style.
This brilliant new anthology, A Quiet Evening, is the latest selection of Lewis’s work edited by John Hatt, who founded Eland Books in 1982. Hatt’s dream was to republish great travel literature in handsome editions. The first classic he reissued was A Dragon Apparent, Lewis’s account of his journeys in Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam, originally published in 1951, before war devastated Indo-China.
more here.
Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.