The Way of the World (ePub)

Nicolas Bouvier was born in 1929 near Geneva, where he died in 1998. Although he was the greatest Swiss travel writer of the 20th century, he was not a restless character. When he did travel, he liked to take it very slowly, and was proud to note that it had taken him longer to get to Japan than Marco Polo. He loved animals, and particularly admired the donkey, whose patience, endurance and humility reminded him of the quiet competence of the good traveller. The youngest of three children of an enlightened and intellectual family (his father was a librarian), Bouvier's early reading of RL Stevenson, Jules Verne, Jack London and Fenimore Cooper made him impatient for the world, and he recalls, 'At eight years old, I traced the course of the kon with my thumbnail in the butter on my toast'. He was encouraged to travel as a teenager by his father, who perhaps sensed that there was no holding his son in the Calvinist, careful, bourgeois Bouvier household. It was during a three-day trek in the Finnish tundra, bivouacking under the stars, that he realised the nomadic state had something to teach him. Without waiting for the result of his degree, in 1953 he left to join Thierry Vernet in goslavia with no intention of returning. The fruits of this companionable journey of a year and a half were published some eight years later, in 1963. Where The Way of the World stops, Bouvier continued, through India to Ceylon and thence to Japan. From his experience of Ceylon in 1955 came The Scorpion-Fish, a novel first published in 1981, and from 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. It was in Japan, to save himself from starvation, that Bouvier took up photography, and developed an eye for imagery which was to become the second string to his career. He became what he called an iconographer, finding images for authors or

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