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Norman Lewis is more important than ever. It reveals the world in all its dirty beauty and makes you feel like you’ve never seen it before. He is the travel writer’s travel writer, churning out prose with more humanity than Bruce Chatwin, more insight than Jan Morris and more humor than Patrick Leigh Fermor. And as this new collection brilliantly reveals, he is a better writer than all three.
Lewis (1908-2003) was the author of 15 novels and 20 works of non-fiction. 36 pieces in A quiet evening span almost five decades, first appearing in a variety of media from the New Yorker to The Sunday Times. The author describes the “Mechanical Researches of Reptiles” of a jukebox in a bar in Huehuetenango in the far northern highlands of Guatemala; Acre in newly independent Ghana “with an architectural bone structure of old arcaded colonial buildings”; and the strange “candies” of bygone Ibiza, songs of great antiquity, “each line of which ends with a guttural howl.”
His themes are our own – alienation, environmental destruction, the dangers of identity politics. Lewis’s reputation rests on his travel writing, but he made a name for himself as an investigative journalist. The emotional heart of A quiet evening dwells on a 40-page primer on the extermination of the Cintas Largas and other indigenous peoples in the Brazilian Amazon; Lewis’s 12,000-word article was the longest The Sunday Times Magazine had ever published, and when it appeared the paper was forced to hire extra staff to handle the publicity. (It also marked the beginning of a fruitful partnership between Lewis and photographer Don McCullin.)
Other topics include mafia trials; the 1965 California grape picker strike; and the murder by thugs of a British couple in the rocky mountainous heart of Sardinia. As this volume’s brilliant editor, John Hatt, writes, “(Lewis’s) instinct for important events and moments was unerring.” He was always restless and had the physical endurance to satisfy his escape reflex: at 81 he could drink an entire bottle of wine at lunch and then bound up a steep hill like a goat. At one point, Ian Fleming recruited him into the Intelligence Service. His masterpiece and his favorite among his books was Naples ’44 (1978), the diary of his year as an intelligence officer attached to the US Fifth Army. The intervention of the work appealed to the observer hidden in it. It was the person who made up a large part of his writing self. There is a beautiful piece here on his return to Naples.
Graham Greene considered Lewis “one of the best writers, not of any particular decade, but of our century”. His prose is characterized by restraint, clarity and musicality, his approach by tolerance and detached sympathy. He was impenetrable: contemporary travel writers could learn by his absence from his pages. The narrator of the pieces collected here is an agent of the material, not a character in the story.
An article, “Cat Village”, was originally published as part of a full book – Voices of the Old Sea (1984), an unforgettable portrait of the Costa Brava before the screaming tourists (I admire it so much I picked it up on the BBC A good read program). My favorite from this new volume? It could be “Indulgent Burma,” in which Lewis receives a tip from a taxi driver. Or perhaps the lovely paean to Spain, Lewis’ default destination, in “Seville Revisited.” But then there’s the interview with Hemingway at his Finca Vigia outside Havana. All three are perfect. So is this book.
A Quiet Evening: The Travels of Norman Lewis by Norman Lewis, selected and introduced by John Hatt Eland £25, 504 pages
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