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More reviews by Peter Gordon
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The Collector of Worlds by Ilya Troyanov
I think it is very difficult to write historical novels about people whose real lives are rather well-known: the historical person can hover like an intrusive shadow over the semi-fictional character. The reader can be left asking "he didn't really say that, did he?" and googling the names of other characters to see if they are also real.
In THE COLLECTOR OF WORLDS, a fictionalized life of British explorer Sir Richard Francis Burton, ILYA TROYANOV somehow manages to avoid this pitfall. Troyanov tells the story in three parts, taking place during Burton's sojourn in India, his trip in disguise to Mecca and his African expedition with John Hanning Speke to find the source of the Nile. But Burton is something of a peripheral protagonist in all three: the first and last are narrated in large part by, respectively, his man-servant and guide while the middle section is presented as a subsequent Ottoman-led investigation as to whether Burton was a spy.
The colonizer, admittedly a less than typical one whose sympathies were as often as not out of synch with those of his colonizing colleagues, is seen very much through the eyes of the colonized or those in threat of being of being colonized. The result is a story of a man, admittedly privileged yet out of place wherever he is, who seeks to understand - or collect - the different worlds he passes through, a feeling surely familiar to many more modern expats. Whether the result is an accurate portrait of Burton hardly seems to matter.
Admittedly, Troyanov is skating on thin ice. THE COLLECTOR OF WORLDS, in its largely sympathetic portrayal of a enthusiastic actor in the imperial enterprise, in its protagonist's fascination with anthropological, philosophical and morphological detail, in its unusual construction as three independent and unconnected stories bookended by Burton's death, is unlikely to be to everyone's taste.
But Troyanov has way, if not with words (the book is translated from German, so it is hard to tell), then with imagery and expression. There is something of a different age and different place in Troyanov's writing. (Troyanov is originally from Bulgaria. And THE COLLECTOR OF WORLDS, coincidentally perhaps, reminds me of the late Hungarian writer Sandor Marai's novel about Casanova's sojourn in Bolzano.)
Troyanov's first line is "He died early in the morning before you could tell a black thread from white." Or just two pages later, this description of Burton's burning notebook: "The camel skin catches light, a grimace cracks, page numbers burn, baboon sounds flicker, Marathi, Gujarati, Sindhi evaporate, leaving only scribbled letters that float up as sparks and sink as cinders."
The entire book is like this. The rush of simile and sometimes antique turns of phrase can be exhausting, but are well worth the effort.
Peter Gordon
29/11/2008
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Peter Gordon is editor of The Asian Review of Books. |
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