There is no more terra incognita, if there ever was any to start, one man’s incognita being another woman’s backyard. My take on all this is rooted in an acceptance of the fact that we are all stragglers now, all of us following in the footsteps of countless, anonymous others. ![]() ![]() Thompson Trail were certainly derivative, but does that make them any less meaningful, any less authentic? Sebald, but she might be describing the best of the stragglelogue sub-genre.Īnd where does this leave us workaday travelers? Is a backpacking tour of George Orwell’s Burma any less gnarly for having Orwell as a guide? My own travels along the Hunter S. In an article in the current issue of The Writer’s Chronicle, the novelist Sabina Murray writes, “Plot is unnecessary to move a book around when you’ve given the narrative an actual pair of legs, pair of eyes, and an articulate, thoughtful voice.” She’s talking about the late German author W.G. The British travel writer Justin Marozzi even took things meta a few years back, following in the footsteps of the ancient Greek historian himself, making his book The Way of Herodotus perhaps the first-ever stragglelogue of a stragglelogue.ĭriven as it is by historical inquiry (some might say gimmick) rather than conventional plot, the stragglelogue is an oddball genre. It’s a form with a long pedigree, stretching all the way back to Herodotus’ Histories - arguably the world’s oldest travel book, published around 440 BC - which was, among other things, a stragglelogue retracing the routes of the early Greek colonists across Asia Minor. Among my all-time favorite books are Scott Huler’s No-Man’s Lands (straggling behind Odysseus), Patrick Symmes’ Chasing Che (straggling behind Che Guevara), and Tim Mackintosh-Smith’s Travels with a Tangerine (straggling behind Moroccan explorer Ibn Battutah). ![]() My take on all this is rooted in an acceptance of the fact that we are all stragglers now, all of us following in the footsteps of countless, anonymous others.Īs a reader, I am a devoted fan of the “following in the footsteps” narrative, a bona fide literary sub=genre that I’ve taken to calling the stragglelogue.
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