There is Joan Didion on the ‘disappeared’ El Salvador; Kafka on the horrors of jolly Swedish naturists; Rebecca West trying to untangle the knotty plait of Serb, Croat and Slav; Ernest Hemingway with an oddly dispassionate piece on bullfighting in Spain; Captain Cook encountering cannibalistic New Zealanders; W.H. Auden adrift in Iceland; Robert Antelme’s harrowing treatment as a Nazi prisoner at the end of World War II.
A good anthology should be a smorgasbord: a selection of tidbits to whet your appetite. Certainly the tasters of Antelme, Cherry-Garrard, Pankaj Mishra and Walter Benjamin left me wanting more. But how does Martin Luther King’s letter from Birmingham City Jail qualify as travel writing or Bruce Chatwin’s encounter with Nadezhda Mandelstam?
Davidson clearly thinks the job of editing (an anthology) begins and ends with choosing your pieces. A journey may be made up of a thousand footsteps—but even a few footnotes would have helped.
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