Travels With Myself

As a big fan of Tahir Shah's work I was looking forward to reading this, but with a little trepidation. I had read the reviews before I was very kindly gifted a copy, and it comes across a a bit of a love hate from the reviewers.

Like any collect or anthology, it is a little hit and miss. These selections are taken over the writing career of Tahir Shah (some twenty years of writing), so we should expect some inconsistency, although there was opportunity for him to leave out some of the poor examples - in my view, there were only a few. It is true some of the essays are superficial - they are, however very short, so this is somewhat inevitable; and some are a little flat in their presentation - these seemed to me to be earlier works, and were perhaps collected here because they couldn't go elsewhere (magazine articles etc).

For the most part these are fairly typical Tahir Shah pieces - none of these were long, some were excerpts of his other books - or perhaps they were the origin pieces - I didn't go back to compare.
It is a sizeable book - 400 pages, and there are loads of essays - somewhere just over fifty. They are mostly travel pieces or experiences - excerpts if you like, occasionally a book review, an interview with someone of importance.

As Tahir lives in Casablanca, Morocco, there are a lot of stories from Morocco. If there was a criticism there was a little repetition in these. After Morocco, India is probably the next most frequent location. Other than these, there are stories from a vast breadth of places - Brazil, Peru and Ecuador is South America, Qatar, Egypt, Syria, Jordan and Afghanistan in the Middle East, Nigeria, Kenya, Ethiopia, Mali, South Africa and Namibia in Africa. Cambodia, Pakistan, USA, Switzerland and Tibet round things out.

Memorable ones for me - Richard Halliburton biography / book review: an American explorer, several of whose books I own, although I have read only one; his time with Wilfred Thesiger; His Indian stories were mostly very good; His time in prison in Pakistan is well told and must have been terrifying; the all-women police stations in Brazil; the Cambodian mine clearing women, widows of those killed by mines, was excellent; and his Moroccan stories, although mostly I was already familiar would be good for a new reader.

This may well have worked better as a dip in dip out book, rather than a linear read. Still, plenty to be gained from this collection of bits and pieces, collected and published in 2011.

4 stars