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← Back to all issuesGranta 10: Travel Writing
Winter 1983
One of the most popular issues of Granta, now in its fifth printing. Including Jonathan Raban, James Fenton, Colin Thubron, Martha Gellhorn, Bruce Chatwin, Norman Lewis, Saul Bellow, Jan Morris, Paul Theroux, Redmond O’Hanlon, and others.
From this Issue
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Watching the Rain in Galicia
Gabriel García Márquez
‘Only then did I understand where my grandmother had got that credulity which allowed her to live in a supernatural world in which everything was possible and where rational explanations were totally lacking in validity.’
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One Less Octopus at Paxos
Russell Hoban
‘She fired the speargun, then held up the spear with an octopus writhing on it. It was a mottled pinky-brown and its head was about as big as two clasped hands.’
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Sea-Room
Jonathan Raban
‘As it was, it did at least put a precise figure on the complaint from which I’d been suffering for the last few months: I was just six degrees and one minute out of kilter with where I was supposed to be.’
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Road to Cambodia
James Fenton
‘The buildings were full of surprises. In one, surrounded by winking lights, the last abbot was lying in his coffin. He had died a year before, and it would be another two years before he was cremated.’
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Into the Heart of Borneo
Redmond O’Hanlon
‘At dawn the jungle was half-obscured in a heavy morning mist; and through the cloudy layers of rising moisture came the whooping call, the owl-like, clear, ringing hoot of the female Borneo Gibbon.’
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Night In Vietnam
Colin Thubron
‘The tombstones glimmered in the grass. But he felt only relief. The dead, tonight, were more companionable than the living.’
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White into Black
Martha Gellhorn
‘It is hard to believe that, in 1952, there were only two places on earth where blacks could not be insulted or mistreated simply because of their colour: Haiti and Liberia.’
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In Stevenson’s Footsteps
Richard Holmes
‘But Stevenson was still three or four hours ahead of me. He crossed the stone bridge into Langogne in the early afternoon of Monday 23 September 1878, ‘just as the promised rain was beginning to fall.’’
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Old Paris
Saul Bellow
‘Who would have thought that Europe contained so much old junk? Or that, the servant class having disappeared, hearts nostalgic for the bourgeois epoch would hunt so eagerly for Empire breakfronts, Récamier sofas and curule chairs?’
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Holy Week
Patrick Marnham
‘They carried the life-size wooden figure lying in the glass case out of the main doors of the church and into the churchyard.’
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Interstate 281
Jan Morris
‘The insularity of Texas has always entertained travellers, coupled as it is with extreme technical sophistication, and Texans of course love to make the most of it.’
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Subterranean Gothic
Paul Theroux
‘When people says the subway frightens them, they are not being silly or irrational.’
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Jim’s Journey
Hugh Brody
‘Jim’s visit had not been easy. He arrived a day after the English Armada had been launched on its way to the South Atlantic.’
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Notes from Italy
William Weaver
‘It was easy to meet people, especially if you were a wide-eyed American and spoke Italian. The literary world was particularly accessible, for all the intellectuals wanted to know about the States.’
