Issues
← Back to all issuesGranta 20: In Trouble Again
Winter 1986
Redmond O’Hanlon in the Amazon jungle, Salman Rushdie in Nicaragua, Colin Thubron in China, Ryszard Kapuscinski in Angola, Martha Gellhorn in Cuba, Peregrine Hodson in Afghanistan. Plus: Amitav Ghosh, Norman Lewis, Timothy Garton Ash, Hanif Kureishi, and Orville Schell.
From this Issue
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The Imam and the Indian
Amitav Ghosh
‘We were both travelling, he and I: we were travelling in the West. The only difference was that I had actually been there, in person.’
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Amazon Adventure
Redmond O’Hanlon
‘Having spent two months travelling in the primary rain forests of Borneo, I thought that a four-month journey in the country between the Orinoco River in Venezuela and the Amazon in Brazil would pose no particular problem.’
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Eating the Eggs of Love
Salman Rushdie
‘Forested mesas flanked the road to Matagalpa; ahead, the multiform mountains, conical, twisted, sinuous, closed the horizon.’
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A Family in Nanjing
Colin Thubron
‘The old people had prepared a banquet for me - an extravagant spread of cold meats and dumplings which we ate with the prestige television blaring, and nobody watching it.’
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Under Eastern Eyes
Timothy Garton Ash
‘They sit around, feet in slippers, drinking wine and swapping jokes about Chernobyl. They have just produced the best journal of new writing in Czechoslovakia. It took about twenty minutes.’
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Cuba Revisited
Martha Gellhorn
‘I drove around Havana, sightseeing, half-curious, and wholly sick of the miserable weather.’
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Bradford
Hanif Kureishi
‘Bradford, I felt, was a place I had to see for myself, because it seemed that so many important issues, of race, culture, nationalism, and education, were evident in an extremely concentrated way.’
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The Shaman of Chichicastenango
Norman Lewis
‘Many Guatemalans claimed to have experienced almost miraculous cures at the hands of the shamans, and the pilgrimages to Chichicastenango had begun.’
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A Tour of Angola
Ryszard Kapuściński
‘You have to learn how to live with the check-points and to respect their customs, if you want to travel without hindrance and reach your destination alive.’
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A Journey into Afghanistan
Peregrine Hodson
‘We had been travelling for a week, and had reached the territory of the Hesb Nasr: a rival group of mujahedin who were notorious for ambushing travellers, stealing their weapons and skinning their victims.’
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The Development Game
Leonard Frank
‘We are six on the mission to the North-west Frontier: an old Japanese, a Korean, an American, a Bangladeshi, a Dutch girl, me. ... We've got four weeks to come up with a project for, say, thirty million dollars.’
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China
Orville Schell
‘But if kitsch cat plates are a far cry from real art, they are also a far cry from socialist-realist propaganda.’
