Strange Bewildering Time: Istanbul to Kathmandu in the Last Year of the Hippie Trail
A poet and journalist looks back on a remarkable journey from Turkey to Nepal in 1978, when the region was on the brink of massive transformation.
In the spring of 1978, at age twenty-two, Mark Abley put aside his studies at Oxford and set off with a friend on a three-month trek across the celebrated Hippie Trail -- a sprawling route between Europe and South Asia, peppered with Western bohemians and vagabonds. It was a time when the Shah of Iran still reigned supreme, Afghanistan lay at peace, and city streets from Turkey to India teemed with unrest. Within a year, many of the places he visited would become inaccessible to foreign travellers.
Drawing from the tattered notebooks he filled as a youthful wanderer, Abley brings his kaleidoscope of experiences back to life with vivid detail: dancing in a Turkish disco, clambering across a glacier in Kashmir, travelling by train among Baluchi tribesmen who smuggled kitchen appliances over international borders. He also reflects on the impact of the Hippie Trail and the illusions of those who journeyed along it. The lively immediacy of Abley's journals combined with the measured wisdom of his mature, contemporary voice provides rich insight, bringing vibrant witness and historical perspective to this beautifully written portrait of a region during a time of irrevocable change.
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Mark Abley is a nonfiction writer, poet, and journalist. His many books include The Organist: Fugues, Fatherhood, and a Fragile Mind, a memoir of his father; Spoken Here: Travels Among Threatened Languages and The Prodigal Tongue: Dispatches from the Future of English, among other books on language; Strange Bewildering Time: Istanbul to Kathmandu in the Last Year of the Hippie Trail, a reflective travel memoir based on his own forty-five-year-old journals; and several poetry collections and children's books. His work has won international praise and has been translated into five languages. He lives in Montreal.
Readers will marvel at this nostalgic travelogue.
-- "Publishers Weekly"Providing an intimate glimpse of far-flung regions during times of change, just before some regions became inaccessible to Westerners ... An engrossing travelogue with introductions to the Middle East and Central Asia, Strange Bewildering Time is nostalgic and thoughtful--a paean and a lament for a time long gone.
-- "Foreword"A book often worthy of comparison with such enduring classics of travel literature as Patrick Leigh Fermor's Between The Woods And The Water and Bruce Chatwin's In Patagonia.
-- "Montreal Gazette"A riveting read ... vivid and thoughtful.
-- "Winnipeg Free Press"Abley masterfully navigates his acknowledgement of his innocent self as a foundation for the book while introducing witty and philosophical remarks that allow the reader to reevaluate the authority of the narrative lens. [Strange Bewildering Time] is a remarkable time capsule of culture and circumstance wrapped up in an enticing story.
-- "McGill Tribune"Abley's story is simultaneously immediate and retrospective. The journals he kept during his travels offer scenes of vivid detail, while the distance traveled in time allows him to see ironies his 22-year-old self could not have fathomed. The past was a strange, bewildering time--but time itself is strange and bewildering ... The blessing of this book is that Mr. Abley's curiosity and compassion were not lost along the way.
-- "Wall Street Journal"A fascinating chronicle ... Strange Bewildering Time: Istanbul to Kathmandu in the Last Year of the Hippie Trail charts the dissipation of hopes at the end of an era.
-- "Literary Review of Canada"Gorgeous and lyrical ... Strange Bewildering Time is ... a meditation on the nature of memory, time and self-knowledge, as well as an account of a region on the brink of turmoil ... There is poetry on every page.
-- "Montreal Review of Books"
