Volume 9, Number 4 · September 14, 1967
In Quest of Uncle Tom
By Conor Cruise O'Brien
Dublin: A Portrait
by V.S. Pritchett, Photographs by Evelyn Hofer
Harper & Row, 99 pp., $15.00
Irish Journal
by Heinrich Böll
McGraw-Hill, 127 pp., $4.95
Travel books are never about the places and people they are supposed to be about, but about the differences between these and the places and people the writer knows best, and about what these differences mean to the writer. For the native of the place, however, the things that he and his relations have in common with neighboring peoples and with other men generally are not less important than the things that separate them. The traveler's account, based on a catalogue of differences and ignoring the common, must therefore seem wrong to the native. This will always be so, unless the native is already rapt in the vision of himself as the foreigner sees him, a fascinating, inimitable, inscrutable concentration of qualities unique even if sometimes repulsive. Romanticism, egoism, and masochism aiding, some Irishmen, like some Jews, have attained that sinister condition described by Claudel: la quiétude incestueuse de l'âme assise sur sa différence essentielle.
Review, 1979 words
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