Langbeschreibung
First published in 1930, this discursive and absorbing travel-book offers, as the author says in his new Foreword, "a picture of a way of living that exists no longer." Hot Countries tells of a series of journeys in the Far East, the West Indies and the South Sea Islands when he was a young and light-hearted novelist seeking colour, romance and adventure.
Hauptbeschreibung
This discursive and absorbing travel-book offers, as the author says in his new Foreword, "a picture of a way of living that exists no longer." Hot Countries tells of a series of journeys in the Far East, the West Indies and the South Sea Islands when he was a young and light-hearted novelist seeking colour, romance and adven-ture, and when foreign travel was not hedged by to-day's restrictions. Tahiti provides the colour, with its idyllic scenery and its lovely girls joyously offering to keep house for visiting bachelors; Martinique recalls the devastating eruption of Mont Pelee; in Siam (now called Thailand) he amusingly describes the worship of a baby white elephant, and the problem of the white man's relations with brown women; in Ceylon occurs a ludicrous episode of native misunderstanding of the Westerner. After discussing " The Englishman in the Tropics " Mr. Waugh glances at the New Hebrides and then transports us to the Black Republic of Haiti (describing the island's dramatic history in the early nineteenth century) before bringing us homeward to London.Alec Waugh belongs to a distinguished literary family: his father was a well-known publisher and writer, and his younger brother is the novelist Evelyn Waugh. His first book, The Loom of Touth, a frank story of public-school life, was the well-written succes de scandale of 1917, when its author, aged 19, was in the B.E.F. in France (he was taken prisoner in 1918). Since then he has written ten novels, dozens of short stories and another travel-book.