As I start on a promotional tour for my travel book
To a Mountain in Tibet, I find I am traveling with the ghosts of others: the writers who have affected me — and those whose books I have just read, with others waiting in my luggage.
Among these last I can't help mentioning Gregor von Rezzori, who died in 1998 (published by the New York Review of Books). His provocatively-titled Memoirs of an Anti-Semite is in fact a grand and beautiful Central European novel of a kind barely possible now, and his more recently published The Snows of Yesteryear (I have only just started it) is building into a masterpiece of oblique autobiography.
Then there is The Hare With Amber Eyes, a strikingly original memoir by Edmund de Waal, based on the fate of his family's unique Japanese collection: a book that has taken Britain by storm. De Waal seems quite unfazed by his book's success. He is more interested in making porcelain, of which he is a master.
And finally, Authenticating Tibet: Answers to China's 100 Questions, by Anne-Marie Blondeau and Katia Buffetrille. Sounds a bit daunting, but in fact this is a handbook to the complexities of the whole China-Tibet question. Very fair and authoritative. It's been a godsend to me while preparing to answer queries from audiences at my talks... except that the difficult questions, of course, are never the ones you anticipate.
These talks will mostly be in independent bookshops. As in my native Britain, it is these enterprising places that take the initiative in inviting authors in. Have bookshops ever not felt in some way besieged? Fifty years ago, it was rumored, the bookshop (and literacy itself) would be killed off by television. Now the threat comes from the demon ebook....
Half a century ago, while starting work briefly as a sales representative for a British publisher, I asked a colleague how I would be able to identify the owner when I entered his bookshop. "That's easy", came the reply. "He'll be the one with the long face."
Long face or no, he has my vote.