I read about this book in an issue of Booklist that I picked up earlier this year: in a brief review, Gilbert Taylor calls this book, which is about Seal’s canoe trip along the length of the Meander River in 2008, a “charmingly mordant, twisting travelogue,” which was enough to make me want to pick it up from the library, despite not having heard of Seal and having no special interest in Turkey. The book is a stylistic mix: it’s part first-person travelogue, with Seal telling about the trip he took and what he saw and how, in fact, the river didn’t actually turn out to be navigable the whole way from source to sea, but it’s also part history—partly as background to current-day Turkey, but partly for its own sake, because the Meander Valley was long a point where different civilizations met (and/or tried to conquer one another in various Eastern-heading or Western-heading land grabs). While I appreciated getting to understand a bit of the bigger historical picture, I found the contemporary scenes more interesting and better-written. Seal is really good at describing his experience of a place, whether he’s talking about a bucolic country scene or a river that gets increasingly polluted as it travels westward from its rural source. His historical descriptions, on the other hand, can sometimes be a bit clunky: I think the most egregious example was one particular sentence early in the book, describing the towns at either end of the Meander around the 5th century BCE. I had to read this twice to understand it, at which point I groaned and read it aloud so I could subject someone else to its awfulness:
If Miletus was renowned for its revered philosophers, then Celaenae came to be known for the marching columns, or at least for the men in command of those columns, who took their rest there; as it was for the achievements of the head that the city at the river’s foot was known, so it was for the exertions of the foot that the one at its head was to be remembered. (13)
But in fairness, most of the book is much lovelier and less punny than that. Some of the history, like the story of ancient confessional steles inscribed at a temple to a god called Apollo Lairbenos, was totally interesting and compellingly written. There are visions of rural peace and abundance from Seal’s time on the water, like this:
The lake teemed, besides, with life; frogs and fish, and tiny water snakes, black and yellow, which fled as the waves from my paddle overran the lily pads where they basked. White storks stood in the shallows, fastidiously immobile. Whiskered terns dipped overhead, their angular wings diaphanous in the sunlight, and above, against the snow glare on the heights of Akdağ, White Mountain, a procession of pelicans passed, their wings in lazy unison, like a half-remembered vision of hands waving from the windows of a passing train. (84-85)
And even when the dryness of the river forces Seal to make arrangements to have his canoe transported downstream, while he proceeds on foot, he still finds plenty of interest near the river. He explores ancient ruins and slightly less ancient ones, climbing a still-sturdy minaret next to an abandoned and crumbling mosque in a totally abandoned village, finding a remaining older block in the mostly-modern city of Aydın, and exploring an old hamam that later was used as a winery, and which seemed to have been left untouched since it closed in the mid 1970s. I like how Seal interweaves the descriptions of historic travellers with his own: when talking about Aydın, he quotes Richard Chandler, an antiquary who travelled to Turkey in 1765:
I wandered through Aydın, recalling the ‘trees, lofty domes and minarees of mosques interspersed’ that had once greeted Richard Chandler, a place of ‘innumerable tame turtle-doves, sitting in the branches of trees, on the walls, and roofs of houses, cooing unceasingly’.
[…]
In this modern city of numbered streets there was not the least reminder, however, of the doves and embroidered trousers, the camel trains and the zeybeks’ floral turbans. The streets were lined by apartment blocks painted in institutional shades. Lines of washing, children’s tricycles, dead pot plants, rusting air-conditioning units, and the placarded details of lawyers’, dentists’ and gynaecologists’ premises, showed among the flag-draped concrete of the balconies. (280-281)
Seal talks, at one point about how his telling of the story of the Meander moves not just from east to west but also from Anatolia’s ancient past to Turkey’s present: this clearly isn’t strictly true, since he’s describing contemporary scenes at the Meander’s source and ancient ruins at its Delta, but it does nicely describe the book’s bigger sense of movement/shifting focus, and is probably part of why I found the book increasingly compelling as I kept reading.
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