Travels with a Typewriter: A Reporter at Large
Michael Frayn
Travels with a Typewriter: A Reporter at Large
'All writers of fiction should be required by law to go out and do a bit of reporting from time to time, just to remind them how different the real world in front of their eyes is from the invented world behind them'. This is what Frayn did in mid-career, when he took up his old trade, journalism, and wrote a series of occasional articles for the "Observer" about some of the places in the world that interested him. He wanted to describe 'not the extraordinary but the ordinary, the typical, the everyday' and his accounts became the starting-point for some of the novels and plays he wrote later. From a kibbutz in Israel to summer rains in Japan, bicycles in Cambridge to Notting Hill at the end of the 1950s, they are glimpses of a world which sometimes seems tantalisingly familar, sometimes vanished forever.
4.2 out of 5 based on 4 reviews
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Omniscore:
|
| Classification |
Non-fiction |
| Genre |
Travel |
| Format |
Hardback |
| Pages |
304 |
| RRP |
£15.99 |
| Date of Publication |
September 2009 |
| ISBN |
978-0571240890 |
| Publisher |
Faber & Faber |
| |
'All writers of fiction should be required by law to go out and do a bit of reporting from time to time, just to remind them how different the real world in front of their eyes is from the invented world behind them'. This is what Frayn did in mid-career, when he took up his old trade, journalism, and wrote a series of occasional articles for the "Observer" about some of the places in the world that interested him. He wanted to describe 'not the extraordinary but the ordinary, the typical, the everyday' and his accounts became the starting-point for some of the novels and plays he wrote later. From a kibbutz in Israel to summer rains in Japan, bicycles in Cambridge to Notting Hill at the end of the 1950s, they are glimpses of a world which sometimes seems tantalisingly familar, sometimes vanished forever.
Reviews
The Daily Mail
Peter Lewis
“Good writing is good writing, whether it is in a newspaper or between hard covers. As I perused with pleasure these leisurely reports, it struck me that Frayn differs from most reporters in another way. Whereas we are looking for what's wrong, for things to condemn, he is looking for things to like.”
28/08/2009
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The Times
Iain Finlayson
“In even the most escapist travels there is no escaping ourselves, but Frayn is able to translate past experience into present literary projects. Writing such as this is a form of autobiography and Frayn emerges from his traveller’s reports as an amiable, proto-novelistic participant in the gyre of his own widening life.”
29/08/2009
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The Financial Times
Victor Mallet
“Frayn seems simultaneously to see the funny side and the melancholia of the human condition. With another author, this might have been a thin and pointless book, the result of a desperate trawl through the cuttings library for yellowing and scarcely relevant old newspaper articles. That is not the case here... Frayn produced entertaining, sometimes eccentric but essentially serious reportage that has stood the test of time.”
24/08/2009
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The Independent on Sunday
Kate Simon
“Frayn's easy style is enjoyable if not thoroughly engaging, perhaps because he chooses the wry smile over the belly laugh. Yet each of his pieces, whether from home or abroad, takes an approach to travel writing that is employed too little today – observing life within the context of the times, and harnessing the power of the narrative form to conjure up images in the reader's mind. It's a method that, in the hands of a talented writer such as Frayn, keeps a destination fresh – whether it's a place the reader knows well or will ever, indeed, visit.”
13/09/2009
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