Turkestan Reunion

by Eleanor Holgate Lattimore

Book Overview

A collection of letters written by Eleanor Holgate Lattimore concerning her amazing honeymoon in the remotest parts of Central Asia earlier in the century offers a delightful and exciting adventure... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1568360533
• ISBN13: 9781568360539
• Release Date: January 1995
• Publisher: Kodansha
• Length: 323 Pages
• Weight: 1.00 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 5.6" x 8.4"

Customer Reviews

The companion book to "High Tartary"

Turkestan Reunion is a compendium of letters written by Eleanor Holgate Lattimore to her family while traveling on her over one year honeymoon trip in Siberia, Turkestan and the Karakorum. These letters are arranged according to their date having been written at approximately fifteen day intervals. Each letter is forewarded by a brief resume of the happenings and is heralded by a nice drawing, which I believe is by the Author. It could be called an epistolary travel book and this is not common among travel literature. This very characteristic lends the book its grace and appeal, that emerge strikingly after all these years (it was assembled in 1934 from the journey which took place in 1927-28). Why a companion book? Eleanor Lattimore was Owen Lattimore's wife and her husband is famous among students of politics and of the Eastern civilizations for his many contributions to the knowledge of those little known countries in those times. Owen wrote his own books on their original wedding trip, the Desert Road to Turkestan and High Tartary, that are famous in their own right, and probably Eleanor's book is often picked up because its mentioned in these other works. However even if it describes events that are already known, Eleanor's outlook on these same occasions is completely different and orginal. A woman's sensibility? Probably, a woman that possesed courage, curiosity, wasn't afraid of disconforts and was able to relate herself with empathy towards her travel companions and the people she met. The endurance of the great disconfort of the couple's trip assumes in the Author's prose almost a sense of liberation from the material preoccupations of the civilized world to go back to the essentials of living: protection from cold and heat, food, rest, traveling necessities such as carts and horses, good company. The first part of the book contains the description of the seventeen day travel through Siberia, that Eleanor accomplished alone, while the rest narrates the common path through Chinese Turkestan and the five Karakorum Passes. Much attentions is dedicated to the nomads encountered during the journey, the Qazaks the Qirghiz and others. The book can truely be defined ethnographic because it is first hand description of a traveling experience accomplished with curiosity and the desire to learn. "One can understand a little of how difficult a province is to rule when one relizes that it still contains flotsam and jetsam remnants of every variety of people who have passed through or conquered the land as well as the scamps and villains who have run away from Chinese law", is an example of the deeply empathic outlook on her experiences. Another aspect I particularly love in travel books is the "spirit of place", the ability to make the reader feel inside a different reality. Eleanor Lattimore's Turkestan Reunion truely evokes this feeling, more than Owen Lattimore's High Tartary which is more scholarly and detailed. As David Lattimore, the couple'

A Female Trailblazer at the Edge of the World

Turkestan Reunion is a collection of the letters written by Eleanor Lattimore to her family in the United States documenting her honeymoon travels from Beijing, through Siberia, into East Turkestan, and over the Karakorum mountains into British Kashmir. The route Lattimore takes is epic and ranging, crossing everything from arid deserts, Siberian tundra, and towering mountains. Such a journey would make fascinating reading regardless, yet an even greater part of the intrigue and charm of this book comes from its authorship by a woman in time when even hardy, professional male adventurers sometimes couldn't endure similar conditions. Ms. Lattimore is truly a trailblazer, in the literal sense of trekking across routes tread by the feet of very few, but also in the sense that her adventures in the early part of the 20th century very clearly run contrary to what where then very strong and revered concepts of female domesticity. In 1927, the idea of a traveling, white woman was so foreign and novel that many officials and friends who hosted the Lattimores, European or otherwise, were sometimes at a loss in deciding what kind of arrangements should be made for Eleanor. Not only does Lattimore shatter "womanly domesticity" just by traveling, she also consciously chooses to travel in the most down-to-earth way, reaching for the most authentic experiences. Often she chooses horseback over carriage (when physically possible; the weather in Turkestan often did no permit), she voices preference for the rundown accommodations and authentic food of the locals rather than the plusher European lodging and food that sometimes was available. Beyond the gender angle, Turkestan Reunion additionally presents a sort of ethnographic experience much less condescending to locals than many travel writings and exploration writings of the time. Lattimore's writing inevitably retains an element of colonial privilege, for example, in the repeated tendency to bestow comical Western names on their guides rather than learning their real names. However, relative to other writers of the time, and to other Westerners in general of the 1920s, the Lattimores display a unique willingness and even desire to commune with locals and acknowledge the hardships of their existence. Eleanor Lattimore with a keen eye documents everyday proceedings of everyday villagers; games among herdsmen, a witch-curing ceremony, marriage and divorce, the arbitration of disputes, these and others are documented in Lattimores casual yet elegant prose. As white travelers in a China still mired in a pseudo-colonized position relative to the rest, there still are many instances where the Lattimores are regaled by obsequious officials and conniving businessmen with banquets and galas, but while these celebrations often compose the bulk of 19th and early 20th century travel writing, Lattimore's book is balanced by the ground-up perspective she is willing to describe. As such, there is a pre-ethnographic element