One hundred and nine years ago today, V.S. Pritchett was born in Ipswich, England. Known as a master of the short story, Pritchett was also a great memoirist and travel writer. (Oh for the days when travel writing was an accepted part of a writer's life.)
Midnight Oil, his second memoir, is a coming-of-age cum travel story, as it describes his working in Paris, learning another language, the difficult but intensely rewarding process of becoming intimate with another culture.
He later traveled to Spain and - through his books Marching Spain and The Spanish Temper - became something of an authority on the country. But it was his book Foreign Faces - about a trip through the Iron Curtain countries in the early '60s - that started me on my life-long fascination with Eastern Europe.
The book ends with chapters on Turkey and Iran. Of Istanbul he writes: "One realizes there are two breeds in Turkey: those who carry and those who sit. No one sits quite so relaxedly, expertly, beatifically as a Turk; he sits with every inch of his body; his very face sits."
When I visited Istanbul in 1997, the men were still sitting, though now talking on cell phones while they did.
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