Tag: Two Frenchmen in the Orient

Essay Series

Nearly fifty months in India and I am now acquainted and almost comfortable with my anxious passivity in front of the blank page. I can write on virtually everything, except for the very things I have been living. I could do with a reference. I could do with a template. I could do with a prototype of the traveler turned writer. Somewhere between Parkala and Manipal, I came across Flaubert.

May 10, 2013

Two Frenchmen in the Orient – Introduction

There was everywhere amongst Orientalists the ambition to formulate their discoveries, experiences, and insights…

– Edward Said, Orientalism

May 10, 2013

Two Frenchmen in the Orient – Part 1
The genesis of a diary. I did not even look for being a foreigner. The travel as coincidence. No need to repeat that I was not feeling ‘good in my own skin’, as the French formula says…

May 10, 2013

Two Frenchmen in the Orient – Part 2
The most recurrent – and delightful – materials found in Flaubert’s stories from Egypt are precisely the author’s reflections on the very act of writing. Flaubert basically writes about writing. … But one would not deny that there is also a more humanistic interest in the project of travelling…

May 10, 2013

Two Frenchmen in the Orient – Part 3
Since I have been abroad, quite a few travelers have gotten in touch with me. Whether friends who had promised (often in vain) to pay me visit, or complete strangers, they show an enthusiasm that reminds me, not without nostalgia, of my early days here…