Armchair Travel

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXV, Issue 22949, 29 January 1938, Page 4 (Supplement)

Armchair Travel

With Freya Stark in Baghdad

TO read a Freya Stark book is a pleasant experience. One actually seems to journey to Arabia or Baghdad in the company of a born traveller. In comparison so many "he-man" travel books seem tame. Freya Stark is the real thing—a woman who is radiantly happy among primitive people remote from civilisation.

She writes as easily and naturally as she appears to live. Her latest hook '".Baghdad Sketches" easts the same spell as licr apparently more important earlier books, the truth being that whatever she sees and feels with liny degree of intensity she can reveal to the reader, with the happiest results. She does not strive for big effects, and although there is an element of danger in most of her expeditions it is never stressed.

Miss Stark's genius is extremely feminine for she tells of the daily life of the people she dwelt anion", and with the faithfulness and selectivencss

of a Dutch muster she paints exquisite pictures of Ikt surroundings, landscapes as well as interiors. Slie lived in Jinghdml's unlive quarter (because it, suited her purse as well as her inclination), by the lion-coloured Tigris. She savs: "Its broad-Mowing surface is dyed by the same earth of which tho houses and minarets are built so that all is one tawny harmony.'' The traveller went to school to improve her Arabic, and first learnt Persian there, for those were the days before her Persian travels. That Baghdad was a perpetual joy is evident i» every page —she writes so buoyantly of people and places within and outside the city. There are indeed few travel writers of to-day who express themselves as freely as Freya Stark. What she has to tell has historical value —slie has caught the changing scene and with characterisf ic humour and perception has set it all down to make a perfect travel bonk for the stay-at-home. "Bagrlulad Sketches," by Freya Stark. (Murray.)