In an Antique Land by Amitav Ghosh

I am fascinated by the meeting between history and travel as well as everyday anthropological observation, therefore this book by Amitav Ghosh sounded appealing to my interests. 

I´ve read In an Antique Land in the German translation In Einem alten Land, by Matthias Müller. I´ve previously read by Ghosh Sea of Poppies, and I appreciated the slow storytelling and intricacies of the story background.

In an Antique Land is mostly a memoir, resuming the author´s experience in exploring the Arab language and culture, living in the tiny village of Lataifa in Egypt. While there, he is also trying to trace the details shared in medieval letters exchanged between merchants of Jewish and Muslim faith, some of them recovered in the Cairo Geniza.

I may confess that I had certain high expectations about this book, as I am personally interested in the role of travel accounts for the understanding of cultural exchanges - I´m a follower of Ecole des Annales, that´s it, and very proud of it.  

The book is dense, detailing extensively his personal experiences while living in Lataifa, his interactions with the locals and the impossibility of just keeping the status of observing scholar. Life in the small village implicitly lead to being fully part of the everyday, not just a visitor - as it may happen in the Western versions of it. (I´ve finished the book few months ago, but when recently read A Door in the Earth I couldn´t stop thinking about some of the episodes from Ghosh´s book, at least from the point of view of the sociological/anthropological structures translated into literary language. )

But, as much as I really enjoyed his personal accounts of interactions with people - call it voyeurism, but memoirs may have a very human element that we are keen to explore about other persons, especially if there are similar interests shared (learning languages, learning Arabic etc.) - I felt often that it delved frequently and too longer exclusively into this narrative part, neglecting at a certain extent the Middle Ages travelogue. I understood the efforts in retracing the steps of some authors, but I couldn´t find easily the real references.

However, there were some good takes about this book: I enjoyed the translation, there were some ideas that I may consider for further individual researches and definitely I need to pay more attention to the Cairo Geniza, which may be relatively far from my actual domain of interest - I am interested in the contemporary politics and history - but that is becoming a very frequent reference, particularly as part of my extended studies of rare Jewish languages I underwent in the last two years. 

Rating: 3 stars