June reading 3: Far Away and Long Ago by W. H. Hudson
I picked this one up a while back because of an article about it in Smithsonian Magazine - the article made me curious, and it was on Project Gutenberg, so it's been serving as my "quiet ebook to read on phone" since then. As a result I went through it very slowly. It's a memoir of the author's boyhood as the child of English settlers in the Argentine Pampas in the 1840s and 1850s, who spent most of his life before the age of 15 riding a pony unsupervised all over the plains.
W. H. Hudson is one of the classic Victorian nature writers, and I'd had a couple other books of his on my extended too-read lists for awhile, but there were a couple things mentioned in the article that intrigued me particularly: first that it was supposedly written during/after an extended illness during which he had extremely vivid hallucinatory recall of his childhood, and I like stuff about brain weirdness. And second that it is apparently very popular in Japan, where it's often used as a school text for Japanese English learners, which made me really curious as to why a fairly random Victorian nature book would end up with that kind of afterlife. Neither of those are particularly evident in the book itself, though.
Anyway, the book itself was quite interesting! If you like Victorian nature and/or travel writing you will probably like this. The racism is only at the level you'd expect of an Englishman living abroad among non-Englishmen in the 19th century who isn't making any substantial effort to critique the system he lives in, but he doesn't make any particular effort to reinforce or justify it either, so it could be a lot worse. And the book ends before he's old enough to be particularly awful about women, other than that particularly Victorian style of reverence for mother-love.
The descriptions of nature, and the vast mostly unsettled plains he lived among, were always lovely and indeed extremely vivid, but also written with a strong consciousness of the changes the settlers were introducing to the ecology already, and the much more rapid changes that happened in the late 19th century after he left (and the Smithsonian article brings that up to the modern day) - writing beautifully about the way humans and nature interact is one of the things Hudson is still known for.
What I ended up finding most interesting, though, was the portrayal of the way the community worked on the pampas, in a mostly-lawless country where what government existed was completely uninterested in enforcing the peace among the people who lived widely dispersed out on the plains, so that disputes were settled and people who needed help were helped and emergencies were managed in ways that were customary among the people and worked out between households without any formal authority.
It's a way of arranging communities that seems to come up again and again in cases where there is no central authority capable of managing disputes, but a lot of the time (because those periods seem to be at the beginnings and edges and underworlds of things) they get heavily mythologized. Maybe if I was Argentinean and more familiar with the national myths around gauchos it would feel that way in this book too, but at least to me, it seemed like an interestingly matter-of-fact first person account where those aspects were valorized only the way a small boy valorizes what the grown-ups around him do.
W. H. Hudson is one of the classic Victorian nature writers, and I'd had a couple other books of his on my extended too-read lists for awhile, but there were a couple things mentioned in the article that intrigued me particularly: first that it was supposedly written during/after an extended illness during which he had extremely vivid hallucinatory recall of his childhood, and I like stuff about brain weirdness. And second that it is apparently very popular in Japan, where it's often used as a school text for Japanese English learners, which made me really curious as to why a fairly random Victorian nature book would end up with that kind of afterlife. Neither of those are particularly evident in the book itself, though.
Anyway, the book itself was quite interesting! If you like Victorian nature and/or travel writing you will probably like this. The racism is only at the level you'd expect of an Englishman living abroad among non-Englishmen in the 19th century who isn't making any substantial effort to critique the system he lives in, but he doesn't make any particular effort to reinforce or justify it either, so it could be a lot worse. And the book ends before he's old enough to be particularly awful about women, other than that particularly Victorian style of reverence for mother-love.
The descriptions of nature, and the vast mostly unsettled plains he lived among, were always lovely and indeed extremely vivid, but also written with a strong consciousness of the changes the settlers were introducing to the ecology already, and the much more rapid changes that happened in the late 19th century after he left (and the Smithsonian article brings that up to the modern day) - writing beautifully about the way humans and nature interact is one of the things Hudson is still known for.
What I ended up finding most interesting, though, was the portrayal of the way the community worked on the pampas, in a mostly-lawless country where what government existed was completely uninterested in enforcing the peace among the people who lived widely dispersed out on the plains, so that disputes were settled and people who needed help were helped and emergencies were managed in ways that were customary among the people and worked out between households without any formal authority.
It's a way of arranging communities that seems to come up again and again in cases where there is no central authority capable of managing disputes, but a lot of the time (because those periods seem to be at the beginnings and edges and underworlds of things) they get heavily mythologized. Maybe if I was Argentinean and more familiar with the national myths around gauchos it would feel that way in this book too, but at least to me, it seemed like an interestingly matter-of-fact first person account where those aspects were valorized only the way a small boy valorizes what the grown-ups around him do.