The Asiatics

The negative (one star) review is far off the mark, and is as accurate as the incorrect title, "The Asians". I read this book while I was living IN Iran in 1962, after a lengthy stay in Beirut, driving a used VW across through Syria and Turkey, and working back, a year later, through Iraq, Jordan, and Syria, always utilizing the most basic of accomodations, including the dirt floors of rodent- and gecko-infested hovels. I felt that "The Asiatics" caught the atmosphere of the Middle East and its peoples wonderfully well, as did another superb book by Prokosch, "Nine Days to Mukalla." This is very hard to do if one has not spent time there and lived with the people, and I don't mean in a hotel, consulate, or embassy. I have read many books about the Middle East, and this is one of the few that ring true. For example, Michener's "Caravans"--perhaps the only book many will have read on the Middle East--has not one scintilla of authenticity. In my opinion travel writers like Bruce Chatwin and Paul Theroux fade into insignificance when compared with Prokosch. The negative reviewer has some axe to grind. Maybe he feels that Prokosch insulted his Asian (I'd guess Iranian) ancestors. My old paperback copy of "The Asiatics" (1960 Signet edition) is falling apart, and I have been hoping for a reissue of this work, so rightly praised by people infinitely more distinguished than that dispeptic reviewer. In my home "The Asiatics" is on a shelf between "Madam Bovary" and "Lord Jim"--right there with the classics.

I had to go to Asia after reading this novel about a young European's journey overland to Asia in the 1930s. It's all the more remarkable considering the author himself never travelled outside Europe and America. I haven't read the new edition with Pico Ayer's foreword but Pico's no slouch as a writer himself, should be worth reading.

Frederic Prokosch wrote this imaginary journey from Lebanon across Asia to Hanoi in 1931 before he ever set foot in Asia. In the novel, the narrator, a young American, travels in catch-as-catch-can manner across the exotic continent. The landscape descriptions are extraordinary. Everywhere he meets with adventure and exotic characters who lament the end of Asia as they know it (this in 1931!). The novel was a bestseller in 1934. I nominate it as the greatest forgotten novel of the 20th Century.