jmoxley's review
adventurous
challenging
informative
reflective
slow-paced
4.0
Intellectual and physical journeys into the Sahara exploring its history, geography and culture which also draws on the experiences of earlier explorers and is as much about the exploration of self as about visiting the desert.
timmason's review
3.0
My first impressions are mixed. The book at first seems to be a radical travelogue, then becomes literary critique, to finally morph into a rather painful autobiography.
kyltra's review
5.0
Sven Lindqvist's sparse words are like heavy bombing on the page. Desert Divers is evocative travel diary and intellectual polemic: here his travels in the Sahara lead him to confront the realities of French empire there, engaging in criticism with colonial writers who earlier influenced him. He interrogates the absences in their writing, their failure to record the deaths let alone the details. He writes: "This is where Fromentin stood 130 years ago. The landscape we see is the same. The same sun, the same desert. But not the same people. His Arabs were closed, menacing, hostile. Those I have met are open, lively, hospitable people."
His own "desert romanticism" is an impression of a lived-in landscape under political and ecological pressure. His words are sober, but they pack punch and tell arresting stories. Sometimes the language is full of colour: "I love the mountains with their long red roots of sand. I love the new-moon dunes, shaped like sickles with sharp, wind-polished edges."
The book takes its name from the dangerous but vital traditional practice of cleaning wells by specialist well-divers. What he's referring to in his title, however, are the Europeans who entered the desert and left with romantic, false portraits of what they found there. "The history of imperialism," Lindqvist writes, "is a well full of corpses." Later he asks: "Who is even today prepared to dive into this dark well and clean it out?"
His own "desert romanticism" is an impression of a lived-in landscape under political and ecological pressure. His words are sober, but they pack punch and tell arresting stories. Sometimes the language is full of colour: "I love the mountains with their long red roots of sand. I love the new-moon dunes, shaped like sickles with sharp, wind-polished edges."
The book takes its name from the dangerous but vital traditional practice of cleaning wells by specialist well-divers. What he's referring to in his title, however, are the Europeans who entered the desert and left with romantic, false portraits of what they found there. "The history of imperialism," Lindqvist writes, "is a well full of corpses." Later he asks: "Who is even today prepared to dive into this dark well and clean it out?"
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