GUEST REVIEW: THE WAY OF THE WORLD

THE WAY OF THE WORLD
Nicolas Bouvier
NYRB Classics
328 pages

GUEST REVIEW BY ANDREW WINER

Early on in The Way of the World, Nicolas Bouvier's masterly account of a road trip across the Balkans and Asia that he undertook in 1953 with his painter friend Thierry Vernet, Bouvier asserts that "traveling provides occasions for shaking oneself up but not, as people believe, freedom." That he and Vernet, still so young at the time, somehow possess enough wisdom to forfeit agency to the exigencies of...