V.S. Pritchett has been traveling again--for his own purposes and our delight--with the sympathy, curiosity, insight, and sharply focused critical eye that made his 1954 book on Spain, The Spanish Temper, unique among recent evocations of places and people. This time he has been behind the Iron Curtain, in Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Romania. Visiting the cities, countryside, and people of those nations with noticeable prejudices, left or right, except those in favor of humane and civilized values, he now presents a sparkingly fresh and refreshingly untendentious picture of them.
Mr. Pritchett has been in Spain again too (it is now thirty-five years since his first book on that endlessly fascinating, always baffling country, Marching Spain, was published). And so he offers wonderfully evocative and convincing chapters on Madrid and Seville as those cities are now. Always avoiding both purposes and the cliches of the guidebook and the solemnities of the sociologist, Mr. Pritchett concentrates on what he himself has seen, heard, absorbed, and learned of current human values and conditions and what they are likely to produce for the present and the future.
Finally, leaving Central and Western Europe, Mr. Pritchett takes us with him on extraordinary visits to Turkey and Iran, which he naturally sees not as exotic entertainments for foreigners, but as contemporary nations with interesting ways of life--as well as perhaps insoluble problems--of their own. He responds to them with all his usual intelligence and human warmth. With The Spanish Temper, The Offensive Traveller serves to place him in the longtime high tradition of English writing about foreign places. Written with zest, this book is, as reading, an uninterrupted pleasure.
About the Author
Victor Sawdon Pritchett was born in Ipswitch, England, in 1900. He attended Alleyn's School in London. After working in the leather trade and as a commercial traveler and shop assistant in France, he set up as a newspaper correspondent there, in Spain, and in Morocco. Mr. Pritchett later turned his attention to criticism, the novel, and short stories. Following World War II, he was literary editor f the New Statesman and Nation. He is now a regular contributor of stories and articles to British and American magazines and to The New York Times Book Reviews. He is perhaps bets known here for The Spanish Temper (1954), The Living Novel and other books of criticism, and his collections of short stories, The Sailor, Sense of Humour, and Other Stories (1956) and When My Girl Comes Home (1961)
