My Journey to Lhasa by Alexandra David-Neel
Introduction by Peter Hopkirk
328 pages
Published 1927
Read from August 20 to August 25
Rating: ★★★ out of 5
An adventure tale on the antique model, full of benighted natives (though David-Neel's genial, paternalistic contempt for the rural poor of Tibet seems rooted more in classist assumptions than racial ones -- though she demonstrates those in plenty, as well) and a European slyly making her way across a distant, half-fabulous land. David-Neel embellishes her ostensibly true story (which I have no cause to doubt, at least in its broad outlines, any more than I would doubt any other exotic travel narrative of its time) with hints of Orientalist mysticism, lampshading each event with "Surely I must have been asleep and dreaming when I heard and saw this," clearly intending her readers to wonder if she really might have struggled with ghosts of lamas over cursed daggers, or called down demons upon startled robbers. If the intent was to whet interest in her subsequent volumes on Tibetan mysticism, it worked -- I'm halfway intrigued about it, and have already priced Magic and Mystery in Tibet on Amazon. I would put no more credence into it than I would, say, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's adventures with mediums, and for the same reasons, but it would be an area of folklore almost wholly new to me, and therefore especially tempting.
The first two-thirds or so of David-Neel's narrative is brisk and engaging, but even though the pace didn't appreciably suffer in the latter passages, I found myself losing interest and wishing the book were over with already. Perhaps that, once again, says more about my current attention span than about the relative merits of this work.
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