OK guys, let's GO! Looking for Europe's Future in an Overlooked Corner of the Continent
Robert D. Kaplan’s “Adriatic” takes readers on a political, intellectual and personal tour from Italy to Albania.
One can learn much from this idiosyncratic book, although only a little about the Adriatic. As Robert D. Kaplan, the author of several books on international affairs, tells it, “Adriatic” is “not military strategy, political science, original archival history, conventional long-form journalism, traditional travel writing, memoir or literary criticism. After all, what does the poetry of Ezra Pound have to do with the current position of the West and Russia in Montenegro?” A good question — although one left unanswered. Instead, Kaplan offers the reader a diverse collection of observations, ruminations, narrations and occasional incriminations clustered around a travelogue through cities on or near the eponymous sea.
The journey begins in Rimini, where a piazza and a church offer Kaplan an opportunity to meditate on Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta, Pound, T.S. Eliot, Henri Pirenne and others. It then moves on to Ravenna and Venice. The Italian chapters have a decidedly different feel from those that follow on Slovenia, Croatia, Montenegro, Albania and Greece. Kaplan portrays himself as an elder traveler, shuttling between Italian tourist sites with a cargo of well-worn books. “Truly, I travel in order to read. I cannot do one without the other. The weight of clothes in my gear is constraining, the weight of books liberating.”
Weather, landscapes, train rides — all are an invitation for Kaplan to plumb his extensive bibliography of poetry, literature and history. These expositions reveal a wisdom and uncertainty produced by a lifetime of both practical and book learning. It is a wonder to follow Kaplan’s ever-shifting train of thought as it moves from, say, Boccaccio to Claudio Magris to James Joyce to “The Arabian Nights” against a backdrop of poplars, monuments and cafes. He also makes a point of visiting Italian graves — the Byzantine philosopher Gemistos Plethon in Rimini, Theodoric and Dante in Ravenna, Pound and Joseph Brodsky in Venice, and the site of a Nazi death camp in Trieste.
It is at Trieste that the book changes direction. “I quietly decide that being a well-read and intelligent tourist is not enough; I must talk to people.” In practice, this means that Kaplan interviews a series of journalists, politicians, authors, academics and others across the Adriatic Balkans. “I am becoming less of a traveler and more of a journalist as I head south.” The literary asides are not banished in the lands of the former Yugoslavia, but they do make way for the voices of this contested area, still haunted by the specters of Tito, the Hapsburgs and the Soviets.'>>>
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/20/books/review/adriatic-robert-kaplan.html
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