The new life of the travel book in times of Instagram

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It is always summer on the screens, there is always someone who posts on Instagram a photograph of a virgin beach, of some forbidden city, of some incredible place that, deep down, looks like all the incredible places in the world.

The trip has become cheaper for the good, in the monetary sense, and also for the worse: it has become an almost banal experience, a tedious consumer habit.

Beside him, the revered tradition of travel writing has also lost value.

is the title of a book by

published in English at the end of 2021 that raises the crisis of the genre: who needs books like

or

in this hyperconnected world?

There is another, more tricky idea that Hannigan's book raises: the travel book not only responds to an obsolete need but also reflects an anachronistic and rather suspicious attitude in 2022. Firstly, because the big business of tourism of masses has an environmental, cultural and political imprint that is difficult to underestimate.

's solitary journey on foot

from Rotterdam to Constantinople may have been the opposite of crossing a bridge in Istanbul, but the tourists of 2022 are also likely to be moved by an image of travel romanticized by literature.

The second part of that criticism goes a little further. The theory, in short, is that the essence of the traditional travel book is that a white man, educated and probably settled in life, leaves Europe, arrives somewhere populated by primitive people, and makes his impressionistic, well-meaning, and well-intentioned portrait. condescending. Carnaza for a woke

. The fall from grace of

, a charming twentieth-century traveler who biographies of recent years have turned into a vain rogue, is a perfect example of this original sin.

"At the very least, the label 'travel book' has become obsolete," explains

editor of Libros del KO and author of

(Anagrama), a chronicle of the years he spent in Bahrain. «It was a brand that sold well, but the concept was diluted. I guess that has to do with the overcrowding of the travel experience. It is very difficult now to make a story that is attractive because you have found a place that nobody knows.

However, Sánchez Mediavilla maintains, there are still books that have to do with the tradition of travel literature, that expand it, and that find their audience. The genre, which always had something of a journalistic chronicle, an adventure novel and a popular scientific or historical book, has become, in 2022, any of these things or all of them at the same time, in anything less than a travel book. «We publish

's books and they sell quite well. Interestingly, the one that sold the worst was

, which is a text of wonderful literature and which, of all his books, is the one that most closely resembles the classic idea of ​​what a travel book is. ».

"It's true, that book cost more," recalls Izagirre himself.

“But there are other books that work well that are more or less travel books.

It occurs to me to think of those by

The travel book genre has fallen somewhat out of favor but, at the same time, it has evolved into something else, into a kind of in-depth chronicle.

And I think it's still necessary."

Just as erotic literature was diluted and recycled into a new and uninhibited romantic literature, the travel book has become a journalism book.

THE RETURN TRIP

And the guilt? «When I presented

in Bolivia, there were those who asked me what was missing for a European to come and tell that reality, if he believed that there were no people in Bolivia who could do it. Well, I understand, I start from some privileges to come from where I come from. I know that there are ways of traveling that are

... But what is desirable is not that I, a European, cannot tell the world that is not immediate to me. What is desirable is that we all have access to the stories of Bolivians themselves. Izagirre maintains that it is not a utopia. “There is no travel magazine that today publishes a dossier on Dakar, for example, without Senegalese writers. That did not happen a few years ago. And chronicles of trips made in the opposite direction are beginning to arrive in bookstores, those made

for example. Of course, they are such powerful stories that they make the rest of us pale a little.

Xavi Moret,

author of the recent

and

belongs to a generation prior to that of Izagirre, Aldama and company. "Actually, that change was already in Bruce Chatwin's books. It makes no sense to describe the world, because there are already those who are broadcasting the world 24 hours a day. You have to approach the books with a previous idea, bet on a subjective look, talk to people. The key is not so much to see but to listen, to seek in the contact with the other and, through that contact, to question yourself».

Chatwin's name takes us back to the golden age of the genre at the end of the 20th century: what if we read the classic books of the travel canon today? Would they bother us? "I suppose some books would sound like the cliché of the upper-class Englishman who goes about the world with

But in the case of Chatwin, the memory I have is that his look was of a very pure curiosity, a desire to understand the other for which I do not think there are many possible reproaches, "says Sánchez Mediavilla. "And it must not have been easy not to be dismissive in 1980 with some of the realities that he portrayed."

“The books from that time were very inspiring to me.

I don't know how many creaky things we would find today, but it doesn't seem fair to demonize them for a few anachronisms.

What moved them was

that still seems noble to me”, Izagirre concludes.

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