The Light Garden of the Angel King: Travels in Afghanistan with Bruce Chatwin

by Peter Levi

Book Overview

From time immemorial, merchants, pilgrims, and invaders from East and West have penetrated the high valleys of Afghanistan. In this resonant account, Peter Levi seeks the clues which each migration... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1873429355
• ISBN13: 9781873429358
• Release Date: October 1999
• Publisher: Pallas Athene
• Length: 230 Pages
• Weight: 0.85 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.6" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

To A Lost World-- With Chatwin, Too

Peter Levi is himself a remarkable figure: An English Jesuit who is a poet, art historian, classicist,and sometime archaeologist. "Light Garden of the Angel King" is Levi's account of his travels in Afghanistan in the late 1960s as he looked for remnants of Greek presence and examined the influences of Hellenistic art, and it's a wonderfully crafted piece. Spare, elegant, softly ironic, and informed by a sensitive intelligence and a deep knowledge of the classical world. Levi is able to evoke not only the age of Alexander's Bactrian conquests but the beauties and complexities of Islamic architecture and poetry and the travails of learning Persian. His travel companion here was the young Bruce Chatwin, and Chatwin's presence (and his fascination with nomads) gives this book a wonderful set of stories. The Afghanistan of the book is long gone, shattered by twenty years of invasion, resistance, and civil war, and for anyone who loves Central Asia, "Light Garden" is a reminder of a long-vanished world. It's very different from Newby's "Short Walk in the Hindu Kush" or Byron's classic "Road to Oxiana", but it is a brilliant travel book in its own right. Very much worth owning!