Tiziano Terzani died (July 28)

[kamui]

Sad news I did not had time to post it 4 weeks ago, since I was about to start to LOS.

 

For all who havn't read his fantasic book

"A Fortune-Teller Told Me: Earthbound Travels in the Far East", it is highly recommended.

 

Tiziano Terzani

(Filed: 02/08/2004)

news.telegraph.co.uk

 

Tiziano Terzani, the Italian travel writer and journalist who died on Wednesday aged 65, first came to the notice of British readers in 1992 with his memoir of the collapse of the Soviet Union, Goodnight, Mister Lenin, which was short-listed for the Thomas Cook Travel Award; but for almost 30 years he was also perhaps his country's most celebrated foreign correspondent.

 

 

In the summer of 1991, Terzani was on holiday in Siberia, exploring the Amur River, which forms the region's boundary with China. When the extraordinary news of the coup against President Gorbachev reached him, he realised that the Russian empire was on the brink of collapse and began to travel westwards across it, through Central Asia to the Caucasus, seeking to record its peoples' sentiments at this historic moment, and their hopes for the future.

 

As a former Communist himself, the journey was not without mixed emotions for Terzani and, written as it is in his characteristically thoughtful and perceptive style, Goodnight, Mister Lenin remains a valuable document of a time of optimism.

 

It is another book, however, that is likely to prove his most enduring. In 1976, Terzani was warned by a fortune-teller in Hong Kong that in 1993 he should avoid air travel or he would be killed in a crash. Seventeen years later, having seen enough of Asia's ways to give the soothsayer credence, Terzani spent 12 months travelling the continent on foot, by car, train and elephant - including a trip home to Italy - and avoided an air accident that would otherwise have been fatal.

 

He recorded his experiences in A Fortune-Teller Told Me (1995), the distillation of 25 years spent in the Far East and arguably the finest book written about the region by a European since those of Norman Lewis more than three decades before.

 

Tiziano Terzani was born into a working-class family in Florence on September 14 1938. His teachers fostered his exceptional intelligence - he came to speak five languages fluently, including Chinese - and he was encouraged to study Law at the University of Pisa, where his room-mate was Giuliano Amato, a future Italian prime minister.

 

He then took a job with Olivetti, working for them in Japan and South Africa, but by his late twenties he had realised that he wanted to make travel his way of life and resolved to become a journalist. His first copy, filed to an Italian newspaper from Cape Town while he was still with Olivetti, broke the news of the assassination of Henrik Verwoerd, the architect of apartheid.

 

Terzani then worked briefly for the daily Il Giorno but, keen to learn more of America, went on a Harkness scholarship to study Chinese at Stamford and Columbia universities. On his return to Italy, in 1971 - with more gumption than experience - he persuaded the German magazine Der Spiegel to appoint him its Asia correspondent. He would keep the job for three decades.

 

Based at first in Singapore, Terzani soon moved to Saigon to cover the Vietnam War, going into the field with both American patrols and their enemy the Viet Cong. The conflict produced his first book, Pelle di leopardo (1973), which begins: "War is sad. Even sadder is that you get used to it."

 

When Saigon fell, Terzani decided to remain behind to see how the new regime behaved, although he was not allowed to file reports. He had had some sympathy for the Communists' struggle but he was soon disillusioned by their behaviour, and appalled by the subsequent exodus of the "boat people". It was not the first such blow to his ideals (that had been the crushing of the Hungarian uprising), nor was it to be the last.

 

He was also taken in at first by the anti-bourgeois rhetoric of the Khmer Rouge in neighbouring Cambodia, but once he became aware of Pol Pot's murderous activities he became one of his earliest and fiercest denouncers. His time in South-East Asia produced two more books, Giai Phong! (1975), about the fall of Vietnam, and Holocaust in Kambodscha (1981).

 

After some years in Hong Kong and then Bangkok, Terzani moved his base to Peking. Once more the scales fell from his eyes - "I came," he said, "to understand the brutal logic of power" - and in 1984 his articles for the German and Italian press led to his being arrested and expelled from the country for "counter-revolutionary activities". Later that year he published Behind the Forbidden Door: Travels in China.

 

In the mid-1990s, Terzani set up home first in New Delhi and then in a village in the Himalayas. He assumed something of the aspect of a guru, growing a patriarchal beard and wearing Indian dress, and coming increasingly to espouse Ghandian ideas on non-violence.

 

In 2002, he became involved in a much-publicised spat with Oriana Fallaci, the doyenne of Italian foreign reporters, who had written a best-selling pamphlet heaping invective on Islam and the Taliban after the attacks on the Twin Towers. Terzani, who visited Afghanistan after the American invasion, wrote a counter-blast - Letters against the War - which advocated addressing instead the discontent which he thought acted as a recruiting sergeant for the terrorists.

 

Terzani's other books included In Asia (1998), which made evident his love of the region while deploring the effects on it of Aids, drugs and unchecked capitalism. Earlier this year he published Un altro giro di giostra (another turn of the merry-go-round), which dealt in part with his fight against cancer. He had little fear of death, however. "I am an explorer," he had written, "and I go to explore."

 

He is survived by his wife Angela, and by their son and their daughter.

[limbo]

Hi Kamui,

 

Great writer indeed.

 

I did miss the news.

[Pharcyde]

Sad news,

 

R.I.P.

[Nervous_Dog]

I am reading a lot now, and added hi to the list

 

Sounds good

 

DOG -