Summary Of Travelers In Spain By David Mitchell

Travellers in Spain: An illustrated anthology by David Mitchell ─ review

David Mitchell presents an immersion in Spanish culture and customs throughout space and time by compiling written extracts from travellers.

It is well known that travelling is a beneficial activity for people as it helps to open our minds, learn what characterizes and differentiates one country, culture or civilization from another but, more importantly, it leads people to a development of a brand-new and more mature conception of the world as well as a new outlook on life.

Travelling is not a big deal nowadays due to the fact that we live in a globalized world which makes communications a lot easier. However, by the time most of the travellers, whose written extracts

It shows a collection of impressions, a huge pile of descriptions of conspicuous and widely known clichés that people associate Spain with, such as bullfights, flamenco, the gypsy community, bandits dwellers on Sierra Morena, the lack of punctuality of Spaniards (along with their laziness and lack of dedication to work), as well as their devotion to religion. I would like to emphasize how efficient is Mitchell when it comes to bringing together the opinion of travellers, as he manages to show the insights of both irrelevant and world-famous people (e.g. Lord Byron, Gerald Brenen, Ernest Hemingway and Robert Graves among others) making no distinction on their status and helping the reader not to diverge the attention from the main

What is more, Mitchell does not even include an introduction in the book, which makes the reader jump in the deep end with any idea (apart from that given by the title of the book) about what the intention of the author is, which topics it will deal with or what it will be about.

One may think that this book will be a more spread out in time version of La tesis de Nancy by Ramón J. Sender, as it also deals with the viewpoints of foreigners of Spanish clichés and traditions. However, as Tom Burns states in the foreword of Mitchell’s book, “the travellers themselves constitute a motley crew that is worthy of a Chaucerian epic”, given the similarities to Chaucer’s famous work The Canterbury Tales because of its collection of insights throughout Spain rather than a more light-hearted and deep perception of an individual as the one showed in Sender’s