There's a book by that missed its mark - wanted to make a virtue, a nation or clan or creed, of travelling all the time, and tried too hard to be poetic and visionary about it. Terzani certainly travels all the time, and seems to slide between the beliefs of one place and the next with more ease than I'd manage. But Terzani also has a family home he keeps going back to, and settles into houses in several cities in between.
The hook, for a modern travel tale, is double and sharp; he was long ago told by a fortune-teller to avoid air travel in 1993, and - maybe just because it would make a good book - he didn't fly for that year (an extended year, to allow for Fate's unknown choice of calendar). But he's a foreign correspondent, so he had to travel all the time anyway: but he did it by train and slow boat, and saw things he wouldn't have otherwise. It's not a journey I expect to make or would be good at... I liked 's From Heaven Lake, too.
Terzani also kept going to fortune-tellers, with only enough bare possibility of belief that it doesn't seem actually rude. As he points out, more and more as he visits more and more of them, their predictions and warnings tend to make sense for their particular locales. The people who recommend the local seers are also compare-and-contrast exercises in their attitudes towards doing so. And the best fortuneteller is always somewhere exotic; Bangkok if you're in LA, but in Prague if you're in Bangkok.
ISBN: 0-609-80958-X
So wrote clew in History (20th c.). | TrackBack