The concept of slow travel had not yet been probably coined
when Alice Steinbach decided to spend a year in Europe, but here’s a book that
epitomizes the beauty of lived experiences, of escaping your comfort zones and
discovering that inside you lies a person that’s waiting to be freed. Alice Steinbach
definitely mastered that craft as she spent almost a year in four different
countries to encounter brand new experiences that enabled her to emerge with
new perspectives.
Without Reservations: The Travels of an
Independent Women has become a classic travel memoir that aspiring travel
writers should emulate. Here, Pulitzer winning Steinbach chronicles her European
journey after taking a nine-month off from her job as a journalist at The Baltimore Sun.
Alice was a self-professed independent woman and I think she was adamant of living up to that image. “For years I’d
made my own choices, paid my own bills, shoveled my own snow,” she wrote. But does independence mean only being
physically free to do as the body wills? The author, perhaps, pondered and
realized there’s more! “I had fallen into the habit of defining myself
in terms of who I was to other people and what they expected of me.” And
so, off to Europe she went, to chase liberty, to run after herself.
Her sojourn led her to some of
the most beautiful places in the world: Paris, London, Oxford, Venice, to name
a few. Alice Steinbach took the company of Freya Stark with her. The British
Italian explorer and travel writer was an inspiration to Alice and many times the author referred to one of Freya's books, whenever she felt lonely
and needed to ignite the zest to continue.
In Paris she started her travel,
feeling dismayed and anxious. Explorer’s remorse, perhaps? She came to terms
with herself as she progressed in her museum trips, shop exploration, and
frequent visits to cafés and restaurants. Then, she met a Japanese man named
Naohiro and the two became lovers—parting ways for the meantime, then meeting
once more somewhere else.
But whether Naohiro was around or not, Alice ventured on her
own. Her writings delved on her inward travels and travails and in the book,
she would narrate part of her past (her divorce, for example) and “musings on
aging, intimacy, her two grown sons and the purpose of work,” as Janet
Rae Brooks wrote.
Along the way, she met people and the book is sprinkled by tales
of their stories and how Alice connected with them. In Milan, for example, she enjoyed some time with a charming
American on the verge of marriage. Steinbach would tell shopkeepers she was her
daughter, while the American would refer to Alice as her mother. Then, in Asolo,
where Freya Stark died, she joined two “patrician” travelers as they toured
Villa Barbaro.
It took me seven months to finish reading Steinbach’s memoir,
the longest I have spent with one book so far. The impact became sentimental as
I neared the end. Every day I would read one chapter after another, slowly,
soulfully. I enamored myself with Steinbach’s vividness in describing the
people she met, places she’d been too, and experiences she’d encountered and
recounted. I loved it when she described Seine as “silvery and serpentine, it
moved like mercury through the center of the city, a mesmerizing force”; of Naohiro as “slim,
attractive, elegantly dressed completely in black except for a white sweater
thrown across his shoulders”; and that
one night in Venice when the “moon… glowed silver through the fog, like light
shining to the eyes.”
Steinbach’s deftness in writing evokes a romantic appeal. Without Reservations made me realize
that to travel is not only to satiate the eyes and senses, but also to unleash our
hidden potentials and aspirations. Traveling goes beyond what the eyes can see
or what our feet can tread, but on how much the experiences pierce through the
soul and mark a positive effect on our being. This work is worth reading again
and again, a perfect partner when you’re bound to explore Europe, with or
without reservations.
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