On aging well and other voyages – Michael Hofmann in LRB:

“Do people ever know their true reason for embarking on a long journey?’ Tété-Michel Kpomassie asks, just as he is setting out for home (où ça?) at the end of a year and a half in the Greenland of his dreams. He was 16 when he first left Togo for Europe; 24 when he reached Greenland, by way of Ghana, Senegal, France, Germany and the colonial power, Denmark; 38 when he wrote those words; 40 when they were published by Flammarion. Now he is 80, and apparently considering a return to Greenland, to write – if such delirious symmetry and stern purpose can be believed – the story of his boyhood in Togo.”

(…)

“Kpomassie is a writer of enviable and maybe indispensable amiability and serenity. He throws himself – just a kid! – on the mercy of embassies. He turns up on the doorstep of a senior French diplomat in Paris, armed only with a several-years-old letter of introduction. He secures a subsequent billet in Bonn by picking up the suitcases of a couple of ladies getting off the train with him. He is happy and perhaps even relieved to find people in Greenland falling over themselves to host him, often for weeks and months on end. With his gaze and his mind continually turned out and facing forward, he is up to every predicament he encounters; he has the mother wit, the equanimity and the self-confidence of the epic hero. He is rarely turned in on himself, hardly ever bored, homesick, hungry, cold. Everyone who writes about Michel the Giant comments on his charm; but it isn’t charm as veneer, as facilitating ooze or unguent, but charm that identifies and goes out to meet itself in others wherever it may be met with, which is wherever Michel goes. One might call it fair dealing or friendliness. Or else he’s the seventh son of a seventh son. The Ghanaian embassy in Dakar has ‘a charming Togolese girl at the reception desk’; newly arrived in the City of Lights, ‘I was enchanted’; Copenhagen is ‘charming’; on the ship to Greenland, ‘a charming Danish hostess woke up the passengers for breakfast’; ‘it was total enchantment’ (a visit to an old people’s home on his first day).”

(…)

“Yes, one thinks, our man has an iron digestion, but he has an iron mind as well. He explicates seasons, customs, work, accommodation, morals. He seems to notice everything, and then to seek a reason it might be so. He has an eye for absurdity – often European absurdity. A tangle of snakes ‘like a mountain of spaghetti’, a breakfast scene ‘worthy of a Brueghel’. He reconstructs – or has never forgotten – his first glimpse of Paris: On both sides of the street, a busy crowd walked up and down the pavements. Others were crossing the street in both directions, some of them almost running. The men all wore grey suits, without any bright colours. They were walking fast and seemed on edge. The women had their hair dyed all kinds of colours. In the general hustle and bustle, they walked along with their shoulders hunched forward, looking up only to flash a stealthy sideways glance from time to time. I couldn’t see any with the supple, noble walk or majestic bearing of our African women. Doubtless the pressure of Parisian life forced them into that nervous, jerky way of walking.”

(…)

“When he leaves, after two summers and a winter, having renewed his visa five times, it is again by boat. ‘Even though on every sea voyage I make, however short, I suffer from seasickness, a long boat trip is the form of travel I like best,’ he writes. ‘That inner psychological war with the elements which one feels one is waging at sea provides me with a good cure for the indefinable sense of anxiety, or the powerful sexual drive, that the lone foreign traveller often develops so intensely in the idleness of Greenland villages.’”

Read the review here.

Now, this is a voyage that puts other voyages to shame.

Anxiety and a powerful sexual drive, characteristics of the lone foreign traveller, so it is.

Charm, not as means to an end, but as genuine friendliness. It’s rare but it exists.