Very often, the most perilous and far-flung adventures begin in the very place where they end: in the stacks of a library, between the pages of a book, in peace and quiet.
Let us just think of young Conrad who whetted his desire to become a sailor by reading Sea workers (Hugo), the maritime novels of Frederick Marryat and those of Fenimore Cooper.
Olivier Weber, writer-traveler, great reporter, diplomat and former French war correspondent born in 1958, knows this well and pays these dreamers of the confines a heartfelt tribute with a Adventure Lovers Dictionary. A sum of almost a thousand pages for the aficionados travel literature as well as for readers in need of departures.
This “meridian surveyor”, who admits to having adopted the art of fugue very early, sees himself again, as a child, reading Cervantes in secret at night in the dormitory of an Alsatian orphanage. “I learned with the hidalgo responsible for my chronic insomnia the meaning of the estocade – to fight to defend -, the taste of the horizon, even if it was populated with windmills, and with Goethe the mastery, quite relative, of melancholy.”
And this is the author of the Don Quixote which also gave him his very first lesson in nomadism: “To live the adventure, you first have to dream about it.”
Subjective and arbitrary, like any exercise of the same kind, this Adventure Lovers Dictionary sometimes takes us on more personal paths, to Central Asia, to the Far East. As when Olivier Weber recounts how he miraculously escaped death after an attack by the Tamil Tigers that targeted the plane he was supposed to be boarding, in the middle of the civil war in Sri Lanka. Or when he recalls one of his many meetings in Afghanistan with Commander Massoud, this “freedom adventurer”.
Antoine Galland, the brilliant introducer and translator of Arabian Nightss, rubs shoulders with Vasco de Gama, Hernán Cortés, Jacques Cartier, Blaise Cendrars and Théodore Monod, the “prophet of the desert”. Not forgetting a few fictional adventurers: from Long John Silver to Indiana Jones, from Tarzan to Tintin, via Gilgamesh – who have also had a good number of imitators.
Pirates, writers, ethnologists, explorers, long-distance travelers, from “Absurd” to “Zanzibar”, the author covers the horizon widely. Alexandra David-Néel, Richard Francis Burton, Joseph Conrad, Jack Kerouac and Gérard Chaliand also rub shoulders with Nicolas Bouvier, Bruce Chatwin, Isabelle Eberhardt and Sylvain Tesson. Not forgetting Ella Maillart, “woman of the globe” (Paul Valéry) to whom Olivier Weber has devoted a mobile biography (I’m from nowhere. In the footsteps of Ella MaillartPayot, 2003).
If movement is the “first step of adventure”, it is also the alter ego, Olivier Weber tells us, of the library, of which he also gives us, in this inspired dictionary, his own definition: “Haven of the adventurer at the quayside.” Everything is said.