Adriatic: A Concert of Civilizations at the End of the Modern Age by Robert D. Kaplan

 

Kaplan's most personal & reflective book

I’ve read many of Robert D. Kaplan’s books, and he’s not an easy writer pigeonhole. Is he a travel writer, or a journalist, or an historian, or a geopolitical strategist, or a literary critic, or a memoirist? In different books—and sometimes all in one book—he qualifies for all of these designations. In fact, in Adriatic, we find Kaplan at his most diverse and his most personal. 

The bones of the book come from a journey (in segments) that Kaplan made that began in Rimini, Italy, and then moved onto Ravenna, Venice, and Trieste (all in Italy), then through Slovenia, Croatia, Montenegro, and Albania, culminating on the Greek island of Corfu. The common theme is the ties of these cities and nations—these lands—with the Adriatic Sea; and, in a larger sense, with the Mediterranean and the diverse civilizations and regimes that have existed in proximity to the Mediterranean. Around the Adriatic, Rome, Byzantium, Venice, the Ottoman Empire, Yugoslavia, and other nations and groups have all encountered one another, along with Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, and Islam. 

Part of the story involves commentary and analysis from another author known as a journalist and geopolitical strategist; lots of reports of conversations with locals—politicians and government officials, academics, historians, and other writers. As one might expect, one comes away with insights into the social, economic, and political situations that Kaplan observes in these lands. All of this is worth the price of admission, but Kaplan’s observations and reporting are not what drew me to read this book twice over. (In reviewing my highlights and notes to write this review, I realized that I gobbled down the book during my first reading, and I would be wise to savor it on a second reading. My hunch proved correct.) 

In fact, several more layers in the book take its value far beyond reporting about current events in each locale. To start with, Kaplan makes his trip into a literary tour. Even before the beginning of his account of his journey, we are introduced to quotes from Italo Calvino; beginning in Rimini, he discusses the work and reputation of Ezra Pound; in Ravenna, we are treated to Dante; in Venice, he discusses Thomas Mann (Death in Venice); in Trieste, James Joyce (where Joyce wrote The Dubliners and other works) and Joseph Brodsky; and eventually on down to Corfu, where he discusses the Nobel Prize-winning Greek poet George Seferis. And in addition to these (and other) literary lights, Kaplan mentions authors most often considered “travel writers." In Corfu, for instance, it’s Lawrence Durrell; in Venice, it’s James/Jan Morris and Mary McCarthy; in Trieste, it’s Sir Richard Francis Burton (the nineteenth-century adventurer and translator) and Claudio Magris; and in (the former) Yugoslavia he cites Rebecca West and her 1941 book, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. These lists of authors are but a sampler. 

But there is another layer down in this book. For Kaplan is not a name-dropper; he’s a reader. His admiration for the authors and works that he discusses is frank (especially for historians and their histories). In fact, he rues his lack of training as a historian and linguist. But he denigrates his own experiences and reporting too much. True, those who haunt archives and who bring to life earlier ages do a great service for which they are rightly hailed. Their work brings history to life, not simply as so many tales from the past, but as a set of events and actions that reveal human intentions and projects in all their magnificent diversity. History provides crucial self-disclosure for the human race, by which we can develop the self-consciousness of our species. Kaplan, through his reading and writing, advances this project with a book like this even more than what he could do via a more formal work of history. 

Digging down another level, Kaplan reveals his own quest for self-knowledge and continuing self-criticism. While Kaplan rues that his formal education ended with an undergraduate degree, I fear that graduate school might have spoiled his taste for broad interests and first-hand knowledge. And, he proves himself a committed, life-long autodidact, which is the mark of any truly educated, cultivated person. Certainly, Kaplan has role models who are great writers who’ve not been hampered by their (relative) lack of formal education. (A favorite of Kaplan and mine is Patrick Leigh Fermor, who was kicked out of school as a young man and went on the write some of the finest English-language prose of the twentieth century, and who quoted Horace to a captive German general on Mt Aetna on Crete during WWII—a great story there.) Whether a historian, philosopher, travel writer, or journalist, to be at the top rank one must know when to adjust one’s focus, when to use the microscope and when to use the telescope as one searches for knowledge across a variety of landscapes. Kaplan does this quite well. (Another fine example of this ability is the late historian-essayist John Lukacs, whose focus could shift without blurring from the “Modern Age” to Five Days in London, May 1940.) 

The final aspect of this book is the deepest and perhaps the most rewarding. This is Kaplan writing a memoir, a confession. Kaplan notes that in writing this he was in his mid-60s, and he’d been to many of these locations before. (See his Mediterranean Winter (2004.) In this sense, this book is similar to his earlier In Europe's Shadow: Two Cold Wars and a Thirty-Year Journey Through Romania and Beyond (2016), which reviewer Timothy D. Snyder described as revealing

[T]he confident, poetical Kaplan, striving as ever in his writing for the proverbial, but also a reflective, political Kaplan, seeking at times to submerge his gift for romantic generalization in respectful attention to the ideas of others. That tension — between an aesthetic sense of wholeness and the intellectual acceptance of complexity — is the real subject of the book, both as autobiography and as geopolitics. 

So, this book: it’s as much a memoir and autobiography as it is a book of travel and political analysis. As in the earlier book, Kaplan chastises himself for his earlier support of the Iraq War, having (mistakenly) thought that it would entail the overthrow of a dictatorship along the lines of the 1989 fall of Communism in Eastern Europe. But he doesn’t dwell on this mistake or the controversy surrounding his earlier book in the Balkans (Balkan Ghosts (1993) that influenced the Clinton administration, making the President reluctant to become actively involved in stopping the Serbian genocide. (There, Kaplan was an early proponent of intervention, notwithstanding any impression taken from Balkan Ghosts by others.) 

But again, I have to emphasize that Kaplan pulls the camera out further, for a wider focus, for a wider reflection upon himself. A sampling: 

The real adventure of travel is intellectual, because the most profound journeys are interior in nature. (Location 89)

. . . . 

[I]t is the books you have read, as much as the people you have met, that constitute autobiography. (Location 95)

. . . .

Because travel is a journey of the mind, the scope of the journey is limitless, encompassing all manner of introspection and concerned with the great debates and issues of our age. (Location 96)

. . . . 

Travel is psychoanalysis that starts in a specific moment of time and space. And everything about that moment is both unique and sacred—everything. (Location 99)

. . . . 

Originality emanates from solitude: from letting your thoughts wander in alien terrain. I boarded a ferry from Pescara to Split a half century ago to feel alive thus. For this reason I am alone now in a church in Rimini in winter. The lonelier the setting, the crueler the weather, the greater the possibilities for beauty, I tell myself. Great poetry is not purple; it is severe. (Location 106)

. . . . 

The mystery of travel involves the layers revealed about yourself as you devour such knowledge. Thus, travel must lead to self-doubt. And I am full of doubts. (Location 113)

[A]s I matured and became more interested in abstract matters rather than in atmospherics—in Confucian philosophy itself rather than in merely the setting for it, in the geopolitics of Italian city-states rather than in the art they produced—[Ezra] Pound’s evocative allusions to such matters, idiosyncratic as they might be, arguably nutty and crackpot for significant stretches, kept me from altogether deserting him. (Location 347)

. . . . 

Travel leads to books, and good books lead you to other good books. And thus, I have become an obsessive reader of bibliographies. (Location 385)

. . . .

The more I learned, the more aware I became of my own ignorance and autodidacticism. Only in late middle age would I become intellectually comfortable in my own skin, confident that the truest and most revealing insights sometimes involve seeing what was right in front of your eyes as you traveled. The future, I have learned, is often prepared by what cannot be mentioned or admitted to in fine company. The future lies inside the silences. (Location 535)

. . . . 

The train is the perfect place to think and read. (Location 602)

. . . .

Even just one day of travel constitutes a moment of lucidity that breaks through the grinding gears of daily habit, so that it becomes a bit more difficult to lie to oneself. I travel in order not to be deceived. Camus writes, “I realized…that a man who’d only lived for a day could easily live for a hundred years in a prison. He’d have enough memories not to get bored.” Very overstated perhaps, but not if that one day was a day of travel. (Location 603)

. . . 

[B]ecause there is no redemption, there is only confession. (Location 629) 

Such a person, such a writer, who strives for such a degree of self-knowledge, self-understanding, who recollects opportunities realized and lost, and who engages in a such on ongoing project of genuine education--of drawing out one's self, as does Kaplan--deserves our admiration for giving voice to so much that we may pass over or have missed in ourselves. 

I hope that this gives you a sample of the many layers of this book and the reason why Kaplan would worry about how this book might be categorized in a book store! It’s many books, many styles, all in one book. It’s a terrific read; a travelogue for the mind; a reflection on many times and places.