George Forster is one of the most fascinating figures you have probably never heard of ... Forster is the vibrant subject of Andrea Wulf’s The Traveler, a lively new book that hums with her characteristic verve ... It is invigorating, especially now, to read him observing, thinking and enthusing on the page.
In our own fractured age, George Forster’s recovered legacy is a vital reminder of what we stand to lose in our artificial partitioning of the world. What a contemporary described as 'cosmopolitanism personified,' he felt no allegiance to a single nation but to humanity itself. The Traveler is an invitation to step out of our studies and experience the world — with its attendant risks and rewards.
Recreates the sight, smell, and feel of that era in intimate detail ... Such imagery helps ground Wulf’s story, a welcome quality in a narrative that moves so quickly. From an early age, Forster was in a hurry, and as his biographer, Wulf must dash along, too ... Wulf’s admiration for Forster can sometimes seem indulgent. His progressive views also included unbridled enthusiasm for the French Revolution, a passion that tended to blind him to its cruelty. Wulf notes some of those excesses, then quickly moves on ... She concedes Forster’s weaknesses, but she holds up his better self as an example worth preserving.
The richness of Wulf’s research – drawn from Forster’s personal correspondence, diaries and essays, as well as those of his contemporaries – injects a novelistic specificity into the scenes she reconstructs.
Splendid ... If her book fails to satisfy in any one way it is perhaps in the self-reproaching twinge readers will feel at their own sad distance from history’s centre stage.
A compelling life to narrate, and Wulf cleaves closely to archival verities, avoiding any tendency towards overembellished writing. Yet if the biographer’s task is not simply to narrate, but also to offer insights into character and personality as the motor to actions and opinions, where Forster’s cosmopolitanism, tolerance, open-mindedness, intellectual independence and sheer toughness came from remain unclear on this account ... The great achievement of The Traveller is to make Forster resonate with the present day. What remains frustratingly elusive is an understanding of how he came to be the traveller, thinker and humanitarian who is so able to do so.
