All I Wanted was Company by John Hopkins (Arcadia Press Ltd., 1999)
Two beautifully written and extremely engaging and transporting books by a writer I increasingly admire the more I read him.
Both of these novels (they read like auto-fiction) feature the same rather stoic and affectless narrator who leads a solitary and frugal life in an undeveloped country. The Attempt is set in Peru, with our narrator based in Lima but frequently traveling to the interior of the country. All I Wanted was Company (I love this title) finds a similar character traveling to Morocco with a wealthy older woman, and then having a dispassionate but poignant affair with a charismatic Moroccan woman of Spanish and Jewish descent.
Like all great travel writers, Hopkins is a brilliant observer of landscapes, architecture, and people. He recreates them all with a clear-sighted sympathy and appreciation that makes his books very pleasurable to experience, for one doesn’t read them so much as one exists within them.
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