Dreaming of the desert: my life in the Sahara, by Sanmao

Travel writing is ‘the red light district of literature’, as Colin Thubron aptly put it, a space where anything goes. Like punters to the other red light districts, we tend to stick to what we know we like, to our own kind. We travel vicariously with voices that are familiar, or at least intelligible, whose behaviour we can understand, whose narrators we believe we can know. That belief allows them to take us to places we have never seen. How, then, can we follow a foreign author’s account of travelling to, or living in, a place we don’t know? I thought this would be an interesting problem while reading Sanmao’s Stories of the Sahara.

Sanmao is not the author’s real name. Born Chen Maoping in China in 1943, she was brought up in Taiwan and educated there, and in Madrid and Germany. In the early 1970s, she married a Spaniard. He loved water, but she dreamed of the desert.