"A Fortune-Teller Told Me" is a well-written and passionate travelogue that shows the Asian Tigers in 1993, while they were in the process of dismantling their past and speeding towards westernization. Tiziani's views on core oriental values is something I can completely relate to. The author loved the cultures of Indo-China and all the countries that form ASEAN and this book is a travelogue of his overland journeys from these countries to Europe via Russia. You can feel how countries like Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand were in 1993. I, for one, am glad that Vietnam is nothing like what he described (with horror) in the book. But I would have loved to see the Malaysia of yesteryear that he writes about romantically.
Terzani knew the Chinese people well and at times I think he is overly harsh on them in this book. I was also a bit disappointed with how little coverage his Trans-Siberian journey gets in the book. Of course there are a couple of factors that need to be kept in mind: For starters, Russia looked a lot like a failed state in 1993 and the author made the mistake of just passing through the cities via train without getting off, unlike I did during my epic-journey ten years later in a more stable version of the country.
The author has witnessed and covered three significant historic moments of the kind that every journalist dreams of . He was in the USSR when it collapsed, he saw the fall of Saigon in 1975 and the Khmer Rouge's takeover of Cambodia. I am sure his Goodbye Mr Lenin is also a great book.
Terzani had a longing to live in India, a country he believed at that time to not be following the western-style modernisation that East Asia was undertaking. I hope he was happy in India when he lived here. He died 3 years ago and I am really sorry that I won't be able to meet him in this life. The man has already become one of my idols.
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