Book Review A Week at the Airport

Alain de Botton - Week during the Airport

Feature photo: City of Sound. Photo above via Frank Bures.

Alain de Botton, author of The Art of Travel, the book which inspired me to write my MA thesis upon transport as well as identity, was invited by to spend the week in Terminal 5 during London Heathrow as the writer-in-residence.

The result is A Week during the Airport.

He sets up camp with the table as well as the computer near the departures desk, but he wanders throughout as well as takes us with him from the airport chapel to the factory where the airplane food is made as well as plated.

The slim volume, usually 107 pages, is split into four sections: Approach, Departures, Airside, as well as Arrivals. Along with text, it includes photographs of places such as the hallway of the road house where he stayed, of the Ghanaian family unpacking the plasma big-screen TV they would be receiving home with them, and, the place Id never seen before -> The First-Class Lounge.

He is the penetrating spectator as well as researcher, capturing the brew of emotions which appear to be fundamental in airports; those in-between spaces where people have been brought together momentarily because of their desire or need to go somewhere else.

I love his outline of the family heading out upon vacation. He shows the fall of the epitome which many people have when they travel, or during least for those who assume changing places will automatically change who they are. David, the father, had been planning the trip for the year:

As David lifted the suitcase upon to the conveyor belt, he came to an unexpected as well as troubling realisation: which he was bringing himself with him upon his holiday

He had booked the trip in the expectancy of being means to enjoy his children, his wife, the Mediterranean, some spanakopita as well as the Attic skies, but it was clear ! which he would be forced to apprehend all of these through the distorting filter of his own being.

He makes we look during an airport; places we often see only as the gateway to get to where we want to go, as the place of the own.

Community Connection

Read some-more of the recommended titles underneath Matadors Focus upon Travel Reading page.


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