JOURNEY INTO THE MIND’S EYE

FRAGMENTS OF AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY Lesley Blanch

Introduction by Georgia de Chamberet Paperback • 400 pages • $18.95 Also available as an e-book

“The sensibility she brought to her subjects was so distinctive that all her writing was essentially autobiographical, but her only book-length memoir was Journey into the Mind’s Eye, a highly scented account of distant travel and lost love.” —Jane Shilling, The Telegraph

Journey into the Mind’s Eye is the July 2018 selection of the NYRB Classics Book Club. If you join the Book Club by July 19th, it will be your first selection.

“My book is not altogether autobiography, nor altogether travel or history either. You will just have to invent a new category.” —Lesley Blanch

Writer, artist, and inveterate traveler Lesley Blanch became enthralled with Russia when she was a child. A mysterious traveler—swathed in Siberian furs, bearing Fabergé eggs and icons as gifts along with fairy tales of Russia—came to visit her parents, and left her starry-eyed. Years later the same man returned to sweep Blanch off her feet. Her love affair with the Traveller, as she calls him, transformed her life and fueled an abiding fascination with Russia and Russian culture, one that would lead her to dingy apartments reeking of cabbage soup and piroshki on the outskirts of Paris in the 1960s, and to Siberia and beyond.

Journey into the Mind’s Eye is a book that remains as singularly adventurous and intoxicating now as when it first came out in 1968.

“Blanch’s brilliance lies in her honesty about the subjectivity of her work. For her, travel is neither an act of discovery nor an explication . . . . but the endless attempt to bridge that vast land of otherness with the worlds we’ve created in our own minds . . . . If Blanch’s Journey isn’t a traditional travelogue, it’s not because she can’t write about the Russia in front of her. It’s because that Russia. . . can never be the only one she sees.” —Tara Isabella Burton, The Paris Review

“She was incapable of writing boringly or badly. . . [Journey is an] incomparably eccentric exercise in autobiography.” —Philip Ziegler, The Spectator

“Everything about [Blanch] was abundant. . . She reminded you irresistibly of a gilded cupid, knowing neither vice nor virtue, but playful and loving, pouring out affection, humour, ideas, plans, stories, words from her rich cornucopia of personality.” —Anne Scott-James