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    Wheels Within Wheels: The Making of a Traveller
    Unavailable
    Wheels Within Wheels: The Making of a Traveller
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    Wheels Within Wheels: The Making of a Traveller
    Ebook327 pages7 hours

    Wheels Within Wheels: The Making of a Traveller

    By Dervla Murphy

    4/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    What is it that makes us who we are? In this beautifully written and searingly honest autobiography, the intrepid cyclist and traveller Dervla Murphy remembers her richly unconventional first thirty years. She describes her determined childhood self - strong-willed and beguiled by books from the first - her intermittent formal education and the intense relationship of an only child with her parents, particularly her invalid mother whom she nursed until her death. Here lie the roots of Dervla's gift for friendship, her love of writing, her curiosity, her hatred of cant, her hardiness and her desire to travel. Bicycling fifty miles in a day at the age of eleven, alone, it seems only natural that her first major journey should have been to cycle to India.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherEland Publishing
    Release dateOct 18, 2011
    ISBN9781906011734
    Unavailable
    Wheels Within Wheels: The Making of a Traveller

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    Reviews for Wheels Within Wheels

    4/5

    29 ratings4 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Interesting, although it faded towards the end, an it might have helped if I'd known a bit more about Dervla's travel writing beforehand - as it becomes clear she is famous for having cycled to India in the 60s, which even though it's not detailed here, must have been quite a feat. Dervla is quite dismissive of the attention it garnered though. I'm sure there is another book about that trip which I would like to read.She was born in 1930s rural ireland, to a couple recently moved from Dublin, and hence already somewhat unconventional. Most of Dervla's early life was defined by her mother's early onset arthritis, and this is her later self's attempt to explain just how much that influenced her desires and ability to travel and explore, unconcerned by many more material issues. There are occasional confusions in the timeline, and a lot of references to more oblique family members who are sometimes hard to keep straight - but it's full of amusing anecdotes describing life at that time and place, especially from the view of an independently minded girl. It's as she enters her teens and starts thinking about travel, and going on some of her early adventures that a bit more familiarity with those adventures would be appreciated, they are mentioned only in passing as if the reader knows about them. Most of the focus is on Dervla's relationship with her mother - something that must have been hard to write about, but isn't easy to read, as you only get her side of the story, and have never met the other people in question. A powerful life though, and she must have been a fascinating person to have met. Very much an inspiration as to how you can do what you wish to, when you're unconcerned about what 'the world' might think.
    • 5/5
      I've had a few of Dervla Murphy's travel books for some years and never got around to reading them. There was something about an Irish woman riding around the world on a bicycle that seemed a little too contrived for my taste. Having read this searing (perhaps the best word) autobiography of her growing up (and older) in Ireland while looking after her crippled mother I have a better appreciation of where she's coming from - or came from which is the point of her title. And yes, wheels within wheels indeed. This is a brilliant story of growing up in Ireland, of childhood, and of families, politics and religion. Most of all, although this might just be my take on it, she comes across as tremendously likable and interesting, even more so for having so many human failings and for having the honesty to talk about them. This would be perfectly paired with Edna O'Brien's stories of growing up in Ireland in much the same period. Highly recommended.
    • 4/5
      Last year I read Murphy's wonderful account of her famous 1963 bicycle journey from Ireland to India (Full tilt), and decided that I would have to read more of her books: this one is an autobiography covering her life up to the point where she sets off to India. In part it's a charming account of growing up in an eccentric family in a small Irish town in the thirties and forties, but there is also quite a bit about the political, social and religious complexities of Irish life. In the later part of the book, Murphy gives us a rather harrowing account of the difficult situation she found herself in having to care for her invalid mother for many years, and the way this stressful situation hurt both of them.
    • 4/5
      This is the first book I've read by Dervla Murphy. She wrote quite a few before this one, so in that sense I am reading out of order. On the other hand, this book deals with the first 30 or so years of her life, up to her first big trip to India. Of course the India book is very famous and most folks will know about that before reading this book. So this book is a kind of explanation of what led up to, what prepared her for that first big trip. While the India trip was plenty big - and I do look forward to reading that book - we learn here about earlier trips that were plenty big enough, perhaps a month of 120 mile days through Spain. She doesn't give us much detail about those trips. She does make it clear that they were exhilarating and good evidence that her dream trip to India was possible.But bike touring is not really the point of the book. The book is about her family. She was an only child and her mother was crippled by arthritis and required increasing amounts of care through the years. Much of this care fell to Dervla, which kept her tied to home. Yet one way or another she did get out on day trips and longer trips, generally with the support of her parents. Her family life was a kind of crucible out of which was forged her remarkable and robust capabilities. That is really the theme of the book. Irish politics has always been very confusing to me. The Irish Free State, what was all that? Dervla's family was involved with the Republican wing, doggedly opposed to the splitting of Ireland. In the early part of the book Dervla tells some stories about that involvement and through that I think I got a better orientation to the battle lines that I'd gotten before. I've ordered her book A Place Apart to learn even more about that. This is a very nicely written book. Dervla talks about how her parents were devoted to religion and her own generation started immersed in that faith but then went through the evaporation of that. So in a sense her generation had the foundation of faith but also the vast openness of the world where faith no longer limits. We later generations have to manage that expanse without the anchoring. But reading about her life, I can see that she is firmly rooted in the world of literature, so deeply immersed that she cannot even see it. I was born in 1955. Perhaps my generation has seen the evaporation of the world of literature, of scholarship. Now we have the youtube generations who have no idea what they have lost. Probably for them Dervla's reading of commentaries on Shakespeare will sound medieval. It's not like faith and scholarship have utterly disappeared - they have just got disconnected from cultural norms. I fear our cultural norms have drifted off.. actually the last chapter of this book is a kind of epilog, about the publication of her India book. Her publisher, John Murray, is like a hold-out of old values. She visits other publishers first and finds them all preoccupied with surface and profit. Well, she's lived a long life and seen more than 99% of the rest of us! How lucky we are that she is so skillful at sharing those experiences with us!