A slight but enjoyable volume of vignettes from Jan Morris’ travels.
I was reading Conundrum at the same time and so noticed that she had taken small extracts from that work to include in this volume.

A sighting in Texas
On my fourth day in the city
I looked through the window
and saw a dreamlike figure sauntering by.
He had a sack over his arm, and a stick over his shoulder,
and he wore a high-crowned hat and a cloak, I think,
and he strolled past easy, insolent and amused.
My heart leapt to see him.
‘Who was that?’ I cried, rushing to the window,
‘that man with the stick, and the high-crowned hat, and the sack on his arm?’
My hostess returned me reprovingly to our conversation.
‘I saw nobody,’ she sweetly and carefully said.
‘But tell me, have you had time to see our new Picasso in the Fine Arts Museum?
And will you have an opportunity to meet with Mrs Oveta Culp Hobby? ( )

This reads like the jottings from a writer’s notebook and these snapshots by Jan Morris are taken from a lifetime of world travel. She’s seen things I’ll never see so I enjoyed reading these quick memories from her life on the road. Some are only short paragraphs, others very well written, then there are those that show the sharp eye of a good people watcher. None of her ‘Contacts’ are earth shattering or important in the big scheme of things, yet for all that they make up an interesting collection ( )

Born in 1926, now aged 88, Jan Morris has witnessed many important events, known and seen many important people, and places. Trained as a historian, Morris achieved reknown as a travel writer, particularly describing places, most notably portraits of cities,such as Oxford, Venice, Sydney, Hong Kong and Manhattan. His focus has always been to describe places, writing "relatively little about people" (...) "Often I have given them only a few lines, or a paragraph" (p. 1), as the author writes in the introduction. One wonders what motivated Morris to change that in what might well be her last book.

Supposedly, travel must become really hard to an aging author, let alone the work of writing. Thus, it seemed, Jan Morris chose to find her subjects closer to home, as she described her home itself in the short autobiographical and historical monograph or memoir A Writer's House in Wales (2002). In 2006, she returned to fiction, with the (social) science-fiction novel Hav, picking up on the same themes of Last Letters from Hav, which was written and short-listed for the Booker Prize more than 20 years earlier. It seemed Mrs Morris had retired, as no further books or essays appeared, until the publication of Contact! A book of glimpses, three years later.

It is not clear where the material for this book comes from. They could be passages from notes or autographs, but it seems most are newly written passages, most very short, based on memories. They form a very eclectic collection of nostalgic ramblings. The style of writing is quaint and antiquarian. One almost hears the author's dentures rattling. In the introduction she writes that these vignettes are observations of "Rich and poor (...), young and old, grand and humble, primitive and exquisitely civilized, named and anonymous, in particular and in the general (...) seldom friends or even acquiantances, only contacts." (p.2) The latter seems an over-statement. As the title suggests, and the reading confirms, these contacts are merely glimpsed, they are no more than very superficial "eye contacts."

Contact! A book of glimpses is a collection of very random reminiscences of all kinds of people Jan Morris encountered on her travels or during his or her life. They are people the way she remembered them, often endearingly enshrined in memory with a humourous little anecdote, a humour soft and mouldy with time.

The book is a book of no effect at all, and very boring after a couple of pages. While these people may have left an impression on the author, the reader soon gets the feeling that the author must have pained her memory or imagination to scrape enough material together to fill the pages. Nice memories do not always come out nicely on paper. ( )

ok but will never remember anything. episodes only a short paragraph. ( )

I had read that Jan Morris had written her last book. Thankfully she has given us [Contact] even though it really is not a book in the traditional sense. Morris is one of the top living travel writers. This book presents a series of one-paragraph observations she has made in her travels from pre-WWII to present. The paragraphs are brief, averaging just over two per page. They have no apparent order, either chronological, geographic or subject. Such is Morris' skill, that in a brief collection of sentences she captures a moment with a painterly detail that suggests an underlying but untold story. It appears she took these notes during her travels with the thought of later including them in a particular book. Having not used them, she has now taken them out of her index card file and given them to us. This book captures Morris' powers of observation that have made her such a great travel writer. Like a great photographer, she knows a great picture when she sees it, and she knows how to capture it. ( )