[In the following review, Plate compliments de Botton's “light, humorous prose” in The Art of Travel, but feels that the author's comparisons between art and travel are often “contradictory.”]

Prodesse Et Delectare, “to teach and to delight,” could indeed be de Botton's motto. For in The Art of Travel, as in How Proust Can Change Your Life (1997) and The Consolations of Philosophy (2000), he tackles some of life's Big Questions in light, humorous prose, reflecting on the assumptions behind holiday-making, probing our motives and desires for going on a journey, and questioning what we think we do when we travel with the help of a handful of (all-male, mostly French and English nineteenth-century) writers and painters.

The selection of guides to thinking about travel, no less than the topics chosen to explore, reveal de Botton's romantic inclinations. In a series of essays on the exotic, on the sublime, on Wordsworthian “spots of time,” and on walks through one's own neighborhood in the spirit of de Maistre's Journey around My Bedroom, de Botton instructs us to “notice what we have already seen,” echoing Shelley's claim that art “strips the veil of familiarity from the world, and lays bare the naked and sleeping beauty.”

There's much to like in The Art of Travel. At times taking us over familiar (narrative, visual, or geographical) ground, de Botton is at his best when arguing for journeys at or close to home. The juxtaposition of Baudelaire's poetry and Hopper's painting reveals a captivating poetics of attente, of waiting and expectation; the demonstrations of the ways in which art can open our eyes to our surroundings—Van Gogh's paintings pointing the traveler's eyes to the cypresses, the olive trees, and the wheat fields of Provence, Ruskin's use of a sketchbook enabling them to remain “alive to the smallest features of the visual world”—hold the irresistible appeal of the reflective life wherein there's time to attend to and delight in the details of the quotidian. To compare the fascination the Orient held for Flaubert and de Botton's own enthusiasm for Amsterdam, containing for this reader the delight of the familiar made strange, also indicates the ways the reader is situated.

There's something discomforting about the “we” evoked throughout the text, that comes to insight on tropical islands, that is lured to travel by photographs of “a sandy beach fringed by a turquoise sea, … a palm tree gently inclining in a tropical breeze” yet to whom the landscapes of Provence are revealed through kindred artistic processes of selection. And there's something disturbing about the passing in silence over the fact that it is the same tourist industry that spoils the very picture it sells on “Winter Sun” brochures (think of Jamaica Kincaid's scathing description of the effects of tourism in A Small Place) and that uses art to tell us what to look for in a landscape, what counts as interesting. Despising guidebooks for telling us what's worth seeing yet applauding art for doing exactly that, de Botton looks at travel through an art that regrettably forgets it is itself ideological, and that the pleasures of the aesthetic are vested with many, sometimes contradictory, interests.