So much of our travels can be enjoyed through the prism of literature. Some writers are intrinsically connected to a destination and you can still visit places associated with them. Just a very few examples:
Miguel Cervantes with Alcalá de Henares, Spain
Agatha Christie with Devon, England
Isak Dineson (Karen Blixen) with Kenya
Ian Fleming with Jamaica
Gabriel García Márquez with northern Colombia
Thomas Hardy with Dorset, England
William Wordsworth and Beatrix Potter with England's Lake District
Ernest Hemingway with Key West and Havana
Franz Kafka with Prague
James Joyce with Dublin
R.K. Narayan with Madras (Chennai), India
Pablo Neruda with Valparaíso and Viña del Mar, Chile
Tennessee Williams with New Orleans
The literary travel possibilities are nearly endless - have a read!
Cover photo: Bruce Tuten
Comments
Reading the poet Simon Armitage's "Walking Home: Travels with a Troubadour on the Pennine Way," his walk along the 296-mile Pennine Way from the Scottish border to Edale, Derbyshire. He put together 20 poetry readings along the route to fund the trip, to which the attendance to some was heartening, to others paltry amid the usual British weather. A very nice read that mixes real literature -- poetry no less -- with a good ol' walk through some of the most beautiful, often forlorn and empty, countryside of Europe.
The entire British footpath system -- one of our pride and joys -- was started in 1936 in Edale when a group of ramblers purposely trespassed on land in order to force the reopening of what was always a public right of way, and their actions resulted in the opening of 10,000s of such miles and footpaths.
I have not read the Sherry books. Thank you for the recommendation of England Made Me. You are the first person I've "known" who has actually read it, and now I hope to read it.
Just finished a novel by the superlative Graham Greene that I did not know existed, a very early novel called England Made Me set in Stockholm, Sweden. We know of Greene living and writing (and he always got to these places before the proverbial s**t hit the fan) in Vietnam, Cuba, Haiti, Liberia, Mexico, etc., but not pedestrian Sweden. It's a wonderful read, published three years before his breakthrough Brighton Rock, and full of Greene's brilliant summations of character. How about this for one: "...their faces old and unlined and pencilled in brilliant colours, like the illumination of an ancient missal carefully preserved under glass with the same page always turned to visitors." The novel also sometimes goes by the name The Shipwrecked. The novel is dedicated "To Vivien with Ten Years' Love 1925-1935"...and if anyone has read Norman Sherry's first two volumes of his Life of Graham Greene they will know of the pain behind those few words. I cannot bring myself to finish the third volume as it was universally panned for being more about Sherry than it was about Greene. Anyone read that particular volume?
Aha. That's key.
...and do not forget travelling, too, Ed. The secret is, perhaps, that I often forget to take my keys with me, but never a book.
Good question, Terry, and London Orbital sounds like another Baker recommendation that I'm putting on my to-read list. How you manage to find time to read so much (and run, and have a pint, etc.) continues to astonish and humiliate me.
Picked up again Iain Sinclair's London Orbital, and it is a wonderful read into the corners of London and the tight corners of almost forgotten history -- and how that glorious history is so often squashed beneath developers' brochure copywriting crimes. It reminds me a great deal of another fantastic read -- W.G. Sebald's The Rings of Saturn, about a walk in Suffolk, England. Sebald was touted for the Nobel Prize for Literature before a car crash ended his life. Why is it that so many writers get hit by vehicles -- Albert Camus, Nathaneal West, Italo Svevo (the ones coming immediately to mind). Walking around with their heads in the air?
Reply to Terence Baker: No, Slad is in the southern part of Gloucestershire. It is in an area of valleys to the north of Bath. There is plenty of cider in the UK outside Somerset :)
I put down -- to recommence very soon -- Iain Sinclair's London Orbital, concerning his 2000 walk around London's M25 motorway, or at least as near as he could get without being splattered by speeding cars. Another great recommendation, written in an unique style to the usual travel book. I only put it down because I was travelling to Ethiopia last week and took with me Nicholas Jubber's far-fetched but entertaining The Prester Quest, in which he took a letter 800 years old that never made it and was originally addressed to the supposedly mythical Ethiopian Christian king Prester John.
Thanks Vicky. I thought Laurie Lee was from Somerset. It borders the Cotswolds, or maybe I am getting confused because of the title of his book Cider with Rosie, cider generally being associated with Somerset.
I am just doing a session of Dervla Murphy travel books ... her one on Laos, followed by her one on Siberia, then Ethiopia with a Mule, and I just found two more -- as yet unread, on Coburg and Madagascar. I recommend her.
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