One of the books that explores contemporary Venice, and sketches the city"s descent from world-leadership status in the fifteenth century to its (sad to say, relatively) minor place in the world today (that is, minor except in the hearts of Venetians and those who love the city dearly), is John Berendt"s The City of Falling Angels. He arrived for an extended visit right after the magnificent opera house, La Fenice, was destroyed by fire in 1996. One of the things that struck me about this chatty and appealing book, besides the wonderful descriptions of people from all walks of life whom Berendt meets and talks to, is how beautiful he makes the city sound despite its bureaucratic nightmares and dangers of being overrun by tourists or destroyed by erosion from the Adriatic Sea. Here"s a quote I find especially evocative about the lure of Venice:To me Venice was not merely beautiful; it was beautiful everywhere. On one occasion I set about testing this notion by concocting a game called "photo roulette," the object of which was to walk around the city taking photographs at unplanned moments-whenever a church bell rang or at every sighting of a dog or cat-to see how often, standing at an arbitrary spot one would be confronted by a view of exceptional beauty. The answer: almost always.
No plans for a trip to Venice would be complete without reading the series of mysteries by American Donna Leon, all of which feature Commissario Guido Brunetti; the first, published in 1992, is Death at La Fenice. One of the pleasures of reading Leon is getting to know Brunetti"s family and co-workers, as well as the mouthwatering descriptions of food and drink. (The first time I drank prosecco, the sparkling wine of Italy, was after reading about it in this series.) For walkers (and Brunetti fans) like me, it"s fun to dream of replicating the strolls described in Brunetti"s Venice: Walks Through Venice with the City"s Best-Loved Detective by Toni Sepeda (with an introduction by Donna Leon).
Louis Begley and Anka Muhlstein, longtime married, spend two weeks a year writing in Venice. Venice for Lovers is an account, in each author"s voice, of their pa.s.sion for the city; in addition, there"s a charming novella by Begley about the experience of a young man who falls in love with a place and a person.
And that maven of manners, Judith Martin-Miss Manners herself-is also aVenetophile, as can be seen quite clearly in her No Vulgar Hotel: The Desire and Pursuit of Venice.
The best parts of Deborah Weisgall"s novel The World Before Her describe the experiences of two very different women in Venice. One is a thirty-three-year-old American sculptor named Caroline. The other, sixty-one-year-old Marian Evans, is the very real nineteenth-century English novelist better known by her pen name, George Eliot. Alternating chapters, many set in Venice, move from 1880 (Marian"s tale) to 1980 (Caroline"s story) and back again.
Experiencing Venice through each of your senses is the goal of native Venetian Tiziano Scarpa"s Venice Is a Fish: A Sensual Guide.
Other contemporary novels I"ve enjoyed that take place in that watery wonderland include Kathryn Walker"s A Stopover in Venice; the fabulous mystery Thus Was Adonis Murdered by Sarah Caudwell; and Salley Vickers"s Miss Garnet"s Angel.
Among the many Venetian-set historical novels, you won"t want to miss Sarah Dunant"s In the Company of the Courtesan; the novels of Dorothy Dunnett, in which Venice has a central role-especially, but not exclusively, Scales of Gold, part four of the House of Niccolo series; and the third in a series of historical mysteries by Jason Goodwin, The Bellini Card. And after reading it (in Venice, preferably) you could stop and have a Bellini in the shadow of the Rialto Bridge, as one of the fans of this book told me she did.
VERONA.
Verona"s probably best known as the location of two of Shakespeare"s plays: Romeo and Juliet and The Two Gentlemen of Verona. But it turns out that, bookwise at least, it"s a swell place to spend a vacation. Tim Parks"s Italian Neighbors: Or a Lapsed Anglo-Saxon in Verona and An Italian Education: The Further Adventures of an Expatriate in Verona are delightful memoirs. Parks also wrote A Season with Verona: Travels Around Italy in Search of Illusion, National Character and . . . Goals!, about his obsession with the Verona soccer team. Those who admire irony with a definite bite will enjoy Parks"s novel set in Verona, Juggling the Stars.
In his captivating mystery, Death in Verona, Roy Harley Lewis takes a fresh (fictional) look at the lives of the characters in Shakespeare"s Romeo and Juliet, especially Lady Capulet.
VIENNA.
Whether it"s described in fiction, biography, or history, Vienna has a storied aura about it, as can be readily seen by the books suggested here. Three histories of Vienna that offer outstanding general background on the country"s place in the world order are Carl Schorske"s Fin-de-Siecle Vienna: Politics and Culture; Frederic Morton"s Thunder at Twilight: Vienna 1913/1914; and Paul Hofmann"s The Viennese: Splendor, Twilight, and Exile.All are well worth a read.
Frank Tallis"s novels provide almost a contemporary guide to early twentieth-century Vienna, and they"re awfully good mysteries, too. Start with A Death in Vienna, in which he introduces his protagonists, Detective Oskar Rheinhardt and his good friend, Max Liebermann, a physician and follower of Sigmund Freud. The cases continue in Vienna Blood, Fatal Lies, and Vienna Secrets.
J. Sydney Jones"s The Empty Mirror is set in the last years of the nineteenth century; the painter Gustav Klimt is a suspect in a series of murders. The (fictional) lawyer Karl Werthen works with the (real) criminologist Hanns Gross to find the killer. It"s followed by Requiem in Vienna.
Probably the most important novel about pre-World War I Vienna is Robert Musil"s The Man Without Qualities. Clark Thayer, a friend from Tulsa, suggested that I read this-it was one of his favorite novels. It was a formidably challenging read for me, but I grew to appreciate its modernist intricacies and comic tone. There"s a new-ish translation by Sophie Wilkins, which wasn"t available when I read Musil"s grand novel early in the 1980s. I wish I could tell Clark how much I enjoyed it, but alas, we lost touch years ago.
For a more contemporary picture of the city, try the very weird but wonderful novel-or collection of interlinked and (somewhat) autobiographical stories-The System of Vienna: From Heaven Street to Earth Mound Square by Gert Jonke. This is a perfect book for anyone who is interested in playful language and doesn"t demand reality from the plots of novels.
Because I love both history and many memoirs, I was quite taken with Marjorie Perloff"s memoir The Vienna Paradox, in which she looks at pre-World War II Vienna in the light of her family"s experiences.
Among all the other famous people that were born or lived in Vienna, the Wittgenstein family is one of the best known. Alexander Waugh"s The House of Wittgenstein: A Family at War traces the experiences of its ill-fated members.
Other novels with a Viennese setting include Philip Kerr"s A German Requiem; Graham Greene"s The Third Man (also a terrific movie, maybe one of the few that"s better than the book itself); The Painted Kiss by Elizabeth Hickey (Gustav Klimt is one of the main characters); Sarah Gainham"s Night Falls on the City and its sequel, A Place in the Country; The House of Widows by Askold Melnyczuk (only partially set in Vienna, but it"s such a strong and vivid novel that I felt I needed to include it here); John Irving"s Setting Free the Bears (his first novel, but one that has all the themes so well developed in his later books); Mary Stewart"s Airs Above the Ground, which is not, strictly speaking, set in Vienna, but rather in the Spanish Riding School in Austria (but surely belongs in this section); and the romantic and satisfying Madensky Square by Eva Ibbotson.
VIETNAM.
Books about Vietnam vary from nonfiction (political a.n.a.lyses and histories) of all approaches, sizes, and opinions, to fiction, which also comes in all approaches, sizes, and opinions. I included a section on Vietnam in Book l.u.s.t, so you might want to begin there. Here are the books I"ve been most moved by and impressed with recently.
Vietnam veteran Homer R. Steedly Jr. killed a North Vietnamese soldier at point-blank range in 1969 and took an ill.u.s.trated diary from the dead man. More than three decades later, Steedly decides to find the family of the man he killed and give them back the diary. Fellow veteran Wayne Karlin, who served in the Marine Corps in Vietnam during the war, tells Steedly"s story in Wandering Souls: Journeys with the Dead and the Living in Viet Nam. Karlin is also the author of Marble Mountain, a novel in which Kiet Hallam, daughter of an African American soldier and Vietnamese mother and adopted as a child by Americans, tries to discover who her parents were.As with all of Karlin"s books, the underlying theme of both of these is forgiveness and reconciliation with the past.
If you"re looking for an all-consuming read about what it was like to take part in the Vietnam War, you won"t do better than Karl Marlantes"s Matterhorn: A Novel of the Vietnam War. I found this tale of a young Marine named Waino Mellas and his fellow Bravo Company soldiers to be forceful, disturbing, and distressing: I didn"t want to stop reading but was forced to pause every three or four pages to breathe deeply and try to recapture my emotional equilibrium.
A friend of mine who recently took a bicycle trip in Vietnam told me that The Sacred Willow: Four Generations in the Life of a Vietnamese Family by Duong Van Mai Elliott was the most enlightening nonfiction she read about the country. The subt.i.tle practically says it all, except it doesn"t give a hint about how quickly and thoroughly engaged you become as you read this emotionally resonant memoir and family history.
Others to check out are Christian G. Appy"s Patriots: The Vietnam War Remembered from All Sides, an oral history of the war; Dana Sachs"s utterly charming The House on Dream Street (one of the lighter reads in this section); Doug Anderson"s memoir Keep Your Head Down: Vietnam, the Sixties, and a Journey of Self-Discovery; They Marched into Sunlight: War and Peace, Vietnam and America, October 1967 by David Maraniss, an hour-by-hour account of a ferocious battle in Vietnam and an antiwar protest against Dow Chemical Company; David Halberstam"s The Best and the Brightest (don"t miss reading this one); James Webb"s powerful novel Fields of Fire; and The Lotus Eaters by Tatjana Soli, which is, quite simply, a spectacularly wonderful novel. I also highly recommended Tim O"Brien"s novels set in Vietnam: The Things They Carried, In the Lake of the Woods, and Going After Cacciato.
In addition, Curbstone Press publishes a series called Voices from Vietnam, which brings the works of Vietnamese authors to American readers.
WALES WELCOMES YOU.
The book you absolutely must read before journeying to Wales is How Green Was My Valley by Richard Llewellyn. The story of Huw Morgan"s coming of age in a small Welsh mining town is one of those books that I wish I could read again for the first time-it"s the same way I feel about Paul Scott"s Raj Quartet, which is set in a totally different part of the world entirely.
And then can you move on to these: Jan Morris"s A Writer"s House in Wales is distinguished by her keen eye for detail, her fine writing, and her enthusiasm for her subject. It"s mostly a memoir, but also includes a good deal of Welsh history and culture packed into a short (168 pages) book.
Judy Corbett and her partner, Peter Welford (a bookbinder and architectural historian), discovered the dilapidated Gwydir Castle in Northern Wales and decided-impulsively-to buy it and restore it to its former glorious state. Corbett writes about their experiences in Castles in the Air: The Restoration Adventures of Two Young Optimists and a Crumbling Old Mansion.And there"s even a ghost from the seventeenth century. Travelers to Wales can stay at the restored castle, now operating as a B&B.
No book lover will be able to resist the myriad charms of all of Paul Collins"s books, and perhaps especially those of Sixpence House: Lost in a Town of Books. In it, Collins describes the period in which he; his wife, Jennifer; and his young son, Morgan, lived in Hay-on-Wye, known as the Welsh "town of books."Woven in with the stories of houses they tried to buy and his part-time job in the biggest used bookstore in town are captivating accounts of books Collins discovers, as well as ruminations on book t.i.tles, the vagaries of publishing, literary hoaxes, and the fate of many unsung writers through the centuries whose books never made the splash they deserved.
Others not to miss include Horatio Clare"s Running for the Hills: Growing Up on My Mother"s Sheep Farm in Wales, which is both lovely and loving; Bruce Chatwin"s On the Black Hill (anything by Chatwin is worth reading; this novel is no exception); Kathryn Davis"s novel The Walking Tour;Tessa Hadley"s The Master Bedroom; Susan Fletcher"s Whitbread Award-winning poetic debut novel, Eve Green; and Owen Sheers"s Resistance (an alternate history centering on a German invasion of the country during World War II-it"s an unforgettable novel).
And mystery fans won"t want to miss Rhys Bowen"s mystery novels featuring Constable Evan Evans. Evans Above is the first one, but they don"t really need to be read in order. Canadian author Elizabeth J. Duncan sets her cozies in Wales. She won the Malice Domestic Best First Traditional Mystery compet.i.tion for The Cold Light of Mourning, so begin with that, and then reach for its sequel, A Brush with Death.
WALK RIGHT IN.
There are WALKERS and then there are walkers. The uppercase variety long to traverse a country by foot, or navigate the Appalachian Trail from Georgia to Maine, or walk from one end of Manhattan to the other. The lowercase walkers, while otherwise certainly eminently honorable and pleasant people, have no such ambitions. They are fine with travel by trains, planes, automobiles, bicycles, horses, and camels. WALKERS feel that ambulating gets them to the heart of a place in the way no other mode of transportation can do. I aspire to join their ranks (although I fear I may have left it too late). I find that walking clears my mind, lifts my spirits, and allows me to see the world from a slower, more considered perspective. On top of all that, walking provides good exercise-talk about mult.i.tasking!
A perfect place to begin reading about walking is with Geoff Nicholson"s delectably idiosyncratic The Lost Art of Walking: The History, Science, Philosophy, and Literature of Pedestrianism . (Thanks to Nicholson, I now refer to falling as "a disagreement with gravity.") You"ll discover all sorts of odd tidbits of information (useful when confronted with any awkward lulls in conversations), including: Farsi has nine synonyms for walking, while Norwegian has over fifty; the idea of Velcro came to its inventor during a walk; in 1809 a British gentleman named Robert Barclay Allardice walked one mile an hour for a thousand hours in a row and won one thousand guineas as a result; and much, much more.
A stately, wide-ranging study of the history, philosophy, and literature of walking is Rebecca Solnit"s Wanderl.u.s.t. Until I read this, I never knew that Thomas Hobbes (author of Leviathan and coiner of the phrase "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short" to describe the life of man) had a special walking stick with an inkhorn at the top so he could jot down anything of importance that occurred to him as he was out on one of his peregrinations. Solnit"s book also has a lovely series of quotations-from Virginia Wolff to Ivan Illich-running along the bottom of every page. Or it might be more fitting to say, walking along the bottom of every page.
Here are some entertaining, sometimes quirky, and often stirring accounts of individual (long) walks.
Bold Spirit: Helga Estby"s Forgotten Walk Across Victorian America explores the life of an indomitable woman. In the 1890s Helga, a mother of eight children, and her eighteen-year-old daughter, Clara, walked from Spokane, Washington, to New York City in order to win a $10,000 prize and thereby save their family farm. The consequences of her journey affected her relationship with her husband, her children, and her community, all of which Linda Lawrence Hunt explores in this moving tale.
In the first week of September 2001,Tom Fremantle began following in the footsteps of Colonel Arthur Fremantle (a cousin of sorts), who traveled from the Mexico-Texas border up to New York during the summer of 1863-getting rides on stagecoaches, railroads, and riverboats. Tom decided to walk the whole way, accompanied only by a seventeen-year-old mule named Browny, and describes his trip in The Moonshine Mule.
Miles Away:A Walk Across France by Miles Morland describes the month he and his wife-neophyte long-distance walkers-spent trekking by foot from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic.Their story is amusing, self-deprecating, and, above all, inspiring; I can sort of imagine shouldering a backpack and following in their footsteps.
In early 1990, as the Cold War ended and cataclysmic changes were occurring all over Eastern Europe, Jason Goodwin and two friends decided to walk from Poland through Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria all the way to Istanbul and see how people were responding to political events along the way.The result, On Foot to the Golden Horn: A Walk to Istanbul, is a book that meshes armchair travel and the history of a region into a substantial yet inviting read.
And, of course, don"t forget these cla.s.sics: Eric Newby"s ironically t.i.tled A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush; Henry David Th.o.r.eau"s Walking (far less well known than Walden); and Peter Jenkins"s A Walk Across America.
WATER, WATER EVERYWHERE.
I was laughing pretty much all the time I was reading Terry Darlington"s delightful Narrow Dog to Indian River. Despite their ages (seventies) and the fact that it had never been done before, Terry and his wife, Monica, leave their home in Stone, England, to take their narrowboat, Phyllis May (named for Terry"s mother, who, though many years dead, sometimes reappears in odd places), on the 1,150-mile Intercoastal Waterway from Virginia down to the Gulf of Mexico, accompanied by their whippet, Jim. A narrowboat, as I learned, is also known as a ca.n.a.l boat; it"s six feet, ten inches wide (Jim, the whippet, is about six inches wide) and sixty feet long (just imagine what it looks like!), with a top speed of 6.2 miles per hour. It"s perfect for cruising the ca.n.a.ls of Europe, but perhaps not so great for the open water that the Darlingtons need to contend with on their journey. Nonetheless the trio set out, encountering ice storms; high seas; piranhas; chiggers; the Southern phenomena of sweet tea, grits, and good ole boys and their families; and lots of that hospitality the region is known for. Terry relates all of the adventures in hilarious vignettes. While I don"t think I"m brave enough to ever duplicate the trip the Darlingtons made, reading this made me think about (a) getting a whippet and (b) taking a narrowboat trip through the ca.n.a.ls in England. (If you enjoyed Darlington"s book as much as I did, check out his first, Narrow Dog to Carca.s.sonne, which is equally fun to read.) And if you find that reading humorous books about cruising is just your cup of tea, definitely try to find the pleasurable memoirs of Emily Kimbrough, mostly published between the 1950s and the early 1970s, including And a Right Good Crew (ca.n.a.ls of England; interestingly enough, she and her travel companions begin their journey in the town where the Darlingtons live); Water, Water Everywhere (Greek Islands); Time Enough (Ireland); Floating Island; and Better Than Oceans. I spent many lovely hours rereading these-I do wish someone would republish them. They"re a delightful look back at a sort of travel best described, perhaps, as "comfortable," when you dress for dinner and have c.o.c.ktails when the sun is over the yardarm (whatever that means), written by someone who"s not afraid to laugh fondly at herself or her friends.
Because I have an abiding interest in anything about New Zealand, I just gobbled down Southern Exposure: A Solo Sea Kayaking Journey Around New Zealand"s South Island. I was glad to be along for the ride, and yet still remain dry enough to keep reading.
Other waterlogged books include Keith Bowden"s description of a potentially dangerous and always fascinating journey by canoe, bicycle, and raft in The Tecate Journals: Seventy Days on the Rio Grande. Bowden offers some nice words about the American Border Patrol agents whom he meets along the way. Here"s the first sentence of the book: "When I first glimpsed the Rio Grande, I mistook it for a sewer drain."
And still more: In RiverG.o.ds: Exploring the World"s Great Wild Rivers, Richard Bangs and Christian Kallen detail their raft trips on rivers from the Apurimac (Peru) to the Zambezi (Zambia); Jonathan Raban describes his journey around England in his boat Gosfield Maid in Coasting: A Private Voyage, and a later trip down the Mississippi in Old Glory; Descending the Dragon: My Journey Down the Coast of Vietnam by Jon Bowermaster contains superb photographs by Rob Howard; and former NewYork Times Asia correspondent Edward A. Gargan tells his story in The River"s Tale: A Year on the Mekong. Here"s a quote from Gargan that I was especially taken with:Rivers are inherently interesting, both as geographical phenomena and as metaphors for larger questions. They mold landscapes, sunder them with gaping canyons, nurture inland fisheries, lavish the bounty of the lands they travel through into vast fertile deltas.
WE"LL ALWAYS HAVE PARIS Let"s face it-foreigners will nearly always feel like outsiders in Paris. Still, this does not stop readers (and visitors) from wanting to experience the beauty of the City of Light. Whether one enters the world of Paris through the artistry of Henry James, Edith Wharton, and Ernest Hemingway, or through the stories and novels of contemporary authors, any reader can vicariously appreciate the magic of this city.
One way to best get a sense of Paris is to understand its (and France"s) history. If you want to meet the most interesting and charismatic woman of whom you"ve probably never heard, one whose life intersected with most of the famous people in a turbulent time in French history-everyone from Robespierre to Napoleon-read Dancing to the Precipice: The Life of Lucie de la Tour du Pin, Eyewitness to an Era by Caroline Moorehead.
Of course one siren song that brings people to Paris is French cuisine. Julia Child"s memoir My Life in France (co-written with her nephew,Alex Prud"homme) captures this dual fascination with the city and its gustatory delights. An even more recent entry in the Paris-equals-good-food experience is Kathleen Flinn"s The Sharper Your Knife, the Less You Cry. The author attended Julia Child"s alma mater, Le Cordon Bleu, and while lovingly describing the markets and streets of Paris, invokes both the joy and terror of being a student at this famous school.
In A Corner in the Marais: Memoir of a Paris Neighborhood , Alex Karmel attempts something different. By following the historical record surrounding a centuries-old building in one of the most charming districts of the city, Karmel creates a window back in time for those of us who always wonder-who walked down these streets, and what happened here? Anyone planning to stay in this lovely quarter of Paris shouldn"t miss this book.
Adam Gopnik"s memoir Paris to the Moon provides what I believe is the best insight into the Paris that most people dream about. Gopnik spent five years living there with his wife and infant son, and he manages to make the city and its people seem at once both frustrating and captivating, bringing them as close to the truth that an outsider can most likely experience.
I"ve always believed that one of the best ways to find out about a place or a time period is through reading children"s fiction, and Gopnik"s The King in the Window made French history, and the city of Paris, so real to me. I highly recommend this fantasy novel aimed at young teens (but enjoyable for adult readers as well) to everyone I know who"s headed there.
Time Was Soft There is Jeremy Mercer"s memoir of living in an apartment above, and working for, the famed Paris bookstore Shakespeare & Co.
Gillian Tindall"s Footprints in Paris: A Few Streets, A Few Lives showcases her uncanny ability to make a place (and the past) live again through the evocation of the people who wandered its streets, stopped in its shops, and worshipped at its churches. In this book, she explores the life of a family-her family, in fact-over two centuries, living on the Left Bank of Paris.
By using the writer"s imagination to invoke a sense of place, a work of fiction presents a different view of Paris. In Suite Francaise Irene Nemirovsky paints a portrait of the City of Light awaiting the darkness to come. Even though the novel quickly moves away from Paris, its stark portrayal of a world about to be lost remains powerful.
In Alan Furst"s The World at Night, darkness has indeed descended over Paris after its occupation by Hitler"s forces. Furst"s tale of a reluctant, unintentional secret agent trying to stay alive in the shifting sands of the occupied city mirrors the black and white tone of films from that era.
Dark images still can exist in the contemporary City of Light, especially in the novels of Cara Black. The author has written a number of mysteries set in the many different neighborhoods of Paris. In Murder in Belleville she creates a tension-filled portrait of the historic Arab district, as private investigator Aimee Leduc follows a case involving the deportation of illegal immigrants.
Graham Robb"s Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris conjures up events of the Parisian past in the lives of men and women from Marie Antoinette to Charles Baudelaire. Robb is also the author of The Discovery of France: A Historical Geography.
Finally, two recent novels by French authors show us that Parisian apartment buildings can be worlds in themselves. In Hunting and Gathering Anna Gavalda charms us with a story of disparate misfits who share a barely furnished apartment in a grand old building.And Muriel Barbery"s The Elegance of the Hedgehog offers us the story of a young girl"s friendship with the elderly concierge in her apartment building and reminds us that even Parisians can feel like outsiders in their own city.
WHERE IN THE WORLD DO THESE BOOKS BELONG?.
Quite often as I was doing all the reading in preparation for writing this book, I"d come across a book that I thought would be perfect, only to realize that there was no easy way to categorize it. It didn"t fit comfortably anywhere, but clearly belonged somewhere because I enjoyed it so much, wanted many others to read it, and it was at least minimally connected to travel. See what you think of these.
To read The Clumsiest People in Europe, Or: Mrs. Mortimer"s Bad-Tempered Guide to the Victorian World is to get a picture of a particular mid-nineteenth-century English mind-one that is didactic, horribly prejudiced, and a believer in the absolute correctness of the English way of life as well as the enormous benefits conferred by being a member of the British Empire. I must say that I winced even as I smiled at Mrs. Mortimer"s comparisons of the "uncivilized" peoples of the world with those "civilized" people fortunate enough to be residing in that sunniest (maybe not literally), most advanced, happiest, and most fortunate of locales: England. Todd Pruzan"s first-rate introduction puts Mrs. Mortimer"s beliefs into context.
George R. Stewart"s Names on the Land: A Historical Account of Place-Naming in the United States is one of those rare biblio-animals: a pleasure to read that brings along with it a lot of interesting information to drop into conversational lulls at c.o.c.ktail or dinner parties.Why is it Arkansas and not Arkansaw? What are the historical reasons for a Warsaw in Indiana, one in Virginia, and one in Georgia? Stewart tells us all this, and more.
I cannot adequately convey how much I absolutely adored Vivian Swift"s When Wanderers Cease to Roam: A Traveler"s Journal of Staying Put. For over two decades Swift traveled the world for work and fun, and then settled down with five cats in a house in a small village on Long Island Sound.This is a diary (highly ill.u.s.trated with her watercolor drawings) of those years, as well as the events of her past. It"s totally enchanting.
It"s through Swift"s book that I learned about the mid-eighteenth-century writer Xavier de Maistre, who was under house arrest (for dueling) and decided to write about the items in his room as though they were important tourist attractions, in Voyage Around My Room. Swift says that he "invented a new mode of travel." I love that description.
Other odd and rather wonderful more-or-less armchair travel books (or at least books about travel), include these: Caroline Alexander writes winningly about all the places that influenced Coleridge"s famous poem, "Kubla Khan" in The Way to Xanadu.
Frederick Burnaby journeyed alone from London"s Victoria Station to Central Asia in 1875. His adventures are described in A Ride to Khiva-a cla.s.sic book of armchair travel that was originally published in 1876 (and reprinted eleven times in the first year it came out). All authors should be so fortunate!
Like all of Alain de Botton"s books-whether his subject is Proust or, as here, musings and anecdotes on traveling-in The Art of Travel you"ll find both delightful writing and lots of observations to mull over.
Barbara Crossette"s The Great Hill Stations of Asia describes those towns-some built more than two centuries ago-that the Europeans constructed in foreign climes in order to relax, leave the heat of the cities on the plains, and escape what came to be known as "tropical fatigue." As Crossette points out, many of these are still lovely places to visit.
From 1924 to 1939 (when he is to believed to have died in a typhoon while sailing a Chinese junk from Hong Kong to San Francisco), Richard Halliburton traveled the world and wrote about his experiences in first-person, you-are-there prose. His books-filled with adventure and a wee bit dated now-include The Royal Road to Romance,The Glorious Adventure,New Worlds to Conquer, Seven League Boots, and The Flying Carpet.
Tete-Michel Kpoma.s.sie"s An African in Greenland tells the wondrous tale of a teenager whose imagination was captured by reading a book on Greenland, and who slowly worked his way north from his home in Africa"s tropical Togoland to fulfill his dream of one day living there.
Robert Macfarlane"s The Wild Places is set in Ireland and England; the places he describes include beaches, salt marshes, forests, and other locales not yet invaded and despoiled by people. Poetic, thoughtful, and sure to lead readers to a desire for silence and-perhaps-a solitary journey of their own.
In Pagan Holiday: On the Trail of Ancient Roman Tourists , author Tony Perrottet had a splendid idea: to retrace the travels of ancient Romans as they ventured throughout their Empire from Pompeii to Egypt and beyond. As he follows in their footsteps two thousand years or so later, Perrottet makes apt comparisons between the ancient cities and their contemporary counterparts, all the while interspersing delightfully prophetic quotes from ancient travelers. (The book is sometimes found under the t.i.tle Route 66 A.D.: On the Trail of Ancient Roman Tourists.) In 1926 Vita Sackville-West went out to visit her diplomat husband, who was stationed in Iran. In Pa.s.senger to Teheran she describes a leisurely journey-via boat, train, and automobiles. She"s scrupulous in her descriptions and honest in her appraisal of the places she visited. (She hated India and admired Isfahan, for example.) Mark Twain"s The Innocents Abroad is essential reading if you need a laugh and want to get a feel for American att.i.tudes in the years right after the Civil War. The travelers Twain describes are probably the first "ugly Americans," so this is not the book to read if you"re particularly touchy about criticism or if political correctness is extremely important to you. Here"s one of my favorite lines: "When I think of how I have been swindled by books of Oriental travel, I want a tourist for breakfast."
The t.i.tle of Mo Willems"s book seems to say it all: You Can Never Find a Rickshaw When It Monsoons: The World on One Cartoon a Day.
Simon Winchester"s Outposts: Journeys to the Surviving Relics of the British Empire was originally published as The Sun Never Sets: Travels to the Remaining Outposts of the British Empire; whatever its t.i.tle, it is a pleasure to read.
In David Yeadon"s The Back of Beyond: Travels to the Wild Places of the Earth, he seeks out the places where tourists seldom go. He"s a wonderful companion-friendly and unflappable, and always eager to discover more. One thing to remember when you read this: it was published in 1991, and many of the places he writes about are no longer at the back of beyond-they"ve since been discovered by the rest of the world, like Nepal"s Kathmandu.
I know where Christopher Robbins"s Apples Are from Kazakhstan: The Land That Disappeared should go-in a section on the ""Stans," those former Soviet appendages. But I couldn"t find enough other books that I enjoyed as much to make a section out of the topic, so I"ve put it here.
Both the sort of traveling (extensive) and writing (excellent) that Bruce Chatwin did are on fine display in What Am I Doing Here and Far Journeys.
WY EVER NOT?.
I"m not sure why there"s so much good writing set in Wyoming, by Wyoming writers, or both. Maybe it"s the beauty of the Tetons and the Bighorns, the seventy-five-mile-per-hour speed limit on the lightly traveled interstates, or the seeming infinity of pure emptiness between towns. Or maybe it"s just something in the water. Why ever it is, readers are able to reap the benefits of these books.
In The Daily Coyote, Shreve Stockton describes how she gave up her successful, highly urban life after stopping for a night in Wyoming on a cross-country trip via her 150cc Vespa ET4. Soon thereafter she left New York, rented a house sight-unseen in Ten Sleep,Wyoming, and then was given a baby coyote. Here"s how she describes what captured her heart about the state:The landscape around the Bighorns is like an ocean on pause, rolling with the subtle colors of rust and sage and gold, stretching to every horizon. These mountains are unlike other mountain ranges. While the Tetons are fangs of stone and Rainier is an ice cream sundae, the Bighorns are sloped and subtle, built of some of the oldest exposed rock in the world; rock that has existed, in its current form, for over three billion years. There is exquisite power in their permanence.
Ron Carlson"s The Signal is a tale of love gone wrong, a good man who made a bad mistake, and the way real evil can show up in our lives. After I read this beautifully written novel, I wanted to see the place where it took place-the Wind River Mountains in western Wyoming-for myself. I have to add, though, that I wouldn"t like to go through the travails the characters did.
Margaret Coel"s series of mysteries all take place on theWind River Reservation, and all feature a priest named Father John O"Malley and a lawyer named Vicky Holden. As Tony Hillerman brings the history and traditions of the Navajos to readers, Coel does so for the Arapaho tribe. In one of my favorites, Eye of the Wolf, Father John and Vicky need to puzzle out whether a nineteenth-century ma.s.sacre promulgated by the Shoshones on the Arapaho is at the heart of three present-day killings of three young Shoshones.
In fact, anyone looking for mysteries set in Wyoming is in for a real treat, because in addition to Coel there are also the books written by C. J. Box and Craig Johnson. Box"s main character is game warden Joe Pickett. My favorite of his is Free Fire, but they"re all filled with crisp dialogue, brisk pacing, and a main character who is satisfyingly complex. Johnson"s thrillers, all set near the Bighorn Mountains, feature sheriff Walt Longmire. As good as the first book in the series (The Cold Dish) was-and it was very good-Johnson just keeps getting better and better with each novel. As I write this, his newest is Junkyard Dogs, and it"s just terrific. Don"t miss The Dark Horse, either. (You can watch my interview with Johnson at www . seattlechannel. org/videos/video. asp?ID=3030910.) Annie Proulx has written three collections of stories set in Wyoming (known collectively, and sensibly, as "The Wyoming Stories"). They include Close Range, Bad Dirt, and Fine Just the Way It Is. Her most famous story is, of course, "Brokeback Mountain," which was later adapted into a superb movie. But reading these three collections together gives you an idea of her great range and stellar talent.What an amazing writer she is.
"Clever" novels frequently put me off. You know the sort I mean: those that make use of different fonts, footnotes, and other similar affectations. I often wonder if the purpose of all these bells and whistles is simply to disguise the fact that the author really has nothing much to say to the reader. And I find that so often novels about child geniuses all follow the same story arc: kid burns out and comes to no good end. So you can imagine my relief and readerly joy when I discovered that Reif La.r.s.en overcame both of my ingrained prejudices in The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet. It"s about twelve-year-old cartography genius Tec.u.mseh Sparrow Spivet, who lives at the Coppertop Ranch (just north of Divide, Montana) with his uber-laconic rancher father, his scientist mother (who is obsessed with finding a certain type of beetle that n.o.body else believes exists), his older sister, Gracie, and the memory of his younger brother, Layton, whose death has left an unhealed scar on the family"s psyche. In this satisfying first novel, we experience the world through the eyes of this brilliant, funny, and emotionally wounded kid.
Other Wyoming books include a cla.s.sic: Owen Wister"s 1902 The Virginian (really, still the cla.s.sic novel of the Wyoming territory, if not the wholeWest); Mark Spragg"s memoir Where Rivers Change Directions; Gretel Ehrlich"s The Solace of Open s.p.a.ces, with its deep appreciation of nature; and Wyoming Summer by Mary O"Hara, which, despite its t.i.tle, isn"t totally set in Wyoming, but the small sections that are really make us feel as though we"re there with the author and her husband experiencing the sudden weather changes, the way the sky appears different from one moment to the next, and the tenuousness of small ranch-holdings. (O"Hara published her hit novel My Friend Flicka, set in a remote area of Wyoming, in 1941. Wyoming Summer, made up of a series of journal notes she"d been keeping, wasn"t published until 1963, but she tells us that the ma.n.u.script was finished and put away long before Flicka became popular.) Here"s how she describes the Wyoming sky:Over all, and low above me, was a pale blue sky, calm and benign. On it, flat sheets of cloud, with indeterminate, melting edges, floated so slowly, so indifferently, so serenely that they made me feel slow, indifferent and serene too.
And here:Now the day is waning and the light changing for sunset. Soft and lovely. No clouds. Just a clear emerald green-and the evening star big and golden.
Fabulous.
ZAMBIA.
After much turmoil in the southern part of the African continent, the country of Zambia was formed out of the former Northern Rhodesia and became the Republic of Zambia in October 1964. Its existence was complicated by the fact that three of its neighbors were still under colonial powers (Southern Rhodesia, Mozambique, and Angola). Here are some books I"ve enjoyed over the years.
The Swedish writer Henning Mankell"s novel The Eye of the Leopard takes place in Zambia, just after it achieved independence.
In Scribbling the Cat,Alexandra Fuller describes her friendship and travels in Zambia with one of her parents" neighbors, a white African and veteran of the Rhodesian Wars, both of them trying to understand the past and its attendant horrors.
Christina Lamb"s The Africa House is a biography of Stewart Gore-Browne, a fascinating Edwardian Englishman whose contradictory att.i.tudes toward his adopted country-Northern Rhodesia-make for fascinating reading. This is a good choice for fans of White Mischief by James Fox.
In The Eye of the Elephant: An Epic Adventure in the African Wilderness, biologists Delia and Mark Owens discuss their attempts to save Zambia"s elephants from wholesale slaughter in the Luangwa Valley. (The couple was expelled from Botswana after writing Cry of the Kalahari and chose to settle in Zambia as a result.) The farm in Zambia that Sheila Siddle and her husband, David, purchased became the Chimfunshi Wildlife Orphanage, the largest primate sanctuary in the world.Their adventures with their "guests" are winningly described in In My Family Tree: A Life with Chimpanzees.
If you"re looking for much lighter fare, Mrs. Pollifax, a CIA agent in her spare time, sets out on an African safari in order to save the life of the president of Zambia, in Mrs. Pollifax on Safari by Dorothy Gilman. Reading this, you can"t escape the feeling that Gilman herself had just been on safari, too, though the rest of the story is surely pure fiction!
ZIPPING THROUGH ZIMBABWE/ ROAMING RHODESIA.
Zimbabwe, formerly Southern Rhodesia, has long been the subject of some terrific novels and memoirs-perhaps the lure for writers is its uniquely African combination of beauty and inept (and corrupt) governments that consistently fail to improve the lives of their citizens.