bookish cartographies
There's an essay in Anne Fadiman's wonderful little collection Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader called "You Are There," which is about the peculiar pleasure of (re)reading a text in a place that it describes, is otherwise connected to (among her examples: reading "Under Ben Bulben" aloud at Yeats' grave in Sligo, and Isak Dinesen on a trip to Kenya). I thought of it again earlier this week upon seeing a NYT piece about wanderlust-inspiring books, in which assorted famous people share stories of the books that have made them want to travel places (Henry Miller and Colette sent Mary Gaitskill to Paris, Simon Schama read Graham Greene's 'Stamboul Train' and developed an infatuation with railways, Stephen Colbert fantasizes about journeys to Middle Earth, and so forth.) The two phenomena are not unconnected: you-are-there reading is often the resolution of a book-inspired trip.
As a child books were my primary, often only, means of traveling--I grew up in a family that had neither the wherewithal nor the inclination for (international) travel, and I never set foot outside the States--barely even left the West Coast--until shortly after I turned eighteen. Salman Rushdie writes somewhere that the most precious book he owns is his passport; for many years my library card was my passport, and I was as promiscuous a reader then as I've become a traveler since (twenty-six countries in the last five years; I'm making up for lost time). And in the course of it all I've done a lot of you-are-there reading: Rushdie in Cochin and Bombay, Amitav Ghosh's The Glass Palace and Daniel Mason's The Piano Tuner in Burma, countless books, poems, travelogues, histories in Istanbul, & many others here in NYC, Rumi at his tomb in Konya, T.E. Lawrence in the Jordanian desert and Hanan al-Shaykh in Beirut, Trainspotting and Ian Rankin and Dorothy Dunnett during my year in Edinburgh, every bloody thing by Sherman Alexie haunting me around Seattle and waking my faint early memories of Spokane....
Fewer of my travels have actually been directly inspired by books--though William Dalrymple's faults aside, From the Holy Mountain comes to mind. It enriched my initial encounter with Syria a great deal, and led me to seek out a number of places (such as the desert monastery at Deir Mar Musa, where I spent several days, listening to Syrian Catholic liturgies and learning to milk goats) that I might not otherwise have ventured. The book most responsible for chasing me from one continent to another is Dorothy L. Sayers' Gaudy Night, read first at fifteen and many more times thereafter, thereby creating the Oxford mystique that led to to apply for the scholarship (the bubble burst after that awful first Michaelmas, though I eventually came to love the place in an odd, perpetually unsatisfied way). After we'd known each other for some time, my friend N.--who grew up in Delhi, and came to Oxford via the same scholarship--hilarously discovered that we had shared this adolescent infatuation with Gaudy Night, and both loved it still. At the time, we lived in graduate buildings on opposite sides of Jowett Walk, on what would have been the very grounds of Sayers' fictional Shrewsbury College.
Oxford, incidentally, is intensely fruitful ground for you-are-there reading of all kinds. From Naipaul's letters home from Univ in the 1950s (my mentor's going-away gift to me when I went up in 2002), to the heavily-marketed Carroll/Lewis/Tolkein trinity, Stoppard's Invention of Love, countless British mystery novels, and other, less fictional and more philosophical works, which tease you with their implicit connections to the stone walls and cobblestoned lanes around you. Lately, I've been rereading Amit Chaudhuri's Afternoon Raag (which I have only ever read outside of Oxford, actually: in Istanbul courtesy of the British Council library, and here), and occasionally have to set the book down because the sense of familiarity that comes flooding into my head is so fierce. It deserves a post of its own here, especially for one particular passage about the view over Holywell street from the window at the top of the third-floor staircase in the New Bodleian Library.
In looking for the source of my peripatetic tendencies, though, more than any novel or travel book I've got to give a shout-out to the children's National Geographic Picture Atlas from, oh, probably the early 90's (the USSR was gone from its pages, but other geographical now-anachronisms are present). I have been utterly entranced by it since I was in elementary school, and every so often dig out the squarish volume and trace my way through all the dearly-remembered photos, both from places that remain foreign and those that have now become familiar ground. I know that supposedly "war is God's way of teaching Americans geography," but the Picture Atlas got to me first, and if I ever have any children, someday it will get to them as well.
What got to you? And what will send you off, suitcase and dog-eared volume in hand, next?
As a child books were my primary, often only, means of traveling--I grew up in a family that had neither the wherewithal nor the inclination for (international) travel, and I never set foot outside the States--barely even left the West Coast--until shortly after I turned eighteen. Salman Rushdie writes somewhere that the most precious book he owns is his passport; for many years my library card was my passport, and I was as promiscuous a reader then as I've become a traveler since (twenty-six countries in the last five years; I'm making up for lost time). And in the course of it all I've done a lot of you-are-there reading: Rushdie in Cochin and Bombay, Amitav Ghosh's The Glass Palace and Daniel Mason's The Piano Tuner in Burma, countless books, poems, travelogues, histories in Istanbul, & many others here in NYC, Rumi at his tomb in Konya, T.E. Lawrence in the Jordanian desert and Hanan al-Shaykh in Beirut, Trainspotting and Ian Rankin and Dorothy Dunnett during my year in Edinburgh, every bloody thing by Sherman Alexie haunting me around Seattle and waking my faint early memories of Spokane....
Fewer of my travels have actually been directly inspired by books--though William Dalrymple's faults aside, From the Holy Mountain comes to mind. It enriched my initial encounter with Syria a great deal, and led me to seek out a number of places (such as the desert monastery at Deir Mar Musa, where I spent several days, listening to Syrian Catholic liturgies and learning to milk goats) that I might not otherwise have ventured. The book most responsible for chasing me from one continent to another is Dorothy L. Sayers' Gaudy Night, read first at fifteen and many more times thereafter, thereby creating the Oxford mystique that led to to apply for the scholarship (the bubble burst after that awful first Michaelmas, though I eventually came to love the place in an odd, perpetually unsatisfied way). After we'd known each other for some time, my friend N.--who grew up in Delhi, and came to Oxford via the same scholarship--hilarously discovered that we had shared this adolescent infatuation with Gaudy Night, and both loved it still. At the time, we lived in graduate buildings on opposite sides of Jowett Walk, on what would have been the very grounds of Sayers' fictional Shrewsbury College.
Oxford, incidentally, is intensely fruitful ground for you-are-there reading of all kinds. From Naipaul's letters home from Univ in the 1950s (my mentor's going-away gift to me when I went up in 2002), to the heavily-marketed Carroll/Lewis/Tolkein trinity, Stoppard's Invention of Love, countless British mystery novels, and other, less fictional and more philosophical works, which tease you with their implicit connections to the stone walls and cobblestoned lanes around you. Lately, I've been rereading Amit Chaudhuri's Afternoon Raag (which I have only ever read outside of Oxford, actually: in Istanbul courtesy of the British Council library, and here), and occasionally have to set the book down because the sense of familiarity that comes flooding into my head is so fierce. It deserves a post of its own here, especially for one particular passage about the view over Holywell street from the window at the top of the third-floor staircase in the New Bodleian Library.
In looking for the source of my peripatetic tendencies, though, more than any novel or travel book I've got to give a shout-out to the children's National Geographic Picture Atlas from, oh, probably the early 90's (the USSR was gone from its pages, but other geographical now-anachronisms are present). I have been utterly entranced by it since I was in elementary school, and every so often dig out the squarish volume and trace my way through all the dearly-remembered photos, both from places that remain foreign and those that have now become familiar ground. I know that supposedly "war is God's way of teaching Americans geography," but the Picture Atlas got to me first, and if I ever have any children, someday it will get to them as well.
What got to you? And what will send you off, suitcase and dog-eared volume in hand, next?
posted by kitabet at 10:18 AM
1 Comments:
Quite nothing like reading "An Area of Darkness" shortly after having been in Bombay. It made me cranky in the best possible way.
"Austerlitz" in Antwerp doubles the dose. Everything seems so tangled and heavy. You wonder, really, how you can go on.
Excellent pages here: we seem to have some mutual friends, and I'm sure we'll have other conversations.
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