Literary Places Read online

  INSPIRED TRAVELLER’S GUIDE

  LITERARY PLACES

  SARAH BAXTER

  ILLUSTRATIONS BY AMY GRIMES

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  Paris, Les Misérables

  Dublin, Ulysses

  Florence, A Room with a View

  Naples, My Brilliant Friend

  Berlin, Berlin Alexanderplatz

  Nordland, Growth of the Soil

  St Petersburg, Crime and Punishment

  Sierra de Guadarrama, For Whom the Bell Tolls

  La Mancha, Don Quixote

  Davos, The Magic Mountain

  Bath, Northanger Abbey & Persuasion

  London, Oliver Twist

  Yorkshire Moors, Wuthering Heights

  Cairo, Palace Walk

  Soweto, Burger’s Daughter

  Kerala, The God of Small Things

  Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City), The Quiet American

  Kabul, The Kite Runner

  Hanging Rock, Picnic at Hanging Rock

  New York, The Catcher in the Rye

  Monterey, Cannery Row

  Mississippi River, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

  Monroeville, To Kill a Mockingbird

  Cartagena, Love in the Time of Cholera

  Chile, The House of the Spirits

  INTRODUCTION

  TURN OVER the page. What – or where – do you see? Perhaps you see city streets or verdant fields, vast mountain ranges or dark, haunted forests, stinking slums or golden temples. A multitude of worlds written into being. Palaces of words, landscapes of letters, towns built of sentences. Whole societies or galaxies constructed from carefully laid conjunctions, stocky nouns, playful verbs; from swirls and curlicues of ink.

  Writers build places. Sometimes they conjure make-believe realms, unfettered by rules of sense or science. But sometimes they evoke real ones – destinations you can find on a map. And sometimes they manage to make those real places feel more real than any photo ever could. They render locations large in mere ink, perfectly capturing their sights, sounds, smells and essence, turning a previously blank sheet into a teleporter for the reader’s imagination.

  Truly great writers recreate not only locations but also eras and histories. Indeed, via some classic works of literature, a reader can travel both around the world and seemingly back in time: to the plains of medieval Spain, to the squalor of Victorian London, to the horror of apartheid-divided South Africa. The very best writers bring not only the physicality of these destinations to life but also their layers; their nooks and crannies, their politics and their position in the world. In this way, these destinations can come alive for people living in different countries, on different continents, even in different centuries. Not everyone is able to travel. And no one – not yet – can travel in time. So by reading great books anyone, of any nation, is able to ‘journey’ to a totally other period and place.

  In this book we have focused on just 25 great literary places – a much-deliberated shortlist of intriguing locations that have featured, if not starred, in some of the best novels ever penned. With the help of beautiful illustrations, this armchair guide hopes to convey you to these varied spots, spread all over the globe. Many of them you may know, some you may not. But, with luck, every chapter will transport you, for a moment at least, to somewhere else entirely – be it the politically and seismically shaken Chilean countryside, the beer-sticky and insalubrious bars of 1900s Dublin or the languid backwaters of southern India, where death and incest lurk behind every swaying palm (shown here).

  In many cases the destinations collected here aren’t just passive backdrops to the tragedies, romances and adventures that unfold within them. These destinations become characters in their own right, rising up from behind the scenes to take centre stage; they have agency, influencing plot, action, emotions and outcomes.

  For instance, consider the North York Moors of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (shown here). This heather-fuzzed, wind-whipped wilderness, where the literary Brontë family lived, played and wrote, may as well be listed in the novel’s dramatis personae. The moors feel as corporeal, untameable, moody and brooding as Wuthering Heights’ antihero Heathcliff himself. It’s utterly impossible to imagine this strange 19th-century Gothic romance – so fierce and full of passion – set anywhere else on the planet. The author and her masterpiece are both inseparable from this soil.

  Likewise, Holden Caulfield’s iconic episode of teenage angst, as portrayed in J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (shown here), wouldn’t have quite the impact if it wasn’t set on the hustling, bustling, grim-and-glamorous avenues of late-1940s Manhattan. Salinger captures the mid-century metropolis, with its pimps and phonies and elusive ducks, at a defining moment – a time when New York was both dealing with the dark aftermath of the Second World War and booming on the world scene. The city’s external chaos and confusion mirror the inner turmoil in the young protagonist’s mind.

  In some cases the words, the place, the culture and the events are so intertwined and richly rendered in a novel that reading it is akin to absorbing the best sort of history lesson, without even noticing. The Cairo Trilogy by Naguib Mahfouz (shown here) not only describes the specific geography of the Egyptian capital’s most atmospheric neighbourhood, it weaves in myriad strands – from cookery to religion, architecture to 20th-century politics – to create an elaborate carpet of a book. You can be enthralled by the narrative of the al-Jawad family, as you might be by any such saga, but you’ll also come away better educated about Islam and about what has made Egypt the country it is today.

  There are many, many more literary locations that could have been included here – places so brilliantly evoked in books that you can almost smell the dirt, dust or blood on their pages. For example, we could have taken a murderous cruise down the Nile with crime queen Agatha Christie; we might have explored Istanbul through the Nobel Prize-winning pages of local-born Orhan Pamuk; or we could have followed the sinister Dracula trail laid in Romania by Bram Stoker. Sadly, the pages of this modest book are limited to covering only 25 others. But maybe by reading a little about this handful of wonderful written worlds you might feel inspired to either read the original tomes or to continue your literary travels by seeking out more globe-trotting works. Who knows? You might even feel moved to travel to some of the real-life locations and try encapsulating them on paper yourself …

  PARIS

  Which?

  Les Misérables by Victor Hugo (1862)

  What?

  French City of Light, squalor, revolution, égalité and Enlightenment

  DO YOU hear the people sing? The angry men, demanding to be heard? Once, before these elegant boulevards ploughed through the congested slums, this city screamed with revolution; tight-packed, disease-festered alleys clogged with barricades and voices yearning for liberté, égalité, fraternité. Now, the avenues are wide, bright, brimming with bonhomie; the noise is of coffee cups chinking on enamel tabletops, breezes rattling the neat plane trees. These streets are elegance and amour incarnate. But once they flowed with blood …

  By the 1850s – when Victor Hugo was writing Les Misérables – Paris was quite literally the City of Light. Around 15,000 newly installed gaslights illuminated the French capital. Night-times became safer; citizens were drawn to the streets at all hours – a pavement culture that endures today. But just a few decades before, when Les Misérables is set, the city was a far darker place. Paris may have birthed the 18th-century’s intellectual Enlightenment but, for the impoverished majority, it was still rife with inequality and despair. As Hugo once wrote, ‘He who contemplates the depths of Paris is seized with vertigo. Nothing is more fantastic. Nothing is more tragic. Nothing is more sublime.’


  Les Misérables contains all of those qualities. One of the longest novels ever written, it charts the travails of Jean Valjean, beginning in 1815, as he’s paroled after nearly two decades in prison for stealing a loaf of bread, and finishing in the aftermath of the 1832 Paris Uprising, when Valjean finds redemption on his deathbed.

  During this period, the city was still the ‘old Paris’ that Hugo loved, a labyrinth of narrow, intertwining streets, courtyards and crannies where characters could slip easily into the shadows. However, the city was also overcrowded, unhealthy and increasingly disillusioned: despite the world-upending 1789 Revolution, France seemed to be sinking back into aristocratic ways. Hence the Uprising. On 5 June 1832 around 3,000 Republican insurgents briefly controlled eastern and central Paris, an area spanning from the Châtelet to the Île de la Cité and Faubourg Saint-Antoine; barricades rose in the streets off rue Saint-Denis. But by 6 June the reinforced National Guard had stamped out the rebellion. Around 800 people were killed or wounded.

  Hugo himself witnessed the riots. He was writing in the Tuileries Garden when he heard gunshots from the direction of Les Halles, the traditional market area with its warren of alleys (now replaced by a shopping mall). He followed the noise north, but was forced to shelter in passage du Saumon (now passage Ben-Aïad – closed to the public), while bullets whizzed past.

  The city has changed immeasurably since. Between 1853 and 1870, urban planner Baron Haussmann razed much of the medieval city, replacing its ancient chaos with modern order: broad, straight boulevards, open intersections, public parks, harmonious terraces of mansard-roofed mansions. Avenues were made wide enough for carriages; they were also made too wide for effective barricades. The result was a city more homogenous, more hygienic, arguably more handsome but stripped of centuries of history.

  Haussmann has certainly made it more difficult to follow in the footsteps of Valjean, his ward Cosette, her suitor Marius and the rest of Hugo’s revolutionaries, vagabonds, gendarmes and whores. But echoes of his Paris remain. Most evocative is the Marais (the marsh), where there are more intact medieval buildings than anywhere else in the city. This neighbourhood on the Right Bank of the Seine survived Haussmannisation; it’s still a maze of tight-knit cobbled lanes, easy to get lost in, and now jam-packed with bookshops, boutiques, bars and cafés. It’s in the Marais that you’ll find the Places des Vosges, a perfect, tree-lined square framed by arcaded 17th-century houses, one of which is Hugo’s former home (now a museum). At the heart of the Marais is the baroque Jesuit church of Saint-Paul-Saint-Louis, where Marius and Cosette are wed; it’s also home to two shell-shaped fonts that Hugo donated to the church after his own daughter married there.

  The area to the west, the Latin Quarter, is another remnant of medieval streets. The Sorbonne, France’s first university, was founded here in 1257, establishing this area as a studenty haven of intellectual thought and no-frills bistros. This is where Marius and his fellow revolutionaries would have likely spent their days discussing a new tomorrow over cheap vin rouge.

  Nearby is the Jardin du Luxembourg, Paris’s second-largest park, and a leafy setting for love. Amid the Jardin’s sparrow-twittering chestnut trees, Marius and Cosette first catch each other’s eye. You can still walk the gravel paths, among the centuries-old pear trees and the statues of poets and politicians. One sculpture, Le Marchand de Masques (1883), depicts a boy hawking masks of famous people; the mask in his raised hand is the face of Hugo.

  However, the best way to sense the plight of Hugo’s misérables is to descend into the sewers. For Hugo, they were ‘another Paris under herself’, a dank, foul-smelling facsimile with its own streets and alleyways. It’s by descending to this abyss that Valjean rescues the wounded Marius – salvation via hell. Haussmann improved the sewage system but still, a visit to Musée des Égouts de Paris (the Paris Sewer Museum), following the raised walkways above the effluent, brings to mind – and nose – the Paris of Valjean.

  Valjean dies at peace, and is buried beneath a blank slab in an untended corner of a Paris cemetery. On his deathbed in 1885, Hugo asked to be buried in a pauper’s coffin, but was first processed up the Champs-Élysées and laid in state under the Arc de Triomphe, before being put in the crypt of the Panthéon, alongside Dumas and Zola. In death, raised to hero; on the page, striving with the common man.

  DUBLIN

  Which?

  Ulysses by James Joyce (1922)

  What?

  The world in miniature, for the humdrum events of one epic Irish day

  THE PUB is warm and beery. Grog glasses – drained, foam stained – scatter sticky veneer. Red-wine lips, hoppy breath, a slurry of slurring; laughter like gunfire, craic-ing off the wood panels, mirror walls and ranks of whiskey bottles. Bar talk is of theology and adultery, literature and death, soap and sausages. Everything and nothing, discussed or daydreamed over a quick cheese sandwich. A nothing old day. But the stuff of life – infinitesimal yet essential – all the same …

  James Joyce’s Ulysses – variously considered the most momentous, accomplished, infuriating and unreadable book in the English language – is the ordinary made extraordinary. It’s a modernist reworking of Homer’s Odyssey, but while the Ancient Greek poem tells of Odysseus’s incident-packed return from the Trojan War, Joyce makes an epic out of a single, unremarkable day.

  Ulysses follows Leopold Bloom, a Jewish ad canvasser for The Freeman’s Journal, as he wanders around Dublin on 16 June 1904. He attends a funeral, goes to the pub, ducks into a museum (to avoid the man sleeping with his wife), pleasures himself by Sandymount Strand, enters the red-light district. The novel is a chaotic stream of consciousness, performing stylistic acrobatics to try to render the human experience. But it is grounded in the streets of Dublin. Joyce, writing from self-exile in Paris, slavishly researched the physicality of the city. Though he seldom returned, he remained tethered: ‘When I die,’ he once said, ‘Dublin will be written in my heart.

  At the turn of the century the city was changing. The well-to-do had moved to the suburbs as the overcrowded centre decayed. Dublin had some of Europe’s worst slums; almost one in every four children died before their first birthday. A Celtic Revival was promoting Irish culture and language while in politics the Irish Parliamentary Party was pressing for Home Rule (rather than independence). But more radical movements were fermenting, and the Great War (1914–1918), Easter Rising (1916) and IRA violence were imminent. Though published in 1922, the ‘action’ of Ulysses predates this tumult. Joyce concerns himself, not with the struggles of nations but rather the little battles an Everyman faces, everyday. Dublin becomes a microcosm of the world.

  Joyce’s geographic diligence makes it possible to trace Bloom’s footsteps. Start at No. 7 Eccles Street, Bloom’s home, where he fries kidneys and contemplates his wife’s infidelity. The building was knocked down in the 1960s but a plaque marks the spot and the original doorway is preserved within a fine townhouse on North Great George’s Street, now the James Joyce Centre.

  O’Connell Street lies around the corner, a fashionable address in Georgian times, though faded by the 1900s, and damaged during the Easter Rising. No more the horse-drawn cabs and clanking trams; a stroll down its leafy central mall these days is accompanied by car din and a mishmash of architectural styles. Bloom wouldn’t have passed Joyce, who now leans nonchalantly in bronze at the corner with North Earl Street, but he did note the monument to Irish leader Daniel O’Connell – ‘the hugecloaked Liberator’s form’ – which stares across the River Liffey.

  Bloom buys Banbury cakes to feed the wheeling gulls as he walks over the wide span of O’Connell Bridge, the divide between dingier north Dublin and the more affluent south. This crossing takes you and Bloom into the heart of Dublin, home to the Bank of Ireland (originally the Irish Parliament building), prestigious Trinity College (where Catholic Joyce didn’t go), the National Library (where he frequently did). It leads to narrow, shop-lined Grafton Street, still gay with awnings, where locals and
outsiders alike still come for the craic – Dublin’s social essence.

  Bloom is hungry when he hits Duke Street. His first choice, The Burton – establishment of ‘pungent meatjuice, slop of greens’ – is no more. But Davy Byrnes pub, a traditional boozer, first opened in 1889, still serves Gorgonzola sandwiches and glasses of Burgundy (Bloom’s lunch of choice), providing a tangible taste of Joyce’s sometimes indigestible masterpiece.

  FLORENCE

  Which?

  A Room with a View by E.M. Forster (1908)

  What?

  Resplendent Italian Renaissance city where stifled passions break free

  FLING WIDE the casement windows and the essence of the city floods in. Fresh morning air carries church bells and wingbeats, barrows clattering on cobbles, the river murmuring below. Sunlight hits the room’s red-tiled floor, dazzles the linen, nurtures the geraniums on the sill. Leaning out, the view unfurls: a Renaissance masterpiece of golden palazzi and terracotta rooftops, speared by towers and a huge, impossible dome. Behind that, green hills braid and fade into the distance. The romance is palpable. This is a ‘magic city’, the sort where one might do the most extraordinary things …

  Florence is irresistible. In its 15th-century golden age, when it birthed the Italian Renaissance, the Tuscan city was artistically unmatched. Briefly, from 1865 to 1871, it was even capital of a newly unified Italy. As leisure travel became increasingly possible, well-heeled tourists flocked to appreciate its sights. Tourists just like Lucy Honeychurch, heroine of A Room with a View.

  E.M. Forster wrote this sun-drenched romantic comedy in early 20th-century England, a place of stifling conventions for the upper-middle classes. The novel pokes a critical finger at the sterility and rigidity of Edwardian England. But it offers an antidote: Florence. The Italian city is all that England is not. Instead of structure, it is spontaneity; rather than pallor, it is passion; rather than niceness, it is life. Today’s Florence remains all of those things. The retreating Nazis destroyed the old bridges (except the famed Ponte Vecchio); the calamitous flood of 1966 ruined many buildings; the tourist throngs have become even more maddening. But this city – Unesco World Heritage-listed in its entirety – still has the power to enchant.