Destination: The Imagination

Book: Cloak, by James Gough (NEW YA Fantasy– 2012)

Interview by Dr. Jessie Voigts

Have you ever seen a rat on the subway–not a real rat, per se, but maybe a half-rat, half-human? Or have you been tended to by an owl doctor– not a doctor for owls, but a doctor that just might be an owl? Such is the world that author James Gough explores, in his new young adult novel, Cloak. At once the story of Will Tuttle, his “allergies”, and his discovery of a new world – within a broader story of change, diversity, and culture, Cloak is a must-read.

Cloak takes the fantasy story plotline of a different world (e.g., Harry Potter, Narnia, Alice in Wonderland) and twists it to include the entire (and familiar) diversity of the animal kingdom, introducing all of those cultures, living side by side. Cloak is a book about culture, society, and civilization. It’s a book for all ages. It’s a book that I can highly recommend, as an intercultural glimpse into another world. And, Cloak is an excellent read, fun and intriguing and high on the can’t-put-down quotient.

James Gough, author of Cloak

We caught up with author James Gough for A Traveler’s Library, and asked him about creating a new world, how travel has inspired his writing, his best travel memories, creating a life of travel and culture for his kids, incorporating a sense of place into his book, and more. Here’s what he had to say…

 Jessie Voigts: Please tell us about your book, Cloak – and what were the biggest challenges in creating a new world?

Jim Gough: Cloak is about a society of animal people, or enchants, that have lived among us for generations. Enchants coexist in our world, but, they are expert in keeping their tales, scales, claws and fangs hidden from our view.

In enchant culture, staying hidden is an obsession and camouflage means survival… My goal is to make readers look at a beat up old ice cream truck and think, “I wonder if there is an enchant at the wheel?”

JV: How has travel influenced your writing?

JG: Traveling gives me a chance to sample other cultures, the background, the people, the accents, the traditions. I try to find out about the history of a place before visiting. That practice carries over into writing too: I make up the history of the people and the places first, to give the story depth.

… I’m a big fan of getting lost. The best way to get to know a new city is to look at a map once then just start walking until you’re totally turned around. There is something amazing about the sights and smells you can discover off the beaten path. . . When I write I create the surroundings in my head, then just wander around my brain and get lost.

To me, part of discovering a new place is with your taste buds. I always ask what dish a region is famous for then I make it my goal to sample it. When you eat what people eat, you get a glimpse into who they are. Conch fritters in Fort Lauderdale. Bacon Rolls off the streets of Chester, UK. Crawfish etouffee in Baton Rouge…

JV: How do you, as a dad, create a life of culture and travel for your kids?

JG: My three girls have become fearless travelers. I think a lot of that has to do with my wife, Kristen, who authors the blog MyKidsEatSquid, and is passionate about collecting experiences. She sees a trip or even a meal as an educational experience. That has rubbed off on me. We’ve explored pyramids and eaten street food in Mexico. My kids have no problem walking through a market where they are the only ones not speaking Spanish, Japanese, Polish.

I also encourage them to look at the culture around them as something to explore. There are all kinds of cultural pockets to be discovered in our own community—restaurants, markets, shops, events…

JV: When you write, how do you incorporate such a sense of place? I really felt like I was riding the subway with Will, and then heading out into the new-to-me setting of Wyoming…

JG: I smell it. Yes, it sounds weird, but if I can imagine a place well enough to know what it smells like then I feel like I can write it. Scent memory is one of the strongest recall abilities we have. So I figure if I can smell the streets of Manhattan in the rain, or a larvae nursery deep in a hidden mountain, and I can help readers smell the same thing, then the experience becomes more real for all of us.

JV: Is there anything else you’d like to share with us?

JG: Maybe just a few rules of travel that I try to live by:

• Never eat anywhere that is too clean or too polished. The greatest restaurants have a little patina and grit.
• Don’t ride if you can walk. You miss too much if you’re moving too fast.
• Smell everything. Good, bad, spicy, sweet—sniff it all. That’s where the memories come from.
• Do as they do. Locals don’t always like outsiders, so try to be as local as possible and they’ll usually give you the benefit of the doubt. There’s nothing worse than that loud guy that thinks every Peruvian should speak English just because he does.
• Do the other thing. If everyone in the world is going to visit that touristy place in the guidebook, don’t be afraid to go somewhere else.
• Bring home memories. I would much rather come back from a trip full of rich, life-altering experiences than a suitcase full of trinkets. Memories last a lot longer than t-shirts.

Intrigued? I KNEW it!!
We also interviewed Gough about the backstory to Cloak at Wandering Educators.
You can read more about his book, background, and book tour (where he can visit your class or book club) on James Gough’s website.

Dr. Jessie Voigts

Jessie Voigts is a regular contributor to A Traveler’s Library, writing about cultural travel.  You can see her other writing at Wandering Educators.

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Book: White Truffles in Winter (a novel) by N. M. Kelby

This fictionalized biography of the great French chef, Auguste Escoffier– White Truffles in Winter  – is delicious, scandalous, lascivious, luscious…

The writing is lush. The author, N. M. Kelby,  paints the portrait of a man obsessed with luscious food and delicious women.  But not just any food–Escoffier prefers dishes prepared with special ingredients. And not just any women.  He marries and has children with a poet–Delphine Daffis, but they live apart for decades during which he carries on a love affair with actress Sarah Bernhardt. He sees her when she is not busy bedding various heads of state and other prominent citizens.  At the end, Auguste and Delphine come back together in Monte Carlo and that is where the book starts, as it tells the story of his life in flashbacks and contemplates his life. Underneath the romance and the food, White Truffles in Winter  explores living well,  aging, memory, and how to adequately show love.

Modern Monte Carlo

Auguste Escoffier himself narrates most of the novel and after hearing him enthuse about the poetry and sacredness of food, we begin to believe wholeheartedly in the power and the glory of a properly prepared meal. Today we credit Escoffier with inventing modern restaurant kitchen methods (dividing the work among specialized stations) and serving styles (as menus à la carte).

He wooed women with his cooking, he wrote cookbooks, and when he needed some luxurious extras, he ordered them on the hotel account and cooked the books. The details of this novel, set in Paris, London and Monte Carlo are not literally correct, but it reflects the basic outline of Escoffier’s life. As the author says, “The elegant savage found in these pages is who we all are when we address the plate.  The magician, the priest, the dreamer, the artist–it is our most hungry self.”

The “King of chefs and chef to kings”  moved from a Paris restaurant to the  Savoy in London and with his friend César Ritz, started the Carlton in London and Ritz Hotel in Paris, thus beginning the Ritz-Carlton tradition. Escoffier also headed the kitchen preparations for the Titanic and drew up the menus, but fortunately for him, let his crew sail without him.

Hotel Ritz, Paris, today

The delight of this novel lies in the dialogue and actions that are consistently believable no matter how remote the life of Mme. and M. Escoffier may be from our own reality.  Occasionally he touches down to earth–with memories of the horrible days of starvation during World War I, which the author intimates were the basis for his obsessions with food.  And with the recipe for Fried Chicken.  Don’t get me wrong, White Truffles is not a cookbook.  However Kelby describes many of Escoffier’s creations in such detail that you could recreate them in your kitchen (if only you had a few truffles on hand).

Auguste explains that fried chicken blends Scottish and African traditions. He learned to make it from Rufus Estes, a famous American black chef of the day who worked for Sarah Bernhardt .  Sarah calls Auguste’s  version, “Magic.” How different in spirit is his version from Paula Deen (who has her own problems these days.)( NOTE: I belatedly discovered that Kelby herself has something to say on the subject of Deen at her blog” At Escoffier’s Table)

Back to the fried chicken, Escoffier says:

Cut some boiled fowl into slices and marinate them in very good olive oil, the juice of a lemon and a handful of herbs fresh from the garden.  I enjoy tarragon, for a hint of licorice; lemon thyme, to bring forward the citrus note; and the slightest bit of lavender.  The fowl should marinate for at least three hours.  Flour. Fry. Garnish with fried parsley.

The cooking advice is not always so straightforward.  In explaining another poultry dish, Escoffier says, “…find a good-sized pullet.  You must be very careful with the size of the fatted chicen…You will know it when you see it.  Your heart will leap.”  This “good-sized pullet” is for a dish that “will require the maître d’hôtel, three waiters (at the very least) and a portable stovetop.”

The author has absorbed and reflects Escoffier’s fascination with everything about food.  ”Food is never as simple as one thinks it is.  It is much more dangerous–seducing completely,” he says. In the  novel’s description of settings–in this bygone era that only the super rich might come close to experiencing in the 21st century–the words are also electric.  When Escoffier goes to Belle Île to meet Sarah Bernhardt (ah, yes, the same wonderful island visited in  P.O. Box Love ) :

“…he could see what a painter en plein aire would see, what Monet had seen as he desperately held his canvas so that the insistent wind would not hurl his easel into the sea–the blue with shutters of green, all set in sharp relief against the bones of jagged steep cliffs, the gray-green sea and the coal smoke sky.  The colors were so intense he nearly wept.”

The publishers, W. W. Norton and Company, have equaled the lushness of N. M. Kelby’s writing with fine scrolling graphics at chapter heads, a sensuous cover picture and a jacket cover that feels as soft and smooth as skin.

One last food reference from White Truffles in Winter. As he feeds a “perfect scallop” to Delphine early in their marriage:

“Close your eyes,” he had said to her. “food demands complete submission.” “Do you taste the sea?”

Delphine did. Not just the salt of the sea but the very air of the moment that the shell was pulled from the sand. “A storm, perhaps. There is a dark edge to the sweetness of the meat.  What do you taste?”

“The hand of God”

Reading Escoffier:

Ma Cuisine A cookbook for people who already know how to cook, despite being titled for the housewife. No cooking temperatures and times, for example.

Auguste Escoffier: Memories of My Life This is his version of his life and it is the book he is writing during the novel, White Truffles in Winter.

Disclaimers: Links from book titles to Amazon are for your convenience, but they are affiliate links, which means that anything you buy while you are there earns a bit for A Traveler’s Library. Please do help us out that way! Thanks.  The photos here come from Flickr with Creative Commons license and you can learn more by clicking on each photo.

And what are your own feelings about food? Have you had experiences where food transported you–where it became much more than simple fuel for the body?

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Destinations: Milan, New York City and Brittany in France

Book: P.O. Box Love: A Novel of Letters (originally 2009, but NEW in English– February 2012) by Paola Calvetti

I reviewed this delicious new romance in e-book format, and as I read P.O. Box Love, I used the bookmark function on my Sony reader to mark favorite passages (there were so many!) and to make a list of people for whom I want to buy the book (there were so many!) If you get the impression that I am recommending this gem to lovers of travel and lovers of literature, you have guessed correctly

The Belle Ile Love Nest

If you have ever been tempted to look up an old girlfriend or boyfriend, you will sympathize with Frederico. If you have doubts about revealing yourself to someone from your past, you’ll understand Emma. Did you ever have the urge to open a bookstore? You’ll love Dreams & Desires, Emma’s bookstore in Milan that specializes in romance. Paola Calvetti, the Italian author, agreed to answer some questions for readers of A Traveler’s Library, and in my first question, I get at one of the reasons this book stands apart. P.O. Box Love blows apart the assumption that romance ends at 35 or so.

A Traveler’s Library:  How did the protagonists’ age change your task as a romance writer? 

Menhir Jean, Belle Ile, Brittany

PC: The way I found Belle Île was really strange and… tied to the destiny of the book. I was in Concarneau; it was a cloudy afternoon and I was visiting its historical monuments, having a cup of tea and wandering in the alleyways. I happened to enter an ancient bookstore run by an old bookseller selling second-hand books. I asked him “do you have any books about Breton legends or rather a love legend?” “Of course”, he answered, the great story of Jean and Jeanne!”

There are literary quotations in abundance throughout P.O. Box Love. Emma ironically quotes Virginia Woolf,” how very little natural gift words have for being useful.” A sign on the wall of the store says “The only advice you can give someone about reading is not to accept any advice…” But we asked advice anyhow– for books that inspire travel.   Paola echoed the beliefs of A Traveler’s Library.

Indeed the book is a love poem to the United States, particularly since Frederico is an Italian temporarily living in New York City during September 2001 and the book deals with the shock and horror of 9-11-01. Frederico (and the author) love the Morgan Library in New York and we are treated to the history of Morgan and the architectural challenges of adapting an historic building.

A love story told in letters sounds as though it would be a simple affair, but P.O. Box Love is enriched with  literature,  architecture, the beauty of three countries, the interplay of interesting characters, including a mother and her teenage son, and the invasion of the Internet into previously hidebound practices of publishing. All these factors contribute to a winner of a book. I welcomed Frederico and Emma into my life and was sorry to say goodbye.

Follow Paola on Facebook.

Disclaimer: Links to the book on Amazon are affiliate links, meaning that anything you buy when you use the link will help support A Traveler’s Library, and we thank you very much.  The photographs here are all the property of Paola Calvetti and should not be reused without express permission.

Today’s prize, the LAST January birthday present, a copy of P.O. Box Love, goes to one person who comments, subscribes, tweets (using @pen4hire) or mentions Vera Marie Badertscher on Google+ (You can comment on this post or on an earlier post. Just do it before Wednesday, February 1, 3:00 a.m. MST. This is your last chance, also, to enter for the Grand Prize drawing.  

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Destination: London

Book: Comfort and Joy (NEW October 2011) by India Knight

Cheeky!  The little book Comfort and Joy just elbowed its way up in front of a stack of other books waiting to be reviewed.  I could not resist the cheerful red cover festooned with Christmas lights, so after reading a few more serious books, I picked it up, hoping for the best.

In moments, I was laughing out loud and within a few more moments, I knew I must share it with you in time for you to get copies for your own travel library and as gifts for all your female BFFs–before the Christmas rush sets in.  Because if there is one thing women need in the midst of holiday madness, it is some relief from the performance pressure.

London Christmas Shopping

Author India Knight‘s main character, Clara (whom Knight says closely resembles herself), think as she is doing her last-minute shopping,

It’s about love, and family, and, like I said, redemption.  If I didn’t want to run the risk of sounding like the king of the wankers, I’d say Christmas was about hope.  Yeah.  Hope.  And optimism.  It’s like the fairy tales in the window: for families, every Christmas is a new opportunity for Happy Ever After. [And then she adds, to herself,] “No pressure, then.”

Right. No pressure.  Clara, a 40-year-old writer and mum, shares three consecutive Christmases (or Christmi, as her sister says) with us.  She feels personally responsible for creating a magical holiday experience for her extended family–and, one suspects–frantic to live up to her own fantasy Christmas.  That 40-yr-old part bothers her when she sees an attractive man and realizes she is wearing tights (and flesh-colored Pants of Steel)–not see-through stockings.

The problem is, I wasn’t always a person of the flesh-colored pants variety.  There was a time, many centuries ago, when triceratopses frolicked playfully across the plains with diplodocuses, when I was acquainted with the woman in the stockings…..Happily for me I don’t find that many people attractive, plus my propensity for bad behavior has been napalmed into extinction by years and years of marriage, children, supermarkets, laundry, bills, school, work, all of that stuff.

So she gets back to searching for the perfect present and cooking and decorating herself into a tizzy for her children, her ex-husbands, in-laws, sisters and their families, a best friend and her mother–who is a dead ringer for Auntie Mame. Her daughters call her Kate–never Mum.

Part of the fun for an American reading this books is the introduction of a very English family and their Christmas culture–not terribly unlike our own, since we stole most of it once the Puritans loosened up.  On the one hand, the story is all familiar–the musings on relations between the sexes and the family dynamics.  On the other hand, there are those distinctly English bits like the class consciousness and a relentless cuteness in talking about bodily functions, and there are a few English usages that take some getting used to.  You need to learn the difference between liking someone and fancying someone, for instance.

Despite the fact that from time to time I felt left out by mentions of brands or store names I didn’t know and TV shows that have not made it to the U.S. via public TV–I totally got it.  Like, for instance, although we might not say “bits and bobs” when describing the last-minute gifts we are buying,

London Oxford Street

The book starts in this headlong rush in  crowded Oxford street on 23 December  2009, as Clara shops for the bits and bobs and ponders why pigeons walk beside her instead of flying.  The head long rush rarely lets up.

The book, of course, is not really about Christmas.  Christmas is just the setting.  It is about relationships.  Here’s Clara, describing her husband and contemplating how the hot blood of a romance cools with the arrival of children and duty.

He’s fit, in both senses.  He is extremely attractive. But you see, even with that–I lie in bed and watch him getting dressed and I think, “He’s extremely attractive,” but I think it like one might think, “He’s a sweet dog,” or, “I really like what the Browns have done to their spare room,”  It’s become objective.  I would prefer it if I had the thought and then felt compelled to remove his pants with my teeth.

Nothing of the 21st century life escapes skewering here–child rearing theories, trendy foods, conspicuous consumption, political correctness, Facebook, texting. (Clara loves “the attractive man” because he uses punctuation in a text message. As in, Happy Christmas, Clara.)

But if this is a sociological study, enroll me in sociology.  I haven’t had this much fun in years.

The publisher, Penguin Books, sent me a review copy, and while I appreciate the opportunity, they know that does not guarantee a good review. In this case, I REALLY hope that you will buy a few copies, and as usual, would be extra happy if you are shopping at Amazon, if you’d get there by clicking on a link from A Traveler’s Library. That way, although it costs you no more, I earn a few cents to keep the blog going. And thanks to the Flickr photographers who make their photos available through Creative Commons for these shots of London.

You can follow India Knight on Twitter @indiaknight

How do you get through the frictions and bits and bobs of Christmas? Are you the keeper of the flame in your family?

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The French House, Luxor (1890)

Destination: Egypt

Book: The Mistress of Nothing by Kate Pullinger (Org. publ. 2009; NEW U. S. paperback edition)

A tour of the Nile River to Luxor sounds pretty exotic even in the 21st century.  But just imagine the adventure and hardship of such travel in the 19th century.  The historical travel novel The Mistress of Nothing lets us see vividly what life is like for the maid of a prominent English woman when they live in Egypt from 1862 to 1864.

It was not at all rare for upper-class Englishmen to set off on adventures in remote corners of the world in the 1800′s.  Even the wealthy and well-born women sometimes ventured abroad. These well-heeled travelers turned out whole libraries of travel memoirs, reports, letters and narratives. Lucie Duff-Gordon‘s traveling, forced on her by illness, was nevertheless embraced enthusiastically. I’ll talk more about Duff Gordon and her Letters From Egypt on another day, but this novel, The Mistress of Nothing, by Kate Pullinger  focuses not on the upper class traveler, but instead on the Lady’s faithful maid and Egyptian servants.

Sally Nesbett is mentioned in passing in Lady Duff Gordon’s collected letters, but Kate Pullinger imagined most of Sally’s life and that of the Egyptian  dragoman, Omar. The events are real, but amended with conversation and telescoped in time.

The Sphinx, Giza Egypt. See the article that goes with this picture at My Itchy Travel Feet.

The Mistress of Nothing is dependably accurate when it comes to descriptions of the landscape and everyday life in both Cairo and the small village of Luxor where Sally lived with her mistress most of their time in Egypt. They settled into what was known as The French House, a historic residence that was later destroyed. (See this April 2010 article about modern-day changes to the village of Luxor where they lived.) The two Englishwomen seem to become more equal in status as they struggle to learn Arabic and survive the searing heat of summer.  And as they slip into a new routine, they both seem to relax their adherence to English formality.

Duff Gordon gives up the many-layered, heavy English clothing and appears one day in “the most extraordinary outfit I had ever seen.” says Sally. She had donned cotton flowing trousers and a long white tunic–the costume of Egyptian men.  Sally is shocked.  ”We had given up our stockings and underskirts while we traveled up the Nile, but it would never have occurred to me to go any further, no matter how high the temperature rose.”  But most shocking of all to Sally…her lady had taken off her stays–the contraption of stiff bones and muslin that squeezed her midsection– went into storage.

This article of clothing becomes the central metaphor for this book about a person’s right to live their own life in the way they wish–and about the shedding of one culture and acceptance of another.  “My lady cast off her English clothes and it was as though at that moment our relationship shifted as well...” says Sally.

But now that my lady had cast aside her European clothes, I longed to do the same….I took off my layers of undergarments. I unlaced my stays. Like my Lady’s they had remained remarkably intact, as thought they were a form of indestructible armour.”

Lady Duff Gordon, as intellectually curious and convention-flouting as she is, ultimately withdraws support from the faithful Sally. In the end, Lady Duff Gordon’s interest in change appears superficial next to the life-changing events that Sally lives through. Although the privileged woman wants freedom to flaunt convention, her servant lady is expected to stay in her place.

Courtyard of Alabaster Mosque, Cairo

The Mistress of Nothing is a satisfying addition to the traveler’s library for many reasons.

• The author describes life in Egypt nearly 150 years ago, including beliefs and customs that have not appreciably changed.
• The book deals with a period of political unrest and the way Egyptians traditionally handle oppression, which echoes recent events. Sally says it is a mistake to follow too far in the reasoning that Egyptian fortunes will forever rise and fall like the Nile, patiently accepting and enduring.  ”Instead, they lie in wait, like a scorpion on a rock, like a crocodile among the reeds, and from time to time they rise up and they bite.”
• The book illuminates the change in attitude about the treatment of archaeological sites.  Sally and her Lady camp out in the cool confines of an ancient temple and foreigners routinely break off pieces of art and hieroglyphics to take back to their own countries without raising eyebrows.
• And finally, The Mistress of Nothing tells an interesting and thought-provoking story about the servant of an aristocrat and their intersection with Egyptian culture.

For the Sphinx and the Alabaster Mosque photographs, I am indebted to Donna L. Hull.  Donna recently returned from a visit to Egypt and gives us a modern woman’s viewpoint at My Itchy Travel Feet.

Book cover, 1000 Miles Up the Nile

The picture of “The French House,”  at the top of this page shows where the main action of this book takes place. It is a drawing by another English woman traveler who wrote about Egypt,  Amelia Blanford Edwards in her travel memoir A Thousand Miles Up the Nile. That photo and the book cover come from the University of Pennsylvania Library on line.  Edwards explains in a footnote that she sketched the French House before it was swept away. Her book was published in 1890.

Links from book titles in this article lead to Amazon for your convenience, if you shop on line.  Although it costs you nothing extra, A Traveler’s Library shows a small profit whenever you shop through our links. So thanks!

HEY, READERS! Can you share a story about a cultural a-ha! moment, when you may have realized that your own way was not the ONLY way to do things? Did you, figuratively, take off your stays??

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Silk Road Urumqi Market

Destination: China

Book: The Song of the Silk Road by Mingmei Yip (NEW April 2011)

They did it again.  Got me to read a romance novel by disguising it as adventure travel.  Song of the Silk Road is indeed all three–romance (with plenty of sex), an adventuring quest, and travel to exotic locales.

Lily Lin, a young woman born in Hong Kong and raised in the United States gets a mysterious assignment from an aunt she never knew existed.  She is promised that if she completes  the tasks successfully, she will earn three million dollars. As earnest money, she is given $50,000 for her trip. She leaves behind in Manhattan her hot affair with a married college professor and sets off on her adventure in China along the Silk Road where she soon becomes involved in another hot affair.

Silk Road donkey cart

While the formula sounds enticing and the mysterious quest is a tried and true idea, the novel suffers from uneven writing and inconsistent development of characters.  At one moment flowery and poetic, the author’s style can suddenly change to awkward.  She seems to have endless imagination in describing love-making, but a limited store of figures of speech for every day activities.  Repetition becomes annoying when it is not so obvious it is amusing.  Over and over she tells us that Xian is the start of the Silk Road.  The forewarnings of danger get comical.

pg. 5/6: With my slightly trembling hand, I scribbled on the death-pale paper.

pg. 8: Like a bad cold, the uneasy feeling refused to go away.

pg. 9: What if I failed to complete the journey? What if I got sick or died on the road? Murdered? Strangled by silk? Engulfed by sand and eaten alive by horrible insects?

And then we run into the paucity of descriptive terms. This is just one example of many:

pg. 20: The meal was consumed almost in total silence, except for an occasional smacking of lips, slurping of soup, clicking of chopsticks, and signs from Chris’s mouth.

pg. 32: [note: another country, another man] We ate and chatted while clicking chopsticks, smacking lips, sipping tea.

These quotations from the narrator, the heroine Lily Lin did not help make her likeable.  It was hard to get a handle on whether she was a worldly 29-year-old sophisticate as she pictured herself (not to mention her frequent self descriptions of her mind-blowing beauty and fatal attraction to the opposite sex), or if she was just stupidly naïve. After all she fell for some of the oldest lies in the world from her married professor and then she took off on a dangerous quest to China, having barely asked any questions or investigated the story the lawyers told her.

Maybe I am just being a spoil sport–letting logic get in the way of a page-turner adventure interrupted only by steamy sex scenes.  So call me old-fashioned, but I think a good novel takes more than just a good idea.  It also calls for good execution.

On the other hand, if you can set aside my complaints and if you want to take a journey to some very interesting parts of China, Mingmei Lip writes like someone who has been there, describing both lesser-known sites and more famous ones, like the Terracotta Soldiers of Xian.

Terracotta Warriors, Xian, China

Besides Xian, Lily’s journey introduces the reader to Beijing, Dunhuang, and Xinjiang. We meet the Uyghur people of the Taklamakan desert and learn about their religion and their healers. We see a famous bazaar in Urumqi. She finally ventures a short way  into the Taklamakan Desert–the Go In But Never Come Out Desert–where we see both golden sands and dumpy motels.

Silk Road Desert

Mingmei Yip at Shakespeare and Company, Paris

My experience with the book was particularly disappointing, because the attractive Yip has published 8 books and although most are in Chinese, this is the third novel in English. I might chalk up stylistic differences to language difficulties, but that does not excuse an author who could very well work with an editor to improve.  She holds a PhD from the Sorbonne, and apparently is talented musically and artistically as well.

[Read in a Single Sitting agreed, and made some of my points better than I did.]

If you want to judge for yourself, and decide to buy the book, the link to the book title will take you directly to Amazon. It won’t cost you any more, but A Traveler’s Library will benefit. Thanks. Photo of Yingmei Yip comes from her web page. The rest are taken by adventurous photographers who share with Creative Commons License through Flickr. The author and publisher sent me a copy of the book for review.

Is the Silk Road one of the destinations on your bucket list? Would a book like this persuade you to go?

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Libya Flag

A timely announcement given the happenings in Libya recently.

BBC World Book Club used one of the questions I submitted in their interview of Hisham Matar. You can get the link to the broadcast and a download by going back to the review of In the Country of Men. Be patient, mine is the last question.

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Destination: Central coast, California

Book: What the Heart Knows by Mara Purl

I am reading What the Heart Knows in a pdf copy that was supplied to reviewers by the publisher. It is a combination mystery/romance/contemporary novel set in California, and a delightful read. Fascinated with the author’s background (as a writer, actor on Days of Our Lives soap opera, and a musician), I decided to ask her a few questions. Sorry, this is a very long post. I reluctantly cut quite a bit, but Mara Purl loves words and has interesting stories to tell!

A Traveler’s Library: In What the Heart Knows, you write about several real locations and one fictional town on the California coast. What led to locate your story on the central California coast? And why did you borrow a Welsh name for the town?

Author Mara Purl

Mara Purl: To begin by answering the last question first, I discovered, rather than created the connection. “Cambria” was the ancient Roman name for Wales. I have a dear friend…who grew up in a tiny California town called Cambria…It sounded like a dream and I kept wondering when and how I’d ever find the time to get there. I was in LA working as a freelance writer but mostly focusing on the acting chapter of my career, I fell in love with the play “Sea Marks” by Gardner McKay. It’s…about a woman from Wales and man from Ireland…I began to look for a way to produce or co-produce it. I found a theatre, but the co-star I found wasn’t free when the theatre was; there were various other stumbling blocks. I let it go . . .My manager, who did not know about my interest in this play, called one day… When the title was half out of his mouth, I shouted “I’ll do it!” “But,” he remarked, “you haven’t even heard where the production will be done or who the co-star is!” I didn’t care. I’d have done anything to do that play.

As it turned out, the play would be done in a small town called Cambria right in the middle of the California coast, halfway between L.A. (my home) and San Francisco. So I finally got my first trip to Cambria…I had a strange series of deja-vu moments during that first weekend of rehearsal. And during the long summer’s run of the play, I found myself intrigued by Life In A Small Town.

I’d grown up in Tokyo; then moved to New York; then to Los Angeles. What did I know about a small town? Virtually nothing. I read the local paper, befriended folks who came backstage after the show, and eavesdropped in local eateries. Since I look at life through the lens of story, I placed my magnifier upon the tapestry of Cambria.

[She produced A Christmas Carol for a Cambria radio station and they liked it and told her she could come back any time.] [Meanwhile]…I’d been hired as a regular actor on the soap opera “Days Of Our Lives.” This was my first brush with what I call the long form of story-telling, where choices and consequences play out for weeks at a time… I hadn’t taken the form seriously until then, but now I became intrigued with it. [She decided to write a serial play based in a small town like Cambria for the radio station in Cambria.] … Researching Cambria, I discovered the connection to Wales, and found on the map of Wales, on its western coast, a town called Milford Haven that seemed to ring a bell. Then, in a moment of synergy that I experienced as both instant intuition and certain direction, I happened to audition for Shakespeare’s “Cymbelline.” Speaking the lines of the protagonist Imogen, I found myself reading a letter from her beloved that said, “Meet me in Cambria, in Milford Haven.” I just knew that was the name for my fictitious town, and for my show. [The radio serial based in Cambria was a big hit in Cambria, so she produced it several other cities, including in England on the BBC, where it was also a striking success.]

ATL: Is it easier in a novel to describe a real place or a fictional place?

MP: Good question! On the face of things, it may seem easier to describe a real place. After all, you can go sit at the very table in the very café in the very city . . . and track each and every detail before your eyes… However, as a story begins to progress, if you’re using a real place, you’re then also “stuck” with its real details. You can’t say it’s 80 degrees if it’s really 110 in the shade; you can’t say the population is 100,000 if it’s really 10,000; you can’t turn right on Parchment Street if it’s a one-way boulevard.

And it continues to get more and more and more complicated as you try to blend your fictional characters with a real place. You can to some extent fictionalize a real place if you use is a kind of stationery tableau that holds steady behind your moving characters. Dan Brown does this in The Davinci Code with Rome; Rex Pickett did the same with California central wine country his novel Sideways. .. But if your place is more intimate, and if it’s to be as much a character as your people, living and moving and breathing and evolving, it really has to be a fictional place, or a heavily fictionalized place (such as when Santa Barbara becomes Santa Theresa in Sue Grafton’s books) so as to be flexible enough to be true. Don’t you love it! Something must be fictional in order to be true!

ATL: This is the first in a series. Will the action in all the subsequent books stay in Milford-Haven?

MP: Yes . . . and no. Each novel does take place in Milford-Haven, and we will come to know the town and its people better and better… However, my protagonist Miranda Jones goes someplace different in each novel. She stays put in book one, What the Heart Knows, because this anchors both her and the series. But in book two, Where the Heart Lives,she goes a little farther afield—to Santa Barbara and to Los Angeles. Then in book three she goes to Oregon; and in book four she has a truly grand adventure in Alaska. In future books she’ll travel to Milford-Haven, Virginia, and even to Milford Haven, Wales, by the way, so travel is a theme for Miranda, just as it is for me.

ATL: What’s your favorite destination for travel?

MP: My favorite destination is the Central Coast [of California]. It’s my soul’s home, and always always speaks to me. I have the curious sensation both of arriving home, and of journeying into an adventure. There’s both a comfort and a charge every time I point my car toward the Central Coast, or even when I fly over it. If the Central Coast is a magnet for me, then all my innards like up like iron filings and form a perfect pattern of joy the closer I get to this particular region.

My second-favorite destinations are those that resonate with the California Central Coast, and I’ve found several: Milford Haven, Wales touches me profoundly; parts of the Japanese coastline draw me; parts of the various Hawaiian coastlines inspire me very much. One I haven’t visited yet that’s been on my list for years is the Milford Sound in New Zealand.

ATL: Any favorite books or movies that have inspired you to travel somewhere? MP: I’d say Louis L’Amour’s books inspired me to travel in Colorado and New Mexico. Louis, whom I met while writing a screenplay with a writer-director who’d directed one of Louis’ films, became a great friend and mentor. He  had such a well-developed sense of place that the Old West comes alive through his pages.

ATL: Thanks so much, Mara. I urge readers to take a look at your web site and learn more about your many talents, and particularly more about your books set in Cambria. Although I’ve been through Cambria, I’ve never stayed for long. You’ve made me rethink that!

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Destination: Albania

Book: Chronicle in Stone (org. 1971, NEW paperback edition)  by Ismail Kadare

This amazing novel by a former Man Booker Prize winner brings to life Gjirokastër, a city on the southern edge of Albania, near the Greek border. The events during World War II in this city provide a microcosm of the shifting bands of conquerors that have moved through Albania over the ages. Chronicle in Stone stops just before the paranoid rule of Communist dictators in the twentieth century, but the constant turmoil that is the history of this country explains a great deal about why it seems rivaled only by Romania in seeming inability to join the modern world.

Ismail Kadare is hailed as “Albanians best known poet and novelist,” and the fact that there are  not a lot of competitors for the title does not take away from his power as a story teller. He is a master artist with words. His style is easy and simple on the surface, but full of symbol and metaphor and originality of thought.

As in our recently reviewed In the Country of Men,  a young boy narrates tragic events.  I felt even more appalled by the deprivation of life in Albania because the wartime tale came from the mouth of an innocent in Chronicle in Stone.

Gjirokaster, Albania

Andrzej Stasiuk (On the Road to Babadag, reviewed here two days ago) described the city Gjirokastër, using many of the same details used by Kadare.  Stasiuk says: ”Gjirokastër is a town of white stone.  The roofs of the houses are covered with black tiles that once were white, too.” Both authors talk about the minaret, about the Turkish fortress on the hill, but mostly about the fact that this is a vertical town–so steep that drunks often fall off the street and onto the roof of a house.

The book is chronological, but there are hints at the randomness and disorganization of life in the insertion between chapters of fragments from a Chronicle, and random thoughts of the boy.  The boy barely understands much of what he is seeing, but then, neither do the adults.  The adults may understand the human sexual pornography around them, but they cannot comprehend the pornography of war and factions that randomly kill townspeople.

I realize I am making it all sound rather grim, but there are laugh-out-loud funny moments and characters that make you giggle with recognition. Small towns everywhere breed such characters. Like the woman Kako Pino whose job it is to apply make up to the bride when there is a wedding. For anything that is related to her, her predictable reply is “It is the end of the world.” Like the man who changes his name each time a different nationality marches across the border.

And there are plenty of opportunities to change one’s name.  The Italians invade. Eventually the Greeks drive out the Italians, but only for a couple of days. Then the Italians come back. Then the Greeks. The populace loses track of how many times the conquerors’ uniforms change. Finally the Italians surrender and the Germans, who have by then taken over Greece, march in. But this is nothing new. Kadare says:

At dusk, the city, which through the centuries had appeared on maps as a possession of the Romans, the Normans, the Byzantines, the Turks, the Greeks and the Italians, now watched darkness fall as a part of the German empire.  Utterly exhausted, dazed by the battle, it showed no signs of life.

Gjirokaster

In this paragraph, the city becomes a person.  That is a common manner of expression throughout the book, as the boy ascribes human qualities to clouds, airplanes, the very stones of the city. When the Germans invade, the boy says, “The road that would lead them there (as it had led so many armies) now writhed at the city’s feet, begging forgiveness.”
The boy sees everyday life around him and makes everyday observations even as unusual events are occurring. The English planes bomb so regularly that “people seemed to get used to the bombings as a disagreeable part of a daily routine. ‘See you tomorrow at the coffee house, right after the bombing.’ ‘I’ll be up at dawn tomorrow; that way I think I’ll have the house cleaned before the bombing.’”

Life becomes one big jumble. During the shifting of armies, there are times when “The city had been left without a government. In quick succession it had lost planes, the anti-aircraft guns, the siren, the brothel, the searchlight and the nuns.”

The Turkish Fort at Gjirokaster

Chronicle in Stone opened my eyes to Albanian history, to a city that sounds quite worthy of a visit just because of its unique architecture, and mostly, to a masterful weaver of words, Ismail Kadare.

Some day I may tell you about my personal experience with an Albanian in Greece, which did nothing to erase the prejudice that the Greeks hold against the Albanians. A good deal of the animosity between the two countries is based in their religious differences, but also, a dirt poor country next door to a wealthier one makes for friction. As bad off as Greece is these days, Albanian is still worse.

Global Giving has an economic development  project in Gjirokastër, teaching locals preservation skills. You can see photos of the Gjirokastër, and learn about the Albania project.

The book title is linked to Amazon for your convenience. If you click through to Amazon and purchase anything at all, I get a few cents which helps support A Traveler’s Library. Thanks.

Have you been to Albania? I would like to hear first person accounts. What do you think is the most pathetic country in Europe?

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The Dutch House, New Castle, Delaware (early 1700's)

Destination: Colonial Delaware

Book: Flesh and Grass by Libby Cone (Self published via Smashwords and available on all forms of electronic media)

I read Libby Cone‘s first historic novel, War on the Margins, about the German occupation of British Channel islands and enjoyed it very much. In the newer book, she’s writing  on her own without a graduate committee looking over her shoulder, and apparently without a caring editor. Too bad, because I am fascinated by the Dutch history on the East Coast of America, and loved visiting the old town of New Castle Delaware on a road trip to the Brandywine Valley. This book left me wishing I had not even started it, but it did stir up memories of a  trip to historic America.

In brief, Flesh and Grass tells the story of a colony of Mennonites, sponsored by the Dutch West Indies Company, come to America for religious freedom in 1662.  Their small, hard-working colony is abandoned by the Company, whose officers are much more interested in the sugar and slave trade of the Caribbean. Then the community becomes a pawn in Holland’s wars with England and France. Their community is burned out over and over again, attacked by pirates who steal their goods, and they dwindle in numbers. The narrator finally moves inland to Pennsylvania in 1693 after Zwaanendael (Dutch) becomes Lewes (English).

Although or maybe because it is thoroughly researched, the story sinks under the daily drudgery of life in this ill-fated colony.  I disagree with several of the writer’s choices.

• First, she tells the story journal style in the voice of a blind man, thus sacrificing physical descriptions except when he asks people to describe things to him. All tell and no show.
• Second, she uses the Dutch spelling, forms of address, and a stilted speech throughout the entire book. More skilled writers introduce that type of speech, but then lay it aside so that readers do not have to hack their way through a jungle of unfamiliar usages.
• Third, she recounts life in the colony incident by incident, with no overarching narrative curve. Instead of plot, we get plod.  Although exciting and interesting things happen to the people here, the prose presents them all in the same tone–no build-up, no suspense.

It pains me to write such a negative review because I think that Libby Cone could do better. I KNOW she could do better because I read her other book, and the reader will be better served to read War on the Margins.

But don’t lose interest in this very interesting part of American history, and if you have a chance, definitely visit the historic gems of  New Castle  and  Lewes, Delaware which was the main site of Flesh and Grass. Lewes, calls itself “the first town in the first state.” (Delaware was the first state to ratify the U.S. Constitution.) First called Zwaanendael by the Dutch, Cone uses that name and Hoornkill interchangeably. But the Lewes museum site says the proper name was Whore Kill–Harlot’s Creek.  The Museum site also says the town was founded in 1631, while this book apparently starts with the founders sailing from Amsterdam in 1662.

New Castle Armory and cobblestone Street

We did not get to Lewes, farther South, but we did visit New Castle, an easy detour from a Brandywine Valley road trip.  The Old Armory pictured above housed a restaurant, where we enjoyed a nice lunch in a building that felt like an authentic old tavern of the 1800′s. According to their Facebook page, it is now closed. Too bad, I loved the solid building with colonial columns in front, surrounded by a park-like swath of grass and fronting on that very bumpy street.  The streets throughout the center of town are the rough cobblestone you see in that picture. (You can still eat at historic Jessop’s Tavern on the main shopping street.)

Walk through the business district, and everything looks preserved from colonial days, with the exception of “The oldest house in Delaware”, The  Dutch House, maintained by the New Castle Historic Society.

Entrance to The Dutch House 

As he sometimes does when we travel, Ken took a break and sat on a shaded bench in Battery park, looking out on the Bay while I went through the  Read House and Gardens (1801), home of a signer of the Declaration of Independence.

Read House parlor, New Castle Delaware

We both visited the Dutch House (pictured at top of page), which has gone through many upgrades over the years, and was once much rougher, probably with a thatched roof in its original early 18th century version. The Historic Society, with financing from a member of the ubiquitous Delaware du Pont family, has recreated the interior as it would have been in the early 1700′s with odd tools and kitchen utensils.

Besides Battery park, which stretches for many blocks along the water, the townspeople can gather in the original town square for relaxation.  We found the whole town relaxing–after walking these streets for a while, you might be surprised when the ring of a cell phone or hum of a car motor jars you back to the present. But how interesting to think of those earnest settlers who came here from Holland, asking only to be able to support themselves and worship as they wished.

These photos are all the property of Vera Marie Badertscher. If that one of the Armory looks a bit like a car ad, it accompanied an article I wrote for Automotive Traveler  , an on-line magazine, about our road trip in a Chevy HHR loaned to us by General Motors. We liked the loaner car so much that when we got home, we bought one for ourselves.

The book title is linked to Amazon for your convenience. If you click through to Amazon and purchase anything at all, I get a few cents which helps support A Traveler’s Library. Thanks.

What’s your favorite historic America site? Have you visited the historic towns of Delaware? I would like to know more about Lewes, if you have been there.

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