From Packabook Newsletter

But if time is short – here are some highlights of things you can get up to, inspired by the book itself.

Enjoy the nightlife (and daylife!) of the Bairro Alto

 ”An eighteen-year old Zé Coelho was drinking cheap bagaço in a white tiled tasca in the middle of the Bairro Alto with three of his school friends when the owner came thundering down the stairs from his apartment above.
    “Something’s happening,” he said, breathless and shocked…..
Zė Coelho flicked his shoulder-length hair over the wolfskin collar of his floor length woollen capote Alenteano and they started running down the narrow cobbled alleyway towards the square below.” 
(Robert Wilson’s A Small Death in Lisbon p387-8) 

Not far from Santos is the Bairro Alto, its steep, cobbled streets filled with galleries, museums and bars.
This is where the teenage Coelho is drinking with his friends when the 1974 coup against Salazar breaks out – and more than thirty years later it is still a center for youth culture. The authorities may have tried to clean up the area, but it remains one of the most colorful parts of the city, with a hectic nightlife, vestiges of prostitution and extensive graffiti.

Come the dawn, the Bairro Alto transforms back into a traditional local community, complete with laundry drying on the balconies and shop-keepers trading their wares. Visit the Chiado art museum, drop in on the area’s historical churches and enjoy one of the oldest districts of the city.
Drive along The Marginal
“He drove out onto the Marginal and noticed for the first time on the outskirts of the city that the air was fresher and purer. After five days of brutal swelter, the sea was blue again, the sky clear and the twin steel towers of the Ponte Salazar, the new suspension bridge being built across the Tagus, were pin-sharp in the flat calm of the estuary.” (Robert Wilson’s A Small Death in Lisbon - p359)

The characters in this novel spend a fair bit of time driving along the coastal road between Lisbon and Cascais known as ‘The Marginal’, and so should you. As you drive, there is little to block your view of the beach towns dotted along the way, each with their own restaurants, bars and golden stretches of sand down to the water to tempt you off the road.

Stay in your own ‘House at the End of the World’

“They spent the time driving out to his house, the westernmost house on mainland Europe – only heather, gorse, the cliffs and the lighthouse at Cabo da Roca between it and the ocean…they bought two chairs and sat in the enclosed terrace on the roof and drank brandy and watched the storms out at sea, the deranged clouds and the blood-orange sunsets.” – Felsen and Susana

(Robert Wilson’s A Small Death in Lisbon - p288) 
 
I’m not sure if Felsen’s house actually exists, but there is a place that you can stay which is pretty close by. Quinta da Rio Touro is a guesthouse and organic farm less than a five minute drive away from the Cabo de Roca lighthouse, the most westerly point of continental Europe.

The restored farm house is part of the Sintra/Cascais Natural Park, and gives you a taste of more traditional Portuguese life, on the edge of the ocean. Take a picnic to the lighthouse to watch the sunset and you are sure to leave with some stunning photographs.
The joy of this novel is that we are able to explore Lisbon from two different avenues of the past.
During World War Two we see the city mainly through Poser’s cynical eyes and Felsen’s almost indifferent ones  - where the struggles of a city trying to cope with a huge influx of refugees and little time for aesthetic values leave us with a picture of grime and despair.In Coelho’s time we see Lisbon as new money comes to the fore, with a rapid program of change and development.
If you make a trip to the Portuguese capital now, you will see the city has moved on a step further. This novel made me want to explore Wilson’s city for myself, to discover what is new and to find the beacons of the past which remain.

Thanks so much to Suzi Butcher at Packabook for allowing me to share this portion of the Packabook Newsletter with readers of A Travelers’ Library.  The link to A Small Death in Lisbon that you find above leads to Packabook’s Amazon affiliation, so the profit goes to them if you choose to use this link.

Can you think of a time that you have visited a particular neighborhood or region because you read about it in a novel or travel literature? I planned my travel to Paris by zeroing in on the Latin Quarter of Paris after reading Hemingway’s Moveable Feast. But now, I’m dying to go to the end of the world in Portugal. How about you?

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The Seine River, Paris

Destination: Paris

Movie: Midnight in Paris (NEW 2011), written and directed by Woody Allen

What a delicious confection of a movie. If you are craving a hearty boeuf Bourguignon of a movie, go elsewhere, but if a simple little meringue melting on your tongue sounds heavenly–this movie is the dish for you. But it may be the best Paris travel  movie of the decade. It shows EVERY major tourist site, instead of  just the usual establishing shot of the Eiffel Tower.

Notre Dame, Gil with French guide, played by 1st lady of France

It really doesn’t matter whether you are in the pro- or anti- Woody Allen category, Midnight in Paris is a treat for a) lovers of Paris; b) lovers of literature; c) lovers of art; d) lovers of the past (as in: any time but the present would be an improvement); e) lovers.

Gil Pender and his fiancé at Monet's Garden

Briefly, Gil Pender, a Hollywood writer who wants to write a novel is engaged to a beautiful young woman who doesn’t get his yearning for a romanticized Paris (in the twenties, in the rain). Everything changes when, at midnight one night, he travels to the Paris of the 20′s and starts meeting literary lights and famous artists. He ultimately has to navigate between his dissatisfaction with his present day life and his fantasy.

Paris in the Rain

My friend Jane Boursaw over at Reel Life With Jane said that she would prefer to see Woody Allen playing out his own neurosis, but I have to part company with Jane on this one. Owen Wilson, as Gil,  channels Woody, but is a much more attractive actor. Maybe Woody has finally realized how obscene it looks to have him romancing women 40 years younger than he is (regardless of how his own private life goes down).

If you’re trying to place Owen Wilson, it is because the dumb bulb characters he usually plays would not be bright enough to recognize Zelda  and Scott Fitzgerald if he ran into them at a post-midnight party in Paris. And if you enjoy playing this movie’s game of “Isn’t that–oh, you know, the famous 1920′s surrealist painter?” and can pick up a French phrase here and there, then you probably don’t go to a lot of buddy movies.

The writer gets picked up in a 1920′s cab by a guy named Tom Eliot and Gil stammers, “Thomas Stearns Eliot? T.S. Eliot? Prufrock is practically my theme song.” Nope, not the kind of dialogue that Owen usually gets to say, but he’s winsome and convincing as the movie script writer/wannabe novelist who is in love with the idea of a Paris that never quite existed outside of misty-eyed memoirs like Ernest Hemingway’s Moveable Feast.

While all the casting of the famous people seemed spot on, there are two that really made the movie for me.  Kathy Bates is genius as Gertrude Stein.  And Corey Stoll, who plays Hemingway had me choking on my nachos with laughter.  I heard him interviewed on PBS and read this interview in the Los Angeles Times, and so I knew that he had no intention of presenting a realistic Hemingway, but rather the one that the celebrity-worshiping Gil would conjure up if he imagined Hemingway. He sounded like he was reading his dialogue from a Hemingway novel. The performance was brave and true. Because that is what a man does. He speaks the truth. He kills the bull.

Just one final thing–as I said above, this could be a travel guidebook–and certainly is a perfect travel movie to watch if you are heading for Paris, but Woody Allen shows Paris as we have not seen it before.  Everything is saturated in a golden light, giving it the dreamlike quality that matches Gil’s misty-eyed view of the city. The only one of the photographs above that even begins to capture that tint is the one shot in the rain on a bridge over the Seine.

Photos come from the official movie site, which also has a lot of other interesting information, including a trailer.

Have you seen this movie? If yes, what did you think? If not, will you?

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Lake Chad in Nigeria from space, NASA

Destination: Nigeria

Book: Things Fall Apart (1959) by Chinua Achebe

You won’t learn here about today’s Africa, racked by wars in some parts and thriving on tourism in others.  This is the Africa of the Africans, when outsiders were just beginning to encroach. Missionaries showed up (a white man–not an albino, someone says–riding an iron horse), some slave traders, the British government claimed power, while villagers who had once been sure of the truth faced new paradigms that puzzled and upset them.

Ibo Statue from Nigeria

The iron horse tied to a tree stayed put, but soon even the natives were riding the iron horse called a bicycle and clustering around stores where they could trade and buy rather than subsist on the yams they grew.  It is an upsetting time, and in Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe tells it the way an old Ibo villager in Nigeria would tell it to a youngster.  We learn the family connections and rank of the characters. We learn about what they did from dawn to dark, and how they gained status within their community.  We learn about their many gods, and how puzzled they are when their powerful gods seem to allow these white men to come and set up a church to worship the white man’s God. Above all we can see the humanity of these “primitive” people and the value of their lives.

The title derives from the poem by William Butler Yeats, and the book closely parallels the poem.

Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

The book is one of the first books written by an African, from the African point of view instead of accepting the judgement of Europeans. The characters are clearly drawn, the dialogue replicates the rhythms and idiom of tribal speech.  The book is written in simple language, and in my public library is filed in the young adult section, but that strikes me as wrong. Just as Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea might be accessible to young adults because of the surface simplicity, there is a whole universe of meaning in this book.

You can find a lot of study guides and analyses of Things Fall Apart by googling Achebe’s name.

“Chinua Achebe is an African great and perfect introduction to African writers. Things Fall Apart is a must-read classic,” says Gayle Pescud, a fellow Lonely Planet Blog Sherpa blogger, who lives in and writes about Ghana. Gayle introduced us to a book about Kenya, Unbowed in a guest post last September.

I know too little about Africa. I am going to remedy that by reading and reporting on a series of books (and probably some movies) about Africa in the coming months.  Do you have books to recommend? Now if you have nine minutes–here’s the author himself.

The incredible photo at the top that looks like an abstract painting tells another story about Nigeria. Click on the photo for information on Nigeria’s Lake Chad. Thanks to the photographers whose photos I use here–all form Flickr and Creative Commons. And the video is from You Tube, where you can find more videos of Chinua Achebe.

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Destination: Northern Michigan

Book: The Nick Adams Stories, by Ernest Hemingway, arranged and foreword by Philip Young

Before the young writer’s Paris reflected in A Moveable Feast, or the Spanish Civil War and the love of bull fighting, Hemingway had Northern Michigan.

I recently read Ernest Hemingway’s Nick Adams Stories in paperback arranged chronologically.Prior to this book, published in 1972,the stories had been sorted by subject matter, or scattered among many collections.  Reading them in this book’s order made the collection look even more like an autobiography of Hemingway, as some suggest the stories are. The Philip Young arrangement lets you follow Nick Adams from childhood, through WWI, as a returning veteran and then as a writer and even a parent. Hemingway did not write the stories in this order, although the first,an early story, differs in style from the last.

I have no question that the character Nick is Hemingway’s alter-ego.  Ernest Hemingway’s family vacationed in northern Micigan and he learned there to love fishing and hunting and life in the woods.  He spent 20 summers there between 1899 and 1921, more time than he spent in any other single place.  He mined that formative time for stories and characters throughout his life. His love of the Man’s life–backwoods survival, knowing the secrets of the fish and the wildlife in order to outsmart them–started in his adolescence, when only Nick’s mother, a girlfriend and occasionally his sister infringe on the life of men in the wild. In a previously unpublished story Nick says when entering a virgin forest says, “I always feel strange.  Like the way I ought to feel in church.” That holiness of the outdoors and the natural and the wild pervades Hemingway’s life and literature.

The editor of this collection includes eight previously unpublished stories, that show some experimentation with style.

His interest in boxing also developed early, as seen in the story “The Light of the World” and “The Battler”. Both are early stories told in a more traditional style instead of his later sparse prose. Some show influences–a gangster story that sounds like it was written after seeing an Edward G. Robinson movie. “Summer People”, perhaps the first he wrote with Nick Adams, seems to be playing with fire –asking for censorship. This was about the time of D. H. Lawrence and the scandals over Lady Chatterly’s Lover. “A Way You’ll Never Be” flirts with stream of conciousness.

He tells it like it is, although we have to remember that he did not choose to publish all of these stories, and his attitude and style changed as he aged. At times the prejudices of the characters jolt today’s politically correct reader.  A cabin smelled like the Indians who had rented it earlier, so white’s would not rent it.  A character says, “I could tell he was  Negro by the way he walked.”

Finally, of course I like the writing about writing. Again, it is Nick that is the writer. It is Nick that is thinking about writing. ”Everything good was what you made up; what you imagined. That made everything true.” Reading that made me feel that Hemingway was chastising me for finding his own life in Nick.  He obviously did not like this autobiographical investigation, but most writer’s don’t. Two writers I will be presenting in a few days agree. Steinbeck grabbed characters and places from real life and denied it. Flaubert really hated having his life dissected.

“He, Nick, wanted to write about country so it would be there in the way Cezanne had done for painting.  You had to do it from inside yourself–Nobody had ever writen about country like that.  He felt almost holy about it.” What more could a traveler ask of literature?  Hemingway, by the way, spent hours studying Cezanne’s paintings when he lived in Paris. But, that, of course, has nothing to do with Nick.

Like the photo? I found it on Flickr. Gilberto Viciedo, a Cuban, composes photo mosaics. For Hemingway, he appropriately selected animals and birds. Click on the photo for other examples of his work. Creative Commons license.

I liked the parallels between author and character revealed in this arrangement of the Nick Adams stories.  Do you seek out information about authors and try to match it to their literary work?

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©2012 A Traveler's Library. All Rights Reserved.

Bronte Country

Destination: The World

Books:

• Around the World in 80 Days by Jules Verne
• Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
• The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo
• A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway
• The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexander Dumas
• Travels with Charley by John Steinbeck

A GUEST POST by Shannon McKenna Schmidt, co-author of Novel Destinations.

I blame it on Jules Verne. My wanderlust began with a children’s version of his novel Around the World in 80 Days. Reading the thrilling story, with its depictions of distant ports of call, was like a siren’s song. I went along as Phileas Fogg circled the globe to win his wager, from London to India and China, and across the American frontier.

Over the years I’ve visited many places on the page, some of which I’ve since had the chance to the see in person. One of the most atmospheric is the Yorkshire moors in northern England, vividly depicted by Emily Brontë in Wuthering Heights. And Paris, brought to life in Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast and Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre-Dame. When it was published in 1831, Hunchback drew so many readers (including the Duchess of Orléans) to see “Victor Hugo’s cathedral” that it compelled the city to restore the rundown Notre-Dame.

Chateau de Monte Cristo

Sometimes visiting a place motivates me to seek out a book, like Alexandre Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo. Near Paris is one of his most imaginative creations: the Château de Monte-Cristo. On the grounds are a castle that resembles a confection made of stone, man-made grottos, a waterfall, and a stone tower he used as his office. Dumas’ “paradise on earth” is so intriguing that it made me want to read its namesake novel.

Stateside, a visit to Orchard House in Concord, Massachusetts, is like stepping into the pages of Little Women. Louisa May Alcott used the house as the book’s primary setting, and fans of the novel are sure to recognize things like the trunk of costumes the March sisters used to stage their plays and the parlor where Meg got married.

A well-worn book on my shelves is Travels with Charley, John Steinbeck’s memoir about his road trip exploring the U.S. with his French poodle in a pick-up truck camper (which he named Rocinante after Don Quixote’s horse). This spring I’m setting out on a Travels with Charley-style road trip, traveling the U.S. and Canada in an RV for several years with my husband and two cats.

For me, the allure of travel is too great to resist, inspired early on with a globetrotting adventure tale.

Shannon Schmidt

Shannon McKenna Schmidt is the co-author of Novel Destinations: Literary Landmarks from Jane Austen’s Bath to Ernest Hemingway’s Key West (National Geographic Books) and also blogs about literary travel. Her writing has appeared in National Geographic Traveler, Continental, The Miami Herald, and other publications. She lives in Hoboken, New Jersey.

Thanks, Shannon. I appreciated this peek at your bookshelf.

Any readers who are interested in ordering any of the books mentioned,  can click on any Amazon link on my site and everything you order will help keep A Traveler’s Library in business. I suggest you start by clicking on Around the World in 80 Days (in the 1st paragraph). Also, we have talked about several of these books before, and if you click on any of those titles, you will be taken to a previous post. Don’t miss Shannon’s great web site Novel Destinations.

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Destination: Paris

Book: A Moveable Feast: The Restored Edition (Released 6/28/2009)

[amazonify]1416591311::text::::A Moveable Feast: The Restored Edition[/amazonify] underlines the sometimes ignored fact that even in memoirs, which purport to tell the truth, the author artfully arranges the truth.  In fact, the editors do as well.

When A Moveable Feast was first published, it was already fogged by memory. A famous author, conscious of his “brand” to use today’s term, looked at notes he had made 30 years before. Hemingway, who did not consciously write travel literature, tinkered with the notes from 1957 up until his death in 1961. His fourth wife Mary then made adjustments to the manuscript, some that minimized the importance of former wives, and published it in 1964. And the book quickly became a travel guidebook to Paris.

Scholars and Hemingway’s grandson Seán Hemingway, the present editor, found those adjustments to be understandable, but unfortunate. Here we are presented with a different ordering of the chapters, and additions of whole finished chunks of writing, fragments that cast light on Hemingway’s thinking, and some editorial reversions to the Hemingway original notes.

Travel Literature

While it may be impossible to recreate the Paris of the 1920′s for today’s travelers, Hemingway guides us to cafes and museums and parks that still exist. Granted the cafes may charge more because they appear in literary works and once-cheap hotels and apartments may be cashing in on the Hemingway slept here signs. But rather than thinking of it as “a good place to work” as Hemingway did, we get all starry-eyed wanting to recreate the days of the Lost Generation.

Keep in mind, if you truly want to recreate the experience, you do not go looking for celebrities. Hemingway and his friends were largely unknowns.

A Book for Writers

The most striking change from a writer’s point of view comes in the tiny pronoun “you.” In his original drafts, Hemingway used 2nd person throughout rather than first person, which was edited into the original publication.

Judging by the titles he considered, the book, in Hemingway’s eyes, was not about Scott Fitzgerald or Gertrude Stein or the Lost Generation. It was not a travel guide to Paris. The book was about writing.

He talks about the problem of concentration, of developing plot and believable characters, where to find material, how to make a good sentence. I could go on and on –just, please, if you are a writer– read it.

A Book For Scholars

From an historic point of view, it is interesting to see all those rough drafts.

For Hemingway scholars, it is fortunate that his notes and drafts  survive in the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston. I found particularly haunting a 1961 chapter that he apparently decided not to include–the last written for this manuscript–called Nada y pues Nada in this edition. He had been suffering from various mental problems and had experienced electric shock therapy which removed some of his memory before he wrote this piece about a friend who was dying. It emphasizes the importance to keep on writing.

No, I thought.  I would not forget about the writing. That was what I was born to do and had done and would do again.

And in what he apparently considered for the final sentence of his book

But there are remises or storage places where you may leave or store certain things such as a locker trunk or duffel bag containing personal effects or…..this book contains material from the remises of my memory and of my heart. Even if the one has been tampered with and the other does not exist.

The debate continues as to whether this edition improves on the original, or is merely a continuation of a family feud. Although I come down on the side of the former, it really does not matter. Good reading for the traveler or the writer, in any case.

For other writing about France, see the search box on the right. And subscribe to A Traveler’s Library because we’ll be sharing books about France and French literature every Friday for the foreseeable future.

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The Sun Also Rises poster

Destination: France and Spain

Movie: The Sun Also Rises (1957)

Having thoroughly enjoyed the novel as travel literature, which I talked about yesterday, I decided to pop the movie The Sun Also Rises to the top of my Netflix cue, and see how much travel value it has.

What the movie lacks in subtlety and backstory, it makes up for in scenery. The opening shot of the Seine alone is worth the price of admission–sun shining through clouds on a broad, empty river.  And although I thought some of the Paris street scenes looked like back lot, listening to the auxiliary materials that came with the DVD explained that all the Paris scenes were actually in Paris (Paris of the 1950′s made to look like the 1920′s). To comment and

And consulting a new book that I just received, [amazonify]1887140832::text::::Paris Movie Walks[/amazonify], by Michael Shurmann, I discovered that I can visit at least two of the establishments in the movie–Le Pharamond and the Select.  Please, readers, if you know of other bistros, bars and restaurants that have survived since the writing of Sun Also Rises, would you let me know before I go to Paris next year?

The Spanish scenes are a bit more suspect.  The film’s screenwriter, Henry Viertel, complains that producer Darryl Zanuck took the Spanish scenes to Morelia, Mexico. That decision was wrong because residents of Pamplona, he says, are Basque, blond and Viking in appearance, rather than dark like Mexicans. So the street scenes and fiesta scenes, which look quite exciting in the movie, are filled with the wrong shade of extras.

Note: Furthr research indicates the settings are more complex than I implied. The fiesta scenes actually WERE in Pamplona, but everything else, including the bull fights were in Morelia, Mexico. The director did masterful work of cutting in the smaller scenes with the stars into the authentic footage of the fiesta parades, etc. The actors never went to Pamplona, apparently.

The other objection that the historian commentators have about the film is that Hemingway was in his mid 20′s when he wrote this book about survivors of the Great War, who would have been at most in their late twenties. Tyrone Power and Errol Flynn, although performing beautifully, are obviously much older than that. I had to laugh when they changed the age of the bullfighter from 19 to 22, probably not wanting Lady Brett (Ava Gardner) to be accused of violating the Mann act.

I thought the slapstick scene in the bull ring with Eddie Alberts and Errol Flynn did not seem true to the book.  But in general the movie stayed close to Hemingway’s theme and mood.

Looking at the DVD was fun, and listening to the commentary at the end provided a lot of education about Hemingway, and the film. How do you think Juliette Greco‘s tiny role of a prostitute got stretched over several scenes? Find out in the commentary.

Recommended viewing for some luscious and tempting scenery.  And I’ll be back to talk about the book Paris Movie Walks at a later date.

Poster available for sale at All Posters

Meanwhile, I’m curious. Do you listen to the commentary that comes with the DVD, or do you prefer to watch the movie and go to bed as my husband does, leaving the wizard behind the curtain?

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The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway

Destinations: Spain and France

Book: The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway

Happy Birthday Ernie! Ernest Hemingway was born 110 years ago on July 21. It seems appropriate to celebrate by talking about his first break-through novel,The Sun Also Rises which turns out to be a pretty good travel book.

From dissipated ennui in Paris to dissipated blood sport in Spain, The Sun Also Rises follows a group of world-weary drunks from Paris to Pamplona.  Excuse me if I sound disrespectful to the life lived by this particular group of ex-pats, but is is very difficult to imagine how the venerated members of the Lost Generation ever got any writing and painting done, awash in liquor in numberless bars. (See more plus more photos, or leave comments on the next page)

I thought that I had read this book before, but if I did read it in my college days, it slipped out of my memory, so I approached it recently with a new eye. As usual when I talk about books here, I did not do any research on what I am supposed to think about the book. My criteria for A Traveler’s Library is simple. Does it make me want to go somewhere?

First, Hemingway’s craftsmanship in the Sun Also Rises is magnificent.  I don’t have to tell you that, since a college professor already told you some time ago.  Second, I can’t wait to get to Paris and follow in Jake Barne’s footsteps–even if I don’t care to drink myself into a stupor every night or play a game of musical men like the impossibly beautiful boy-magnet Lady Brett. (Jake, of course, is the newspaper reporter stand-in for E.H.)

Third, I stand in awe of the way that Hemingway makes me SEE the countryside of southern France and northern Spain. Particularly since the prose uses line drawings rather than relying on lush adjectival brushstrokes.  His is language to study.

This book serves the traveler well.  From cultural differences:

“You can never tell if a Spanish waiter will thank you.  Everything is on such a clear financial basis in France. It is the simplest country to live in.  No one makes things complicated by becoming your friend for any obscure reason.” AND “They were all French and Belgians and paid close attention to their meal, but they were having a good time.”

Paris bridge

Or snapshots of places:

Paris–”Crossing the Seine I saw a string of barges being towed empty down the current, riding high, the bargemen at the sweeps as they came toward the bridge. The river looked nice.  It was always pleasant crossing bridges in Paris.”

Bayonne–”Cohn made some remark about it being a very good example of something or other.  I forget what.  It seemed like a nice cathedral, nice and dim, like Spanish churches.”

I found page after page of these pure and simple descriptions of place that made me recall the Spanish countryside and yearn to see Paris.  When Ken and I were in Spain we avoided the bull ring. I never went to the bull fights held in nearby Nogales when I first moved to Tucson.

People said that you must see a bullfight to understand Spain. And I believed that came from Ernest Hemingway. But that is not entirely his point of view.

Before I read the book, I thought he emphasized the bull fight to the exclusion of everything else, but looking at the book, I see that pastoral scenes, and particularly the religous nature of Spain and the intensity of the fiesta shares the spotlight.

Finally, I had that tingle of recognition that you get when you have shared an experience with a famous novelist–or at least a character in a novel.  Jake/Ernie and I both/all ate suckling pig at the ancient Botin restaurant in Madrid.

Botin Restaurant, Madrid

———-

Book cover by “Grave-Digger”;Paris Bridge by “jgrimm”; Botin by Tym Altman, photos from Flickr under Creative Commons license.

More about Spain: Driving Over Lemons, Don Quixote, The AlhambraMore about France:Paris in the Moon, A Sweet Life in Paris, Victor Hugo

Have you seen a bullfight? In your opinion, how important is bullfighting to the understanding of Spain? Let’s talk.  (And have you subscribed by e-mail or RSS feed yet so that we can continue the conversation?)

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Paris Carousel, photograph by Shawn Duffy

Destination: France

Book: Paris to the Moon by Adam Gopnik

I seem to be reading backward in time through my pile of French books. First I read A Sweet Life in Paris, released just this year and about an American in Paris in the present. I have just finished Paris to the Moon, published in 1999 about..well read on.

Soon I will be reading the expanded version of Hemingway’s Moveable Feast, about life in Paris in the twenties. Although I read the original years ago, I did not think about getting a copy of the expanded version in time for the publication today, unfortunately. My recollection is that the book is more about Hemingway and the Americans who hung out with him than it is about Paris, but from what I read in Christopher Hitchen’s review in the Atlantic, the new sections may relate more strongly to the other two books.

I found it very interesting to read two such different books about Paris and come away with the same general definition of what it is to be French.  David Lebovitz simply shows us the culture through his experiences with minimum comment, whereas Adam Gopnik philosophizes at length on the exact same observations.

• Parisians worship bureaucracy and filling out the correct form, the way we worship the rule of law and hiring lawyers.
• Parisians don’t like to stand in line.
• Parisians sound rude to Americans because Americans say things that sound rude to them.
• Paris does not represent the whole of France, instead it is even more insular than Washington D.C.
• Everyone dresses well, even the garbage collection men, and particularly the apartment owner carrying the garbage out to the curb. In short, appearance counts.
• Eating is an appreciation of food in the way that museum attendance is an appreciation of art.
• They are inclined to sympathize with a strike by workers or students or anyone.

Lebovitz takes food as his theme, naturally, since he is a chef.  Gopnik’s book revolves around the raising of his child. He and his wife moved to Paris when the child was born to keep him away from American TV and Barney in particular. (Of course that did not work.)  They stayed five years and when they had a second child, a girl, they said  a sad goodbye to Paris in order to enroll their boy in an American school. (The pieces were written for the New Yorker originally, and the direct appeal to the narrow, upper middle class liberal private-school obsessed Manhattanties means there are frequent references that go right over my head.)

We all hang on every amazing development of our first child. For Gopnik, his first child is a foreign culture within a foreign culture, and he observes and analyzes both with intellectual acuity worthy of the French intellectuals and journalists he pals around with. He also uses the ever-so-clever statements of a three-year-old to illustrate his truths, in the way, according to Hitchens, Hemingway uses his son in one of the restored sections to Moveable Feast.

Gopnik, with some very fine, evocative writing goes deep into the history and traditions that shaped today’s Paris, and tries to puzzle out the answers to “Why are they the way they are?” I like his eventual conclusion that instead of comparing them to us, we need to just say, “this is what they are.” Perhaps a good guideline for dealing with all of our culture shocks.

Do you agree with Gopnik’s conclusion that we should just say “this is what they are?”  I am also interested in people’s reactions to the Carousel Photograph. Gopnik’s book ends with a carousel moment, introduced early in the book as a metaphor for his child’s development. But to me this photo had more to say than just a direct reference to his choice.

Photo obtained by Creative Commons license through Flickr by photographer Shawn Duffy.

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