No money for travel? Take a "virtual literary" trip iinstead

[SoCalDem]

The 69 Greatest Fiction Travel Books of All Time
by Boris Kachka |
http://www.concierge.com/cntraveler/articles/500078?mbid=rss_contf&all=yes


First things first, you may be thinking: What is a fiction travel book, anyway? Well, here's what we think: It's a book in which a place is as important a character as the protagonist; it's a book so informed by the writer's culture that it's impossible to read it without uncovering the life of the author behind it; it's a book that has shaped the way we see a certain place; it's a book whose events and characters could be set nowhere else. So for everyone who, like Michael Ondaatje, got his first glimpse of Japan through Yasunari Kawabata's Snow Country; or, like Nathan Englander, found India in Rohinton Mistry's A Fine Balance; or discovered the world through Homer's Odyssey—this is the list to have. Read on.

86 top travel fiction

Absurdistan
Gary Shteyngart (2006)
"It's probably the best contemporary travel novel," says Darin Strauss. "Certainly the most fun." The Russian immigrant's second book tops his first novel, The Russian Debutante's Handbook, in screwball inventiveness, with a gluttonous character in the slothful tradition of Oblomov who (sometimes literally) flies over the Bronx and hails from an autonomous ex-Soviet republic that could exist only in Shteyngart's mind. "The sweep," Strauss says, "is matched only by the humor and exuberance of the prose" (Random House, $14).

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Mark Twain (1885)
Huck and Jim's "downstream education," as Jonathan Raban puts it, is important for numerous reasons, but alongside its lessons in the American vernacular and the history of race, there is the canonization of the Mississippi. "The idea of the river as America's first great interstate arterial highway, at once a place of magical solitude in nature and of fraught encounters with society, survives even now," says Raban (Bantam, $6).

The Alexandria Quartet
Lawrence Durrell (1957-1960)
These four novels come as a set, with different perspectives on essentially the same forlorn story. They "play with time and point of view like a Charlie Kaufman script," says Darin Strauss, but "are worth reading not for their gimmickry—supposedly based on the theories of Einstein and Freud—but for their lush descriptions of Egypt. Durell was more famous as a poet than a novelist, and his pointillist evocations of Alexandria are breathtaking" (Penguin; set, $45).

Arcadia
Jim Crace (1992)
Inspired by London, the unnamed city of the master novelist's morality tale about a self-made millionaire and his utopian dreams almost upstages the Dickensian struggles at its heart. "There is so much life and strife and detail," says Amy Bloom. "An entire world has been conjured up, street by street, an imagined city with every cobblestone and desire and character made real" (out-of-print).

The Baron in the Trees
Italo Calvino (1977)
Imagine John Cheever's swimmer traveling via tree instead of suburban pool—for his entire life—and you have Calvino's fairy tale of an eighteenth-century Italian boy who climbs a tree one day and never comes down. Michael Ondaatje calls this world "a thrilling, unforgettable universe, beautifully evoked, completely real and believable—a landscape where there are great adventures and love affairs and politics and wars" (Harvest, $14).

The Big Sleep
Raymond Chandler (1939)
This caper redefined the city that W. H. Auden called "the great wrong place" and which Phillip Lopate dubs "the city that didn't want to be a city." Lopate loves that, contrary to its bright reputation, Chandler's Los Angeles is "portrayed as a very occult, secretive place." "Don't expect sunshine and palm trees," seconds David Ebershoff. "His L.A. is a shadowland—damp with fog, dark with night, and peopled with killers and cons" (Vintage, $14).

Colomba
Prosper Mérimée (1841)
In the lamentably obscure French writer's most accomplished novel, a jaded colonel and his daughter journey to Corsica in search of untouched paradise, only to become immersed in international intrigue, culture clash, and a still-thriving ancient tradition of the vendetta. Fernanda Eberstadt calls it "a shrewd, dispassionate portrait of nineteenth-century Corsica" (Kessinger, $21).

Come to Africa and Save Your Marriage
Maria Thomas (1987)
This story collection is one of only three books by Thomas, who died in a 1989 plane crash en route to an Ethiopian refugee camp. Thomas wrote, "A language you don't understand reminds you how vulnerable you are," and it's through her writing and our own journeys, says Julia Alvarez, that "we discover that it is precisely this vulnerability which connects us with one another—a good enough reason to travel if nothing else" (Soho, $12).


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[MineralMan]

1. Yup. These days, I'm visiting Italy in the 19th Century

with Charles Dickens. It's not fiction, but it's sure fascinating. Pictures From Italy on my Kindle, downloaded free from gutenberg.org.

You can find all sorts of 19th Century travelogues there. Cool beans.

[Retrograde]

4. I did the same with Twain

with Innocents Abroad: I swear I met some of the same people in Paris!

I also like mysteries for virtual travel: Donna Leone has a good series set in the Venice tourists don't see, with a lot of local color.

[CJCRANE]

2. Any recommendations for a virtual drinking tour?

:beer:

[SoCalDem]

3. You seem to have that covered

:)

[dixiegrrrrl]

5. What a wonderful idea & topic!

( perhaps cross post in books forum, for longevity???).

K&R