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Travel, fictional and otherwise
May. 15th, 2007 10:13 pmBack from a series of educational courses, although now I'm not entirely sure what I've learnt - it's all still settling. Anyway. I read another extremely good book while I was away - Jan Morris' Last Letters from Hav. I picked this up from a rack outside a rather odd shop - Interturist Travel ("Land Sea Air!"), with an interior that looked a cross between a secondhand shop and an elderly lady's parlour. I held the book up outside the door until one of the elderly ladies (there were two, both nonspecifically European in accent; short, greying hair in buns, black shapeless clothes) came and opened it, and then waved me away ("take it!") when I asked the price. The shop has (obviously) since disappeared.
Last Letters from Hav is a travel book about a nonexistent country; a tiny country on the edge of the Mediterranean where Jan Morris spent a summer in the eighties. Visited by many other famous (and infamous) personalities from history, invaded, occupied; as Jan Morris says in the preface, Hav is "a little compendium of the world's experience, historically, aesthetically, even perhaps spiritually. It reminded me constantly of places elsewhere, but remained to the end absolutely, often paradoxically and occasionally absurdly itself."
There is a hardback out now called "Hav", which collects this book and its later sequel, which I haven't yet read. I picked up the hardback and saw that the cover has the House of the Chinese Master on it, in flames, and felt the same shiver I felt when reading the chapter about the Iron Dog, and the final, devastating chapter of the original. Describing this book is too hard without either replicating it (badly) or stealing all the best bits, but it's definitely worth reading.
Last Letters from Hav is a travel book about a nonexistent country; a tiny country on the edge of the Mediterranean where Jan Morris spent a summer in the eighties. Visited by many other famous (and infamous) personalities from history, invaded, occupied; as Jan Morris says in the preface, Hav is "a little compendium of the world's experience, historically, aesthetically, even perhaps spiritually. It reminded me constantly of places elsewhere, but remained to the end absolutely, often paradoxically and occasionally absurdly itself."
There is a hardback out now called "Hav", which collects this book and its later sequel, which I haven't yet read. I picked up the hardback and saw that the cover has the House of the Chinese Master on it, in flames, and felt the same shiver I felt when reading the chapter about the Iron Dog, and the final, devastating chapter of the original. Describing this book is too hard without either replicating it (badly) or stealing all the best bits, but it's definitely worth reading.
