Books on Holiday

Great column in the Guardian - with famed authors mentioning books they'd taken along on their travels.

http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/generalfiction/story/0,,2109130,00.html

There is a part two - (go to the article and click that link).

Quoting -

The great escape

Saturday June 23, 2007
The Guardian


Journeys of the imagination. Photograph: Dylan Waldie / Getty


Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

When I was about 17, I travelled to Lagos from Nsukka, the sleepy university town where I grew up. Lagos had always intimidated and repelled and fascinated me. My cousin, who lived there, often spoke about the city's fiercely fashionable and money-worshipping socialites: women who would starve just so that they could buy the latest expensive lace; women who married wealthy men but were cash poor and so colluded with their tailors and delivery people to give inflated bills to their husbands. I was reading Balzac's Le Père Goriot on the bus to Lagos. I got to the passage about 19th-century Parisian society women doing exactly these same things, and I remember reading that passage over and over. It was a marvellous moment for me, one of those in which literature teaches you about universal humanity: Lagos society women were just like Parisian society women. I still feel ambivalent about Lagos, but I am no longer intimidated by it and I owe that (mostly) to Balzac's wonderful novel about class in 19th-century Paris.


More recently, I read Marie-Elena John's novel Unburnable on the plane from New York to Copenhagen. I laughed aloud so often reading this wondrously intelligent book about Dominica and the United States and Africa, about gender, class and race, about love and sexuality, that the bespectacled man sitting next to me put his Wall Street Journal down and leaned over to see what the title was. He asked what it was about. I could have told him how it dealt honestly with issues without ever forgetting to keep character and soul as its centre, but instead I told him a tiny anecdote from the book about black women and thongs. And I much enjoyed his blush.


Diana Athill

Some time in the early 1960s I found on boarding a ship at Piraeus, bound for Lesbos, that my wallet had been stolen out of my handbag. It was not really a serious disaster because my passport and traveller's cheques were in my suitcase, but it left me with no cash for the overnight journey and afraid that, ticketless, I might be dumped back on the quay. I had a few moments of panic before realising how sympathetic and kind the ticket-collector and everyone else was going to be. In fact, they soon changed it into a delightful experience, and what made it even more so was the book I fished out of my case with which to pass the time once the fluster was over.

It was The Diary of Helena Morley, a Brazilian classic translated from the Portuguese by the American poet Elizabeth Bishop. As soon as I began it, I was transported from an Aegean steamer in the 60s to a tiny diamond-mining town in a remote corner of Brazil in the 1890s, which was the whole world to the 12-year-old diarist who was describing it.

No wonder Bishop fell in love with this book. Helena, the daughter of a British mining engineer and a Brazilian mother, was a wonderfully observant, intelligent, critical, humorous, loving and sometimes bumptious child. No adult writer, however skilful, who set out to demonstrate the nature of life in such a place, at that time, could do it with the nonchalant vivacity and ease that she unwittingly commanded. Bishop was to meet her when she had become a benevolently bossy grandmother, the wife of a banker, an occasion she describes in her introduction with sly but affectionate humour, and which is very pleasing to the reader, who at the diary's end longs to know what became of its writer. I have continued to love this little book to this day.

JG Ballard

I have only stolen one book in my life, and that was a copy of the Los Angeles Yellow Pages, which I took from my suite at the Beverly Hilton hotel. This was in 1987 when I attended the premiere of Steven Spielberg's Empire of the Sun. A Hollywood premiere is an extraordinary event, but in many ways it was outclassed by the LA Yellow Pages, which I read during a bored moment. It struck me that I should hang on to this precious volume which transformed my holiday at the expense of Warner Brothers. What is interesting about the LA Yellow Pages is the picture it gives of real life in Los Angeles, so different from the glitzy world of film premieres, stars and directors. There are more psychiatrists listed than plumbers, and more dating bureaus than doctors, and more poodle parlours than vets. Like the classified advertisements in newspapers, which provide a picture of the readership, the Yellow Pages of any great city reveals its true underside. The Los Angeles Yellow Pages is richer in human incident than all the novels of Balzac.

Julian Barnes

Like many others, I've taken Ruskin's The Stones of Venice with me to Venice, and failed to read a word of it there (relying on JG Links's Venice for Pleasure instead). That hoped-for matching of text to place frequently disappoints. The only time it really worked for me was a dozen years ago. I was setting out for a three-week book tour criss-crossing America. At Heathrow I bought John Updike's Rabbit, Run and started it on the plane. All reading problems became reading joys for the entire trip. I picked up each succeeding volume in a new city, my bookmarks the stubs of boarding cards. The novels were both a distraction from, and a glittering confirmation of, the vast bustling ordinariness of American life. When I managed to escape my professional duties and strolled the urban or suburban streets, I saw Rabbitland everywhere. Even those moments of stunned exhaustion in a new hotel room, when I only had the energy to turn on the television, fed into the reading experience: since Updike uses the technique of counterpointing national events (that is, national events as absorbed by Rabbit through television) against the private life of this archetypal 20th-century American citizen. My book tour finished in Florida - which was perfect, since this was where the fourth volume found Rabbit at rest in geriatric condo-land. Poor old Rabbit died, the novel ended, and so did my trip. I flew home, not only convinced that the quartet is the great masterpiece of postwar American fiction, but wondering whether I would ever again find such perfect circumstances in which to read it.


William Boyd

There is a time in everyone's life - the late teens and early 20s, usually - when art seizes you in a way that is never really replicated later. In my late teens and early 20s I used to fly from London to Lagos, and back again, twice a year. My aim was to travel extremely light - passport, ticket, toothbrush - and at Heathrow I used to buy a novel to make the overnight journey more enjoyable. The experience of the novels - they were always novels - I read on these night flights to Nigeria lives with me still. The book I most recall from these many flights to Africa is John Updike's Couples. I started it as we left London and was still reading as we landed in Rome around midnight. There was a problem with one of the plane's engines and we had a three-hour delay. We were disembarked and I wandered off to an empty bench and carried on reading Couples in the blazingly luminous empty spaces of Rome airport as the night cleaners wandered around with their mops and brooms. It was somewhat surreal: immersed in the serial adulteries of Updike's New England, I would look up from time to time as someone wandered by, and wondered who they were and what their story was. Couples is not regarded as one of Updike's great works (too archly sexually explicit? too self-consciously of-the-moment?) but it seemed to me then - in 1970 - to be unerringly profound. This was the adult life - depicted, moreover, with great literary allure - in all its carnal and social complexities. This novelist knew precisely and absolutely how people lived and lied, loved and betrayed.

Bill Bryson

In 1988, I rashly agreed to spend 21 days in Hammerfest, Norway, in the frigid and lightless depths of winter, for a magazine article. I wasn't sure what to expect, but I assumed I would have a good deal of reading time on my hands and carefully selected a dozen or so books to take. So you may imagine my quiet horror upon arrival when I opened my suitcase and discovered that I had left the books in England and had nothing to read but the contents of my wallet and a Norwegian telephone directory that I found in the bedside locker.

And so began the longest period of my life. Three or four days later, to my inexpressible joy, I found two old English paperbacks in a charity shop - Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov and Kane and Abel by Jeffrey Archer. I read Pnin at least four times and have never been more grateful for any piece of writing. I read the Archer as well, of course, and am not too proud to say that I was grateful for it, too. In fact, after Pnin and the telephone directory, it was one of my favourite reads of the trip.

Jonathan Coe

It was early in the spring of 1994, a terrible storm had blown in from the Atlantic, and we were somewhere on the coast of Connemara. I'd been asked to review a collection of short stories by Charles Palliser, and as preparation I'd brought with me his quasi-Victorian epic The Quincunx. It was 1,200 pages long, so I had no expectation that I would get through it in a week. I hadn't reckoned on the weather, however; or the misfortune of my poor wife, who ate a dodgy oyster at a local restaurant and was soon confined to bed. While she lay there, slipping in and out of uneasy sleep, I sat in the permanently gloomy sitting room next door and began to immerse myself ever more deeply in Palliser's extraordinary narrative.

In recent years there have been several attempts to reinvent the 19th-century mystery novel: Michel Faber, Sarah Waters, Susanna Clarke and DJ Taylor all spring to mind. But The Quincunx is the sine qua non of the genre. The plot concerns a luckless hero called John Huffam, whose rightful inheritance is thwarted by a legal dispute which makes Jarndyce and Jarndyce look like a matter for the small claims court. Its ramifications are so vast and complex that later paperback editions had to come with an explanatory postscript from the author.

Miserable though our holiday turned out to be, it was a privilege to sit in that damp room until three or four in the morning, the gales rattling the windowpanes and roaring through the chimney, and to be guided by Palliser through the winding, crepuscular passageways of this superbly Gothic labyrinth. Early in the hours of Friday morning, I finished the novel with a shiver of satisfaction. The wind had finally abated, as had my wife's sickness, and we took our first walk down to the beach, which was strewn with the detritus of the storm. A dead sheepdog lay stretched out on the sand. That image is stamped on my memory: as are the texture and atmosphere of Palliser's masterpiece.

Kiran Desai

The mountains around Tepoztlan in Mexico are so bare and rugged that the evening light on them shows stark gold. The scrubby plains stretch to silver mines beyond the edge of the horizon. This cowboy landscape still seems a stage set for the drama of colonial power versus the Indian. In the lap of the mountains is a raw and enormous church. It looks if it is the first cathedral: it is old, but really even older, for the stones of the cathedral first came from a pyramid that was destroyed. I read Patrick White in this town. The book, set in 19th-century Australia, is about Voss walking across the desert believing determination can claim the future; that exploration is a spiritual journey; that colonial endeavour is fused with an image of a man upon a cross, doomed, heroic, suffering. Voss is devil and divinity combined, a combination of courage, mystical love, and disdain. He tries to wrest a Dostoyevskian redemption from the colonial enterprise.

Local Tepoztlan scorpions would crawl over the page of the book as I read. In Australia, a madman was walking across the desert. But the land rejected him. The Aborigines killed him.

The emotions of Voss could impart an intensity to Mexico, to the fact of my being another kind of Indian from another colonial landscape. And in this lovely place, reading this book, I could not help thinking of another war, of today's fight being fought under those same directives of perseverance and suffering, fused with colonial enterprise and gain.

Jenny Diski

Usually I avoid reading appropriate books while I travel. I prefer cold reading in hot places, dry words in wet climates, and far-sighted views in dense fog. Even so, I read Melville's Moby-Dick in the southern ocean around the Antarctic Peninsula, and Conrad's Typhoon while on a cargo ship crossing the Atlantic. I berated myself for my obviousness, but it was irresistible to read of the sea on the sea, like getting even more of what you wanted even while you were having it. On both occasions the foul weather remained mostly on the page, but there was just enough swell in the South Atlantic, and torrid ominous stillness in the Gulf of Mexico to match the wildness of the two books, though not so much of either that I was prevented from getting absorbed in the fiction.

Dave Eggers

I was 26 when I first went to Europe. I had arranged to be there for three weeks, starting in England. For some reason, I got it in my head that I wanted to go alone, thinking I needed the time to myself, and that besides, I didn't want to have to haggle every day about what to see and when. This was of course a colossal mistake, and after exactly one day in London, I wanted to die. During the three-week trip, I took some solace in books, and in the practice popular then - and maybe still - whereby young travellers trade books in hostels. I really wanted to get to Cinque Terre on the Italian coast, and took a train that got into Manarola so late that there was nothing open; I had no reservations at any hotel or hostel or inn. I wandered around with two other guys, also from Illinois, whom I'd met on the train. When we realised we really weren't going to find a bed that night, we slept in a barn, on piles of hay, with rain pelting the corrugated-steel roof all night. In the morning, so tired in every way, I checked into a hostel, and there I traded my copy of Joan Didion Play It As It Lays for an Australian girl's copy of The Road to Wellville by TC Boyle.

I read it over the next few days, sitting on the rocks jutting into the Mediterranean, with my feet dangling into the so-warm water. And though the subject matter was incongruous in the extreme - the book is about health crazies in 1800s Michigan - it gave me great solace. The book is so funny and frantic, and Boyle's style so fluent, so buoyant, that I felt much less alone. Though I wish I had, I didn't come home with the book; in Switzerland I traded it for Oscar Wilde's De Profundis. (And even he seemed less lonely than I felt, less apart from anything or anyone who felt connected. So that tells you something, I guess.)

Alan Hollinghurst

I've just found the little grey card for Prospect Lodge tucked in at the end of the novel, and it is even more evocative than the book itself. There is Stendhal's closing dedication, "TO THE HAPPY FEW"; and there is the address of the house where I read it, on the tiny island of Carriacou, in the Grenadines. The book, La Chartreuse de Parme, is in a serious edition, with variants and appendices, but I think I chose it for the binding, which though hideous in itself, with shiny pictorial boards like a child's book, proved resistant to sun-oil, salt water and sticky tumblers of rum punch. Even so, the strip of the spine is half torn off.

The guesthouse was run by an American artist and his wife, and the card has his little drawing on it of the prospect in question, the row of volcanic peaks across the bay, and a sailing-boat down below. In the garden, a hammock was slung between a palm and a papaya, and there, over three weeks steeped in the visionary dazzle of the Caribbean, I read this great French novel set, for the most part, in Italy. I always like reading against the grain of place.

Now the book brings back the island, and the light, and my happiness there, but its contents have faded, 18 years on, and I see I made no notes in it. I have an idea of Fabrice and La Sanseverina, I remember Fabrice's escape from prison and the brilliantly original account of Waterloo, but I couldn't tell you the story with any confidence. I know I was struck by the slapdash haste of the writing. I fear this thrilling novel has joined scores of other books I still say I "know", but which are often little more than a jumble of images and atmospheres - of the time and place I read them as much as of the books themselves.

Pico Iyer

How can I forget sitting in the tiny Druk Hotel in Thimphu, the pocket-sized capital of Bhutan, in the dead of winter, the only tourist in the medieval kingdom, so it seemed, reading, by the light of a single wavering candle, Graham Greene's The Comedians? Maybe it was the mountain atmosphere (no traffic lights, no TV screens in the entire country), maybe it was the absence of every other diversion, maybe it was the intensity of sitting in a bare room in a silent town full of candles (electricity had gone out, it seemed for ever), but Greene's impassioned and unsparing look at the value of commitment, the folly of remaining an ironist, standing on the sidelines, affected me so deeply that when I finished the book I pulled out a piece of worn hotel stationery, and wrote by hand a long, long letter to the poor author (then in his 80s, and surely not delighted to receive illegible scribbles from Bhutan).

The books we read on holiday cannot fail to take on colour from the environment in which we read them; but beyond that, Greene, more than anyone, throws a light on the poignancy of sitting alone in a very foreign place, after dark, surrounded by the sorrows and rending challenges of the world, and wondering what, as a visitor, one can and cannot do. At home, I'm not sure my conversation with the book would have had any of this intensity or sense of being laid bare; but in a small room in Bhutan, Graham Greene seemed the closest friend, the most unsettling cross-questioner, that any traveller could hope for.

Thomas Keneally

I remember being stuck for close on a week with my Eritrean mentor in a bombarded town named Nacfa in 1987, during the long war between Ethiopia and Eritrea. Bombardment by Mengistu's Ethiopian army began at four each afternoon, but we were relatively comfortable in a deep bunker eight feet underground, where the Eritreans listened between noises to the BBC Africa News on their short-wave radios, and then listened to the BBC book reading. The book was Anita Brookner's Hotel du Lac, which I got to like in that all-too-vivid scenario for its subtle, elegant prose and its tension within its glaciers of longing. An Eritrean discussed the book with me in the bunker one evening after our staple meal of spaghetti. He asked, "If that Englishwoman likes that Englishman, why doesn't she just tell him?" "Well," I said, already looking forward to the next day's elegant reading, "you see, that's your northern European Protestant ethos for you. Her art is to capture it so exactly." He still didn't quite get it, but I did. So here's to Anita. And while we're at it, God bless the World Service.






Any stories of your own????










Hmmmm, schniff, I can't access part two...

Thinking of my own travel/with books...