Literary Journeys: Mapping Fictional Travels across the World of Literature

‘’We yearn to travel. There is something else that distinguishes us as a species; we are storytellers. We are known as Homo Sapiens - ‘wise man’ - thanks in no small part to our use of language to construct narratives. We love storytelling.’’

And when we cannot travel, books are there to guide us to a place away from our reality. Before I visited Prague and Seville, and Milan, and Rome, and Paris, and Moscow, and so many other places, I had seen their beauty with the eyes of the mind. I had visited them on a magic carpet called ‘Book’. Books are our first guides to places and wonders that we may never be fortunate enough to visit.

This volume maps a multitude of stories. Books that found their hearts in characters’ show more journeys of the body, the spirit and the soul…

We battle monsters with Odysseus, the most timeless of characters in World Literature, meet merchants in the company of Marco Polo, walk with the pilgrims to Canterbury, fight windmills defending Don Quixote. Walk from Edinburgh to London as a young woman is wrongfully accused, witness the struggles of the serfs in the Russian countryside, meet the legendary Vlad Tepes in the mystical land of Transylvania.

Follow Fernando Ossorio on a journey of a troubled soul in Toledo, let Virginia Woolf lead you on an adventure across the Atlantic, accompany Leopold Bloom through the streets of Dublin, see how Halldor Laxness officiates a marriage between Catholicism and the sagas of old.

What do we think of the motels and the endless road trip in Nabokov’s masterpiece of a young girl’s Western Odysseus to avenge her father in Portis’s True Grit? What happens when you cannot escape Soviet Moscow even by taking a train to a sleepy village? How would it feel to cross Europe during the Napoleonic Wars era as depicted in Winterson’s The Passion? Or China during the so-called ‘Cultural Revolution’?

From Suffolk to Australia, from Iceland to Taiwan, from Tokarczuk’s Flights to Maraini’s Train to Budapest, from Twain to Adichie’s Americanah and Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad, this is a treasure for those of us who are TRUE lovers of Literature.

My reviews can also be found on https://theopinionatedreaderblog.wordpress.com/ show less

A really interesting book, but misrepresented in its title/subtitle--few maps were actually included. The book is much more an overview of the author, book, and historical context of its writing and/or subject matter, along with paintings and (some) maps incorporated. Great for what it is, but wildly different than suggested in the title.