Literary Cities

[saliotthomas]

Some places hold a sort of magnetic attraction for writers,musicians,painters and artistes in general.They stimulate,nestle,flavor their works.The sound of their name alone evoke the literary current of time.
Paris is an obvious one to me,been my bitrh place,and names like Henry Miller,hemingway,Paul Auster,Andrei Makine...the list is long.
Tanger of Paul Bowles,William Burroughs,Truman Capote...
There are many and some will come to your mind as those two came to mine.

[Stewart]

I'm interested in reading the Cairo of Naguib Mahfouz. I don't think I'm quite wanting to jump into his Cairo trilogy, given that it's three big books. (Brief is best.) As a taster I bought his Midaq Alley last year, but I've never got round to reading it. Given that it's set in and around the titular alley, I thought it may be an interesting piece to compare with Alaa Al Aswany's The Yacoubian Building, that being set in and around the titular building. I'm hoping to read that in the next month or so. Time will tell.

Interesting, also, is Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities. Fictional places, perhaps based on aspects of a real place. I've only sampled this, finding it hard to read as a whole given that I wasn't discerning much narrative to drive me on. Just one city described after the other with occasional cuts to Kublai Khan, if I remember correctly.

[elcalifornio]

I was actually intrigued by Eco's Salvador de Bahia in Brazil from that section in Foucault's Pendulum; his Paris in that book is also really mazy, confusing and trippy, it expands and collapses as you read along.

But Salvador de Bahia is best represented by Jorge Amado, so i've heard. I've not read him yet.

[Morten]

In Copenhagen you can easily walk in the footsteps of H.C. Andersen or S?ren Kierkegaard. There exists several good books on Kierkegaard's relationship to Copenhagen.

[Eric]

The Russian city that fits this thread has been variously known over the centuries and decades as Saint Petersburg, Petrograd, Leningrad and Piter.

As it was the former capital of Russia, it is associated with a whole host of literary figures, such as Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Gogol, Blok, Bely, Mandelstam, Nabokov, Zamyatin, Akhmatova, Brodsky, and several others.

See the Literature section in the following Wikipedia article:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Petersburg#Literature

[Stewart]

Alberto Manguel in With Borges was of the opinion that Jorge Luis Borges gave Buenos Aires a level of prominence in his work. In the handful of short stories I've read - way back - I can't say I recall this too much. Maybe it's the memory, or that I just wasn't reading the right stories.

And, though I've not read it - and it's facing me as I type - I suspect you might get quite a bit of Bruges detailed in Georges Rodenbach's Bruges-la-Morte. Certainly this edition (from Dedalus) has photos of contemporary Bruges to accompany the text rather than the original photos by the author.

[Eric]

Just out of interest, Dedalus has also published another Rodenbach book The Bells of Bruges, whose very title gives away where it is set. Both books were translated from the French by Mike Mitchell.

See:

http://tiny.cc/PjP6n (http://tiny.cc/PjP6n)

for a selection of available Rodenbach books, and

http://www.readysteadybook.com/BookReview.aspx?isbn=1903517230

for a review.

[Eric]

Also out of interest, Buenos Aires was important for the major Polish playwright, novelist and diarist Witold Gombrowicz (1904-1969), as he lived there for almost half his life - from 1939 to 1963.

Although his novels and plays are not particularly relevant to his stay in Argentina, there are copious mentions in his diaries of the city and the Argentine mentality. The Gombrowicz diaries, which ooze sarcasm, especially directed at the Buenos Aires exile Polish community, are all available in English.

For those of you who do read Spanish, there are several webpages on the net devoted to Gombrowicz' stay in Argentina, including the informative website:

http://www.literatura.org/wg/wgea2.htm

In English, about the diaries and Buenos Aires:

http://www.warsawvoice.pl/view/6990/

Borges met Gombrowicz in Buenos Aires.

[Stewart]

I chanced upon a quotation attributed to Milan Kundera on the subject of Bohumil Hrabal:


Bohumil Hrabal embodies as no other the fascinating Prague. He couples people's humor to baroque imagination

So it looks like his works - of which only a handful are available in English - may reveal a literature of Prague. I've not read any Hrabal, although I do have a copy of I Served The King Of England, which I've always left aside for a day when I can just sit back and relax, as the chapters are long and reading them in my start-stop commutes would detract from the text.

[Eric]

There's a good, solid article, with excerpts, on Hrabal at:

http://art-bin.com/art/ahrabaleng.html

This mentions translation problems with his Moravian dialect phrases and various technical things he mentions.

He was born in Brno, educated in Nymburk, but lived all of his writing life in Prague.

Quote from that article:

Works by Bohumil Hrabal available in English translation: "Cutting It Short"/"The Little Town Where Time Stood Still" (transl. James Naughton), Pantheon, 1993, Abacus, 1994; "Too Loud a Solitude" (transl. Michael Henry Heim), Harcourt Brace, 1990, 1992; "Closely Watched Trains", (transl. Edith Pargeter) Northwestern Univ. Press, 1995; "Closely Observed Trains, a Film" (script written by Hrabal together with Jiř? Menzel), Lorrimer, 1971; "Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age" (transl. Michael Henry Heim), Harcourt Brace, 1995; "I Served the King of England", Vintage Books, 1990.

I've not read anything by Hrabal, but did see the film "Closely Observed Trains" many years ago, which is based on one of his books.

[saliotthomas]

I loved "To loud a solitude" and re-read it soon.
I just finished "Vend maison ou je ne veux plus vivre" rufly translated by "Sell house where i don't want to live any more"and find it really hard to grasp,to surrealiste and disconstruct for me.

[mvr_moorthy]

Two writers who have depicted city life and make a huge impression are Charles Dickens and O Henry.We inevitably think of Dickens' London and O Henry's New York.

[Heteronym]

Thomas Mann's Death in Venice has made this Italian city one of the legendary cities of literature. Henry James, as The Aspern Papers and The Wings of the Dove show, also loved the sinking city. And I almost forgot Hugo Pratt's Venice Fable, maybe not the best literary representation, but surely the best visual depiction of the Queen of the Adriatic.


Alberto Manguel in With Borges was of the opinion that Jorge Luis Borges gave Buenos Aires a level of prominence in his work. In the handful of short stories I've read - way back - I can't say I recall this too much. Maybe it's the memory, or that I just wasn't reading the right stories.

I've read all his short-stories, and I don't see any concern with Buenos Aires in them myself. For one thing, Borges is only interested in ideas: he invented the genre of fake literary review (Pierre Menard, Herbert Quain) to abolish character and setting. He sets his stories in the past and outside Argentina more often than not. I think the only time he describes architecture in considerable detail is "The Library of Babel", which is to show the idea of an infinite space. I think Manguel is way off the mark, but he's a critic and we're not :D