Booked: A Traveler’s Guide to Literary Locations Around the World
By Richard Kreitner Black Dog, RRP: $50 Reviewer: Thomas Bywater
Choosing a destination and what to read on the way there are two of the toughest decisions facing anyone heading on holiday.
Richard Kreitner’s book goes a long way to solving at least one of these in one fell literary swoop. In Booked: A Traveler’s Guide to Literary
Locations Around the World, he gathers up 60 bookish destinations from 22 countries, and many reading recommendations between them.
From Stephen King’s haunted house in New England to the carving of Paikea on Wha¯ nga¯ ra¯ marae in New Zealand, it’s a whirlwind tour of the real-world places connected to writers and their creations.
But don’t expect to find a poolside paperback among them. Stieg Larsson’s Stockholm, and Botswana via The No.1 Ladies’ Detective Agency might be the closest thing to airport fiction to make the cut. John Grisham’s Biloxi blockbusters aren’t given a hearing and EL James’ 50 Shades of Seattle doesn’t get a look in. It’s all fairly highbrow.
In each entry, Kreitner visits the settings for moments from fiction and the lives of the writers that imagined them. In the footsteps of Agatha Christie, he checks into the Imperial Hotel in seaside Torquay, which the grand dame of whodunnit cast as the setting for countless murders “thinly disguised as the Majestic Hotel”.
But you can’t help but feel Kreitner is conflicted by the role of the literary tourist. Visiting Monroeville, the Alabama hometown of Harper Lee and setting for To Kill a Mockingbird, he sees the literary connection is the town’s “best hopes” for pulling itself out of the economic doldrums. But, he can’t help but agree that the annual 100,000 visitors are turning Monroe County’s pre-civil rights courthouse into a “Disneyland for racists”.
Like reading, Kreitner’s journeys are personal pilgrimages. He’s more in his element in the woods with Thoreau at Walden Pond than sharing a guided Bloom’s Day book tour through James Joyce’s Dublin.
Some entries are straight-up travel journal. In Kyoto, he dispenses “pro tips” to travellers — or “obnoxious pests” as he refers to them. (Stop taking pictures of the geishas, okay? The man is trying to make literary observations about orange toro lanterns.)
If there’s one character who follows the reader throughout this literary guide it would be Kreitner.
Nowhere is better covered than the Brooklynbased writer’s home town. Hopping between Truman Capote’s and Tom Wolfe’s houses, he assures us “the cliches are all true”. Sneering self-consciously at the “hunched-over wannabenovelists” in the New York cafes, he admits it is “where this very book, in fact, was written”.
Note, it is Literary Brooklyn, not Manhattan. He never ventures across the East River, after F. Scott Fitzgerald, into the city.
Write what you know is the mantra and Kreitner has followed it. The first half of the book is set in North America. On page 108 Kreitner boldly sets out to cover the literary treasures of “Mexico and South America” but stops just short the Caribbean. The subsequent 20 entries cover literary Europe, leaving just 10 choice picks for Asia, Africa and the entire Southern Hemisphere.
It’s a little jarring to see the road to Tolaga Bay sitting between Tokyo and Istanbul in a sparse grab-bag of destinations in Asia and Oceania. Still, New Zealand gets a shout-out over Australia. (Take that, Tim Winton.)
Outlining the world’s best bookish destinations in 220 pages is as Quixotic a task as tilting at Cervantes’ windmills — something Kreitner attempts on page 163, along with a recommendation for local La Mancha cuisine.
There are blind spots on everyone’s mental map, just as there is room still on the bookshelf, even on one as extensive as Kreitner’s.
But for every gap, there are some gems that make you want to read more: a demonic apartment in Moscow; a New Orleans statue of one “Dunce” from Kennedy Toole’s Confederacy; the cabin where Jack Kerouac went to be the “alonest man in the world”.
For travel inspiration or just help picking your next long-read, there are few guides that do both so equally. A bit of armchair travel in the pages of one of these classics might be the next best thing to being there.