Category Archives: Travel

Backpack Books

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Dickens

Dickens’s writing retreat in Rochester, England (photo: vweisfeld)

Books written in exotic locales have a zing of extra appeal. What would Elizabeth Catton’s The Luminaries be without Hokitika, Graham Greene’s The Quiet American without steamy Saigon, or Dickens’s Oliver Twist without London? If we’ve read these books, we’ve been to these places, at least in our imaginations. And, sometimes, only in our imaginations. The late Gabriel Garcia Márquez created such a detailed portrait of the fictional town of Macondo, every one of us who read One Hundred Years of Solitude feels down in our bones that we’ve been there. And, none of us want to visit the bleak Mexican borderland of Cormac McCarthy’s The Crossing or, God save us, Blood Meridian.

When sense of place is absent in a novel, we miss it. When place details are wrong, we notice. A few years ago, I read the thriller Gorky Park and enjoyed the first half a lot. It’s set in Moscow and created a vivid mental picture of the city. Then the action moved to New York, and the details were just . . . off, in ways I don’t remember now. Finally, the picture of New York became so discordant it threatened the credibility of the Moscow scenes.

Brooklyn-based publisher Akashik Books celebrates the importance of setting with its anthologies of place-based noir stories (Brooklyn Noir, Boston Noir, Trinidad Noir, Delhi Noir, Copenhangen Noir, and so on), new original writing set in distinct locales. A requirement for Akashik’s Mondays are Murder flash fiction series—“to get your week off to a dark start”—is that stories “be set in a distinct location of any neighborhood in any city, anywhere in the world, but it should be a story that could only be set in [that] neighborhood.” Such focus is essential for writers and brings their stories to life. Paradoxically, by being specific about places and people, writing becomes more universal, a point made by Donald Maass in his helpful Writing 21st Century Fiction. Generic places and stock, stereotypical characters don’t engage readers.

When I travel I take along books set in the place, hoping to intensify and enrich the travel experience. A time or two, that has backfired. The biography of Vlad the Impaler I carried with me to Romania last fall was I must say too intense and specific in its gruesome details, so that I abandoned it, half-read. Traveling in New Mexico and binge-reading a suitcase full of Tony Hillermans revealed such a repetitive story arc that I never picked up another. This was not something I’d ever noticed reading one or two a year.

An entertaining guidebook for place-based reading, or for armchair travelers wanting to steep themselves in a locale or rekindle memories of past visit is Nancy Pearl’s Book Lust to Go: Recommended Reading for Travelers, Vagabonds, and Dreamers (2010). Pearl recommends both fiction and nonfiction books for territories as wide as Oceana and as focused as her home town, Detroit. Alphabetically, she roams the world from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe. It will help me pick books for two trips to Canada this summer!

And, if you’re really into it—check out the Geoff Sawers’s literary maps of the U.S. and U.K., showing who writes where.

**** Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil

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Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, John Berendt, Savannah, Georgia

Savannah (photo: wikimedia.org)

As it seems I’m one of the last people in America to read Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, John Berendt’s 20-year-old best-seller, I’d heard enough sly references and snippets—especially when the movie (trailer) came out–to have a pretty good idea of what I’d encounter in its Historic District (free map!). I was not disappointed. While many people gravitated to the over-the-top drag queen, The Lady Chablis, my favorite character was Minerva, the purple-glasses wearing juju expert. Berendt allows that, although his book is nonfiction, he did mess with the time sequence a bit and disguise a few characters who needed a veil of privacy. Savannahians surely know when and who.

I hadn’t realized Savannah was so geographically and topographically isolated and that its residents used that isolation to their advantage, wanting “nothing so much as to be left alone,” Berendt says. “Every nuance and quirk of personality achieved greater brilliance in that lush enclosure than would have been possible anywhere else in the world.” It’s sadly ironic, then, that his book has inspired so many tourists and Midnight-themed tours.

And the perfect, related cocktail?

Let It Snow (Not)!

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snow, writing, writer, author, mystery, suspense, reader“Our snow was not only shaken from whitewash buckets down the sky, it came shawling out of the ground and swam and drifted out of the arms and hands and bodies of the trees; snow grew overnight on the roofs of the houses like a pure and grandfather moss, minutely white-ivied the walls and settled . . .” – Dylan Thomas

The Central and Northeast U.S. isn’t the only country hit by snowstorm after snowstorm this winter. Take a look at how Tokyo residents responded after a 10-inch blizzard—its biggest blizzard in decades. Snow sculptures from the land of “Hello Kitty.”

Photo gallery from the 24th Annual International Snow Sculpture  Championships – Breckenridge, Colorado. Tokyo amateurs, be in awe!

Have a cup of hot chocolate and let Frank sing to you. Let it Snow!

Hot chocolate not warming enough? Here’s a hot toddy recipe that calls for brandy, whiskey, or rum (whatever you have, basically) and tea. The recipe says you can skip the tea. Just so it’s hot!

Your Cryosphere Glossary from the National Snow and Ice Data Center.  Perfect for teachers, dads, and moms who get asked those tricky snow questions. Find out where it’s snowing right now with the NSIDC “near-real-time” data map.

Simon Beck’s Snow Art—made by stomping around in the snow, very precisely. Not just your everyday snow angel.

A collection of Snow Poems. I like this one by Frederick Seidel. Good to remember when you’re stuck in the snow. Six-sided, too.

Snow is what it does.

It falls and it stays and it goes.

It melts and it is here somewhere.

We all will get there.

 A recent op-ed about the incomparable snow leopard, and how the big cats are saving people. She has her eye on YOU.

snow leopard, writing, mystery, author, reader, suspense

A Bitter Reminder

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Fall 2013 - Danube Trip 023Strange to watch last night’s Netflix thriller, Harrison’s Flowers (clip, quite dark), recommended to us by our twenty-something guide in Croatia last fall. The movie wasn’t very good—predictable plot, relentless tank and submachine-gun fire—but the cast was good (Andie MacDowell, Adrian Brody, David Strathairn, Brendan Gleeson, Alun Amstrong). Roger Ebert’s review called Brody’s acting a tour de force, with his character using “attitude and cockiness to talk his way through touchy situations. Watch the way he walks them all through a roadblock. I don’t believe it can be done, but I believe he did it.”

The story, set in 1991, takes place during the height of the Croatian War of Independence, which U.S. media called the Yugoslav civil war, which has been barely covered in film (available here, anyway). It tells about an American photojournalist who disappears in the hotly contested Danube River town of Vukovar and the determination of his wife to travel there and find him, despite the awful risks. Said Roger Ebert about the unlikely plot, “There is a way in which a movie like this works no matter what.”

The interesting part to me was not just that it was shot in Croatia, but that Vukovar is where our river cruise docked, and I spent some time walking around it. Much has been rebuilt in the intervening years, of course, but there were still rubbly areas. Below is my photo of a famous scene from Vukovar, and the one above, taken near the port, certainly displays female determination. A 49 from the Rotten Tomatoes critics; though 77 of civilian reviewers liked it.

IMDb points out some amusing anachronisms in this movie, but don’t let the fluffs in terms of which tanks carried which identities put you off—I lost track of which side was which, and while politically that was key, cinematically, it was meaningless. The regenerated arm, though, I think I can explain: prosthesis.

Wars and Conquests

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IMG_0073The fertile territory within the Balkan States and the Great Plain of Hungary have been attractive targets for invasion and conquest for millennia.

First recorded: the Romans (who built an early road along the Danube), then the Magyars in 896. Their leader Arpad is considered the great founder of Hungary and he and the leaders of the other six founding tribes are commemorated in Budapest’s Millennium Monument—erected for the country’s 1000th birthday. Sturdy guys, these. Love the faces!

The influence of the Romans is still felt in the Balkans more than 2000 years later. The Romanian language is one of the romance languages—most akin to Italian—though it is more easily understood in its written rather than spoken form to people who know those languages. The Hungarian parliament, which wanted to emphasize its links to the Holy Roman Empire, used Latin as its official language until the 1840s.

IMG_0091In the 13th century, Eastern Europe was overrun by the Mongols—the Golden Horde—who swept westward from Central Asia almost as far Vienna. (This genetic infusion may explain the extra root on one of my wisdom teeth, which my endodontist says occurs most often among Asian people.) I see an echo of this influence in the costumes of the men in the horsemanship demonstration pictured above, which took place near Kalocsa, Hungary. As a few men in the distance herded sheep, the vision of ancient warriors thundering across the plain was vivid.

Starting in the 16th century, Hungary came under the influence of the Austrian Habsburgs, becoming part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. On the losing side of World War I, Hungary was stripped of more than seventy percent of its territory—including Transylvania, which went to Romania, and northern areas that went to Slovakia. The Transylvanian village Fiatfalva (now Filias) and northern town Dobsina (at the edge of the Slovak Paradise National Park) were, as best I can reconstruct, the birthplaces of my paternal grandfather and grandmother, respectively.

Fall 2013 - Danube Trip 065Other countries in the region—Bulgaria, Romania, Serbia, Croatia—were subjected to repeated assaults by the Ottoman Turks, and many hilltop forts and fortifications remain that take advantage of natural rock formations—like Belogradchik in Bulgaria, pictured here. Built by the Romans and added to by the Bulgarians, the Byzantines, and the Turks, it covers many acres.

Fall 2013 - Danube Trip 023In World War II came the Nazi occupation, promptly followed by the Soviets, whose heavy hand is everywhere evident. Shortly after their withdrawal almost 25 years ago, came the Yugoslav civil war. National Geographic (I think) published a version of this exact scene of hope and rebirth, which I photographed in heavily damaged Vukovar, Croatia.

Politics Along the Danube

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Budapest and Kalocsa, Hungary.

Vukovar and Osijek, Croatia.

Belgrade, Serbia.

Vidin and Veliko Tarnovo, Bulgaria.

Bucharest, and Transylvania, Romania.

These are the reasons this blog and website have been on vacation!

There’s much to say about visiting these capitals and towns of Central and Eastern Europe. The first is, if you can, go!

The major cities are an odd mix of beautiful restored Baroque late-1800s architecture and grim Soviet construction. In many places, the endless ranks of dismal concrete apartment blocks are gradually being restored and, with new windows and a coat of paint to cover the grey, acquiring a sturdy cheerfulness.

The economies of all five countries suffered with the withdrawal of Soviet support for industry—leaving many abandoned factory buildings too expensive to pull down. The war in the former Yugoslavia and the sluggish economy worldwide dug an even deeper economic hole, which they are struggling to climb out of.

The politics are complicated and always have been. Borders and rulers have changed many times. Hungary now has a right-wing government and growing anti-Semitism. On the ride from the airport, the cab had to wait for demonstrators from the radical nationalist and neo-Nazi Jobbik party, and the driver muttered, “Shame.”

Both Croations and Serbs acknowledge their war was more complicated than commonly understood, though the underlying issues were of course interpreted somewhat differently in the two countries. One thing (of many) I hadn’t understood before is that the Muslims in the former Yugoslavia were not necessarily people who at some point had immigrated there from other countries, but were mostly Slavic people who during the many centuries of Ottoman rule changed their religion. Thus, that aspect of the war wasn’t a conflict between ethnic “Yugoslavs” and a foreign population they had never accepted, but an inter-familial conflict more akin to our own Civil War.  Always the bitterest.

Before he and his wife were executed on Christmas Day, 1989, Nicolae Ceausescu built, as we heard dozens of times, “the largest government building in the world, after the Pentagon,” in Romania’s capital, Bucharest. The vast and mostly empty reception rooms, intended to show the increasingly unhinged ruler’s power and prestige, are a monument to ego. While many Romanians are trying to make the best of this white elephant—“The Palace of the People” Ceausescu called it—visitors can only wonder whether the massive funds spent on the project might have been put to much more productive use.

When I figure out how to upload my photos to this new computer, I’ll have a more picturesque report.

Anticipation

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Starting to think seriously about my next vacation—only a few weeks away now—prompted by yet another flight detail change from United. The trip will start in Budapest, then float south along the Danube to Bucharest. On the journey, the boat will slip easily through the Iron Gate, the gorge separating Romania and the Carpathian Mountains on the north from Serbia and the Balkan mountain foothills on the south. Dams constructed over a 20-year period, ending in 1984, have turned what used to be a wild stretch of river into something more like a lake.

But the Iron Gates of my imagination, the ones I hope to see in my mind’s eye, are as they are described in Alan Furst’s thrillers. In his books, set in the late 1930’s and early 1940’s, the Iron Gates were a perilous passage for desperate people—spies, refugees, terrorists, anyone caught up in the tightening net of loyalties and politics of a looming World War II:

“He would have to cross the Russian lines, would have to go through the white water at the Iron Gate, where the Duna [Danube] came crashing down onto the Wallachian plain to form the border between Romania and Bulgaria.” – Night Soldiers

“Europe was lost behind them—after the Iron Gate they were in a different land, a different time, running along the great plain that reached to the edge of the Black Sea.” – Night Soldiers

A few days in Budapest, an infamous spy town, is another something to look forward to:

“On 10 March 1930, the night train from Budapest pulled into the Gare du Nord a little after four in the morning. . . . In the station at Vienna, a brick had been thrown at the window of a first-class compartment, leaving a frosted star in the glass. And later that day there’d been difficulties at the frontiers for some of the passengers, so in the end the train was late getting into Paris.”—Kingdom of Shadows

“Difficulties at the frontiers”—we can imagine exactly what those difficulties were—“for some of the passengers”—and exactly who those terrified passengers were. Laced with foreboding, those lines open Furst’s thriller Kingdom of Shadows.

Other than a literary interest in things Budapestian, I have a family history interest as well. Legend has it that my grandmother (who died when I was a toddler) was a pastry chef in Budapest before immigrating to the United States. The disappointing kernel of the story is that none of her six daughters learned the art. She came from the generation that wanted to put the Old Country behind it. Truthfully, she had to have been quite young—twenty?—when she came over, so “chef” may be a bit of an exaggeration, but it’s a pleasant thought and one that will require eating as much pastry as possible in homage.

Another feature of this trip is a three-day add-on excursion into Transylvania—ancestral home of my grandfather, who came from a tiny village annexed to the marginally larger village of Székelykeresztúr (“Holy Cross” in Hungarian) in 1926. Google maps gives the larger town no more than 12 streets. My grandfather’s home was about eight miles from the medieval walled town of Sighisoara, birthplace of Count Dracula. I have Transylvania roots, for sure.

So, of course I enjoyed reading The Historian, by Elizabeth Kostova, about a woman researching her family’s history who traverses that part of the world and at every step finds connections to Our Vlad.  “Genuinely terrifying,” said the Boston Globe.

Lots to look forward to, and I have my reading for the trip all lined up:

I’ve provided links to amazon.com, in case you want more info about any of these books, but of course would encourage you to make any purchases at your local independent bookstore!