Literary Travel :
Authors Take You There
Taking Journeys Through Books
|
Share |
gets robbed of all his gold and spends a year working in a crystal shop to earn the money back, after which he decides to continue on in search of his treasure. In the oasis, he meets and falls in love with a woman who urges him to complete his search, which he does, only to find out that the treasure was buried in Andalucía all along.
Ian McEwan
Ian McEwan’s most celebrated novel, ‘Atonement’, is initially set in an area of South East England known as Surrey Hills, before shifting first to France and then London. The novel tells the story of a young girl called Briony, who unjustly accuses her sister’s lover Robbie of raping a girl on the family property. Robbie gets sent to prison and later to Dunkirk during the WW11. Briony, her sister and Robbie are finally reunited in London, when Briony attempts to make amends for all the pain she had caused them. While London needs little introduction, Surrey Hills is far lesser known. Described as being an ‘area of outstanding beauty’, it is easily reached from the British capital and is a perfect example of how glorious the British countryside can be.
Haruki Murakami
Japan’s beloved Murakami reached international fame with his ‘Kafka on the Shore’, the strange story of Kafka, a boy who runs away from his father, who prophesises that he would kill him as well as have sex with his mother and sister who had both left when he was a child. His journey of escape takes him from Tokyo to Takamatsu, where his story takes even more unexpected and unbelievable turns. A small city of around 400,000 inhabitants, Takamatsu is famed for Edo-period Ritsurin-kōen garden, but apart from that, it’s also the gateway to the island of Shikoku, the site of Japan’s most famous pilgrimage route of 88 temples.
James Joyce
Dublin is replete with exceptional writers who have called it home, and the city is full of spots which celebrate them. But the city seems to be especially fond if James Joyce, whose presence is to be found all over the cityscape, as is that of his characters in ‘Ulysses’ and ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’. To bring these characters back to life, you need only visit the James Joyce centre, take a walk around Stephen’s Green or Trinity College, or go on the much celebrated literary pub crawl. Couple this with a reading of ‘A Portrait’ and ‘Ulysses’ and you’ll have captured the essence of an entire city.
Salman Rushdie
Hidden beneath the complex layer of fantastical happenings in Salman Rushdie’s ‘Midnight’s Children’ is a stunning India, and one that the author explores in great debt. The novel’s protagonist, Saleem, is born on the stroke of midnight of the Indian independence, and from then on, he believes that events in his life mirror those in the nation’s history. During his strange story, we travel with him through the slums of Mumbai, the chaos of Delhi and the jungle of the Sundarbans, the world’s largest continuous halophytic mangrove forest and home to the endangered Royal Bengal tiger.
Links to Images:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/yeomans/95435526/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/khamtran/3766284781/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/moralesphoto/411678050/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/y_fujii/4263294982/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/paszczak000/5107615135/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/simonippon/4062207067/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/bi_plus_one/4068504115/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/joiseyshowaa/2388512675/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ashugarg/2504259741/
....