Across an Inland Sea
Writing in Place from Buffalo to Berlin
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- $62.99
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- $62.99
Publisher Description
How do the places we live in and visit shape our lives and memories? What does it mean to reside in different locations across the span of a life? In richly textured portraits of places seen from within, Nicholas Howe contemplates how places create and gather their stories and how, in turn, a sense of place locates the stories of our own lives.
Howe begins with one of the finest descriptions ever written of Buffalo, that city on an inland sea where he grew up. He gives us a fresh Paris, viewed from the river below. And he depicts Oklahoma as a site of open lands and dislocation--a place of coming and going. Howe then turns to Chartres, a traditional location of pilgrimage, to ask what other sites might still be capable of compelling visitors in secular time. He portrays Berlin as a scene of twentieth-century history--and a city that helped him make sense of his American life. Finally, he writes about Columbus, Ohio, as home. Vividly rendering the places he has known, Howe meditates on the weight of home, the temptations of the metropolis, the fact of dislocation, the unraveling of history, the desire to remake ourselves through voyage, and the wonder of the familiar.
In ways that too often elude travel writers, it is place that holds our imagination, that inspires much of our art and literature. Across an Inland Sea evokes the various senses of place that can fill and haunt a life--and ultimately give life its form and meaning.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Though Howe takes readers from Buffalo, N.Y., to Paris and from Oklahoma to Chartres, Berlin and Columbus, Ohio, in these elegant essays, his is not a travelogue in the traditional sense, but rather a deeply felt, meditative exploration of the"power that places have over us." A medievalist and professor of English at UC Berkeley, Howe reveals a gift for capturing the modern-day pilgrimage."Journey, story and metaphor alike," he writes,"draw from the same need: to move from point to point in the hope of discovery." Howe's discoveries take the form of little epiphanies--about the way to see a city with fresh eyes, about the writing about place and memory--and are the stops along the way that he meticulously relates to his readers, so that, in the end, his journey becomes his reward. Howe's references are often literary--Kafka, Roland Barthes, Flaubert--but his accounts are clear and thoughtful, and his wit helps make his narrative work accessible. His opening chapter about his family's--and his own--history in and relationship to Buffalo during its recent decline is stunning in its breadth of understanding and melancholy, while his elegy to Columbus's High Street reveals a striking depth of feeling for a main drag marked by fast food chains and ethnic restaurants, student hang-outs and underused parks. This graceful volume will be especially meaningful to writers, but it should appeal to anyone who muses about authenticity in a place or people. 6 halftones.
