How to Talk About Places You've Never Been
On the Importance of Armchair Travel
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- $23.99
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- $23.99
Publisher Description
Written in the irreverent style that made How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read a critical and commercial success, Pierre Bayard takes readers on a trip around the world, giving us essential guidance on how to talk about all those fantastic places we've never been. Practical, funny, and thought-provoking, How to Talk About Places You've Never Been will delight and inform armchair globetrotters and jet-setters, all while never having to leave the comfort of the living room.
Bayard examines the art of the "non-journey," a tradition that a succession of writers and thinkers, unconcerned with moving away from their home turf, have employed in order to encounter the foreign cultures they wish to know and talk about. He describes concrete situations in which the reader might find himself having to speak about places he's never been, and he chronicles some of his own experiences and offers practical advice.
How to Talk About Places You Haven't Been is a compelling and delightful book that will expand any travel enthusiast's horizon well beyond the places it's even possible to visit in a single lifetime.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Continuing in the same vein as 2007's How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read, Bayard, a professor of French literature at the University of Paris, constructs a case for the sedentary voyager who travels the world by neither land, air, nor water but rather by book, favoring poetic license above actual experience. This thread leads through Marco Polo's professed encounters with unicorns and griffins in medieval Asia, Margaret Mead's lascivious descriptions of Samoan sexual proclivities, and George Psalmanazar's whole-cloth invention of an island society that captured the collective imagination of 18th-century Europe. Phileas Fogg, the protagonist in Jules Verne's Around the World in Eighty Days, is celebrated for his expediency and emotional detachment on his trip around the world. Bayard defends German writer Karl May's depiction of an American Old West he never visited, because it allowed for a more sensitive portrayal of Native Americans; and he feels that French poet Blaise Cendrars's linguistic gifts bring readers aboard the Trans-Siberian Express "in the context of a shared fantasy." Bayard puts forth some interesting ideas about the capacity of literature to take readers to other worlds and the possible superiority of these experiences to physical travel; at the very least, these notions will sit well with academics and shut-ins.
