Hav
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4.8 • 5 Ratings
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
“Journey through a mystical country where everything is possible and easily arranged” in this 2-part travelogue set in a fictional Mediterranean city of dreams (Los Angeles Times).
“A touching lover letter . . . to life itself”—featuring Last Letters from Hav, shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and a foreword by Ursula K. Le Guin (The Independent)
Hav is like no place on earth. Rumored to be the site of Troy, captured during the crusades and recaptured by Saladin, visited by Tolstoy, Hitler, Grace Kelly, and Princess Diana, this Mediterranean city-state is home to several architectural marvels and an annual rooftop race that is a feat of athleticism and insanity. As Jan Morris guides us through the corridors and quarters of Hav, we hear the mingling of Italian, Russian, and Arabic in its markets, delight in its famous snow raspberries, and meet the denizens of its casinos and cafés.
When Morris published Last Letters from Hav in 1985, it was short-listed for the Booker Prize. Here it is joined by Hav of the Myrmidons, a sequel that brings the story up-to-date. Twenty-first-century Hav is nearly unrecognizable. Sanitized and monetized, it is ruled by a group of fanatics who have rewritten its history to reflect their own blinkered view of the past.
Morris’s only novel is dazzlingly sui-generis, part erudite travel memoir, part speculative fiction, part cautionary political tale. It transports the reader to an extraordinary place that never was, but could well be.
“Jan Morris is to other travel writers what John le Carré is to other spy novelists.” —New York Times
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Taken for the real thing on its first publication in 1985, this faux-travel memoir prompted fruitless calls to confused travel agents. It's no wonder: Morris's imagination is a marvel, her spectral country fully realized and fascinating. Hav, an eastern Mediterranean peninsula, rises believably in the mind, with its city skyline of onion domes, minarets, and one incongruous pagoda along with its glorious and complex history. Hav's past is ingeniously, believably intertwined with real events; its present is realistically faded and isolated, adding to the eerie feeling one gets of spying on a lost world. While this sense of wonder is not quite enough to sustain interest in the absence of any plot, the book picks up toward the second half (which was added 20 years after the first) when a more sinister, dystopian tone takes over. After a mysterious, catastrophic "Intervention," a new society led by an obscure secret order assumes control, and Hav becomes a morally compromised hub of international wealth and influence. This section is more clearly a commentary, an "analogy" as Morris (Conundrum) calls it, but both volumes are thought provoking and, in some ways at least, live up to Morris's description of Hav as "a little compendium of the world's experience."
