Salon.com > The Literary Guide to the World http://www.salon.com Thu, 23 May 2013 04:40:26 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 I’m addicted to Harry Potter fan fiction! http://www.salon.com/2007/11/02/addicted_to_fanfiction/ http://www.salon.com/2007/11/02/addicted_to_fanfiction/#comments Fri, 02 Nov 2007 10:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/life/since_you_asked//2007/11/02/addicted_to_fanfiction Dear Cary,

I am in my 30s, finished my Ph.D. dissertation recently, teaching classes at universities, applying for jobs, and have two kids under 10 years old with my husband. In fact, I should be too busy to be writing to you.

The problem is that I'm addicted to fan fiction. Especially a small fraction of online fan fiction, with which you may or may not be familiar, but has a fanatical group of followers. Yes, I'm an HP fan-fiction groupie. I know that there are various fan-fiction communities online, but I've been addicted with the Harry Potter fandom ever since I couldn't wait for Book 5 to come out and started searching for any news about it on the Internet.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2007/11/02/addicted_to_fanfiction/feed/ 81 Destination: Brazil http://www.salon.com/2007/01/30/brazil_9/ http://www.salon.com/2007/01/30/brazil_9/#comments Tue, 30 Jan 2007 13:13:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/literary_guide/2007/01/30/brazil Where do you start with Brazil, that massive, sprawling swath of South America, a republic founded in 1889 on the principle -- or fantasy -- of "order and progress," but forever caught between crashes and calamities, coups and dictatorships? (In 1961, Time magazine wrote that Brazil's mercurial new president, Janio Quadros, had "burst on the world like Brazil itself -- temperamental, bristling with independence, bursting with ambition, haunted by poverty, fighting to learn, greedy for greatness.") What to make of the national "myth of racial democracy," the poverty and favelas, the prison riots, the burning Amazon, the new world rising in Brasilia, the population exploding in São Paulo? And what about samba, Tropicália, Cariocas, Carnival and soccer? Yes, soccer: the "beautiful game," the uniquely Brazilian ballet that gave the world Pelé, Garrincha, Zico, Socrates, Romario and Ronaldinho? And what about Lula, the Landless Movement, Chico Mendes, Sonia Braga and Rio's dreaded City of God?

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2007/01/30/brazil_9/feed/ 10 Destination: Colombia http://www.salon.com/2007/01/16/colombia_12/ http://www.salon.com/2007/01/16/colombia_12/#comments Tue, 16 Jan 2007 12:09:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/literary_guide/2007/01/16/colombia Pedestrians in Colombia are warned to look both ways before crossing a one-way street. The advice encapsulates not just this fragile country's lawlessness and disorder, but the slapstick, deeply ironic and often resigned dark humor of a people both tormented and exceptionally resilient. A second saying in Colombia holds, "Como nacimos en cueros, todo lo demás es ganancia," which translates roughly to "Since we were born buck naked, everything else is the takings."

Last winter, in a long travel piece, the New York Times finally allowed that "there are now a few safe pockets [of Colombia] beginning to attract foreigners." That's an optimistic view of what is at least an off-the-beaten-path destination, permanently listed in State Department travel warnings. Colombia is still cruel, and the drug war -- remember? -- refuses to be won, as leftist, right-wing and military armed conflict enters its fifth decade. The Lonely Planet guide, which used to be called a "travel survival kit," has simply excised the chapter on the Eastern Plains, as if the huge, parched cowboy grasslands had sunk away into the Amazon. Is it safe? As a friend used to put it: "I'd go, but I'd never take responsibility for recommending it to someone else."

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2007/01/16/colombia_12/feed/ 5 Destination: Gypsy Europe http://www.salon.com/2007/01/10/gypsy/ http://www.salon.com/2007/01/10/gypsy/#comments Wed, 10 Jan 2007 12:48:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/literary_guide/2007/01/10/gypsy The boy sat near the bridge, at the edge of the Gypsy camp, rolling a cigarette. The bridge was an elegant garbage heap. It was put together with planks, aluminum siding, rope, tree trunks, sodden cardboard, tires. The boy himself looked part of the bridge as he sat, cross-legged, carefully sprinkling the tobacco onto the paper. He had torn a page from a book in order to roll the cigarette. When he lit it, the paper flared a moment, and he smoked the tobacco in quick sharp bursts. When he was finished, he tore the remaining pages from the book and stuffed them in the pocket of his jeans. He threw down the cover and it landed at the foot of the bridge. The cover was too stiff for rolling tobacco.

When he walked off toward a ramshackle shed, leaving the book on the ground, I strolled across to see what he had just smoked -- a Slovak translation of the Romanian writer Emile Cioran. Nothing goes without saying. The boy had taken the page down into his lungs.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2007/01/10/gypsy/feed/ 11 Destination: The Netherlands http://www.salon.com/2006/11/30/netherlands/ http://www.salon.com/2006/11/30/netherlands/#comments Thu, 30 Nov 2006 12:18:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/literary_guide/2006/11/30/netherlands For a country that was once the global capital of the publishing industry, it's extraordinary how little the Netherlands has influenced world literature. Most of the canonical writers of Dutch fiction are unknown outside Holland; many are untranslated. From a traveler's point of view, this is wonderful. Nothing could be more tedious than arriving in a new country with a suitcase full of preconceptions about its culture, drawn from world-famous novels already reduced to clichi by generations of English-language critics.

That said, some of the books any visitor to the Netherlands ought to read are familiar enough to the English-speaking world. Chronologically, one would have to begin with "In Praise of Folly," by the humanist clergyman Erasmus of Rotterdam (1466?-1539). The book is a tongue-in-cheek twist on the classical genre of the encomium, in this case delivered by Erasmus' invented muse Folly ("Moriae"), in praise of herself. Folly's routine starts off lightly enough, as she congratulates humanity for embracing her so thoroughly. But soon the irony turns darker and harder to pin down. Folly insults people by calling them "wise," and praises them by calling them "fools." The reader becomes unsure which lines are backhanded compliments, and which are openhanded slaps. Gradually, Folly's speech turns into a sort of 16th-century "Colbert Report": a blistering condemnation of the hypocrisy, bloodthirstiness, stupidity and corruption of contemporary lay rulers and the Catholic Church, all delivered in the guise of "praise" from one of the world's first unreliable narrators.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2006/11/30/netherlands/feed/ 8 Destination: Alaska http://www.salon.com/2006/11/13/alaska_13/ http://www.salon.com/2006/11/13/alaska_13/#comments Mon, 13 Nov 2006 10:25:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/literary_guide/2006/11/13/alaska Happenstance and various provocations -- one being that Jack London lied about spit freezing before it hit the ground -- led me to writing.

Alaska -- a fifth the size of the contiguous United States, with far more total coastline, 150,000 bears, the tallest mountains -- has spawned a tradition of unnecessary literary exaggeration. As a result, traveling south from the territory (after 1959, the 49th state) to the lower 48 we Alaskans enter a fortress of nonsense about ourselves: All Alaskans live in ice igloos, at 40 below, on a windswept wasteland, six months of dark, six months of sun (yet allegedly with only one season), polar bears snarling at the door, buzzard-size mosquitoes, beaches of gold.

Through no choice or heroism of my own, I actually was born in a sod igloo in the Arctic and grew up running those huskies London wrote about. Wolves did howl at the dogs -- normal stuff -- but details he made into legend were absent: We never saw a hardworking sled dog nip a lazy one into line, never heard the alleged crackle of spit freezing in midair. One time it got to 72 below; my brother and I tried, different trajectories ... everything. Liquid -- yellow and otherwise -- arrived at the snow, same as always. Jack had exaggerated. And the Eskimo hunter culture I was raised in and around despised exaggeration.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2006/11/13/alaska_13/feed/ 9 Destination: Russia http://www.salon.com/2006/11/06/russia_17/ http://www.salon.com/2006/11/06/russia_17/#comments Mon, 06 Nov 2006 13:15:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/literary_guide/2006/11/06/russia If you savor wine, you probably like traveling in France. If you appreciate good food, especially good food involving cured pork products, you're certainly drawn to Italy. If you love literature, however, the word-strewn, story-riddled, literary character-infested, continent-size country to which you most want to travel is probably Russia. It may be lazily regarded as "the East," but Russia's contributions are integral to the Western literary canon (as well as to the Western canons of music, dance and art). The universal themes of its greatest novels -- alienation, the individual's puniness against the forces of history, the struggle to invent a decent life, really bad weather -- make every reader feel Russian at one time or another.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2006/11/06/russia_17/feed/ 14 Destination: Vancouver http://www.salon.com/2006/10/30/vancouver_3/ http://www.salon.com/2006/10/30/vancouver_3/#comments Mon, 30 Oct 2006 11:55:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/literary_guide/2006/10/30/vancouver The first thing to know about Vancouver, British Columbia, is that it resembles the last, if not no other, place on earth. A sinewy swoop of land framed by mountains and water, it's the final terminus of the North American frontier, half post-industrial pan-Asian metropolis and half primeval nature. The beacon city of an implausibly clean-scrubbed future in an environment echoing its native people's history, Vancouver looks like the glimmering set design for a dreamy, what-if alternative to "How the West Was Won."

Visiting Vancouver is like simultaneously taking a step forward and back. In its near-future, Vancouver boasts an uncharted, wet-lab urbanity that has inspired author and Vancouver resident Douglas Coupland to call it "the city of glass." Its past, the deep native roots in the region, is also present, right from the international arrivals terminal. Air travelers are greeted by a dramatic installation, festooned with the First Nations iconography of totems, masks and canoes, echoing the aboriginal people's distinct sense of place. Now the native Vancouverite's reverence is for land value, the product of a generation-long development boom instigated by the transition of Hong Kong to China and the waxing of Asia's economies. Vancouver is today among the select handful of world centers -- think Geneva or Sydney -- recognized solely by its livability: a happy accident of freeway-forbidding geography, Canadian social engineering and the best lessons of urban development.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2006/10/30/vancouver_3/feed/ 22 Destination: Baltimore http://www.salon.com/2006/10/23/baltimore_4/ http://www.salon.com/2006/10/23/baltimore_4/#comments Mon, 23 Oct 2006 11:30:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/literary_guide/2006/10/23/baltimore To understand Baltimore, it's helpful to get a grip on its geography. Baltimore is one of those odd American cities that lies in no county; instead, it dangles in the water, surrounded by a ragged blob of land. It has been said that Baltimore County looks like a monkey wrench hanging from the Mason-Dixon Line, which makes Baltimore City the bolt -- one that has been tightened a hair too much. Incapable of expanding, the city has been losing population and political clout since the 1960s, when white residents began to flee for the suburbs. Fittingly, all quintessentially Baltimore stories have a "Wizard of Oz" quality: Characters dream of escaping to someplace new, only to yearn for home. Or, as we say in Bawlmer: Hooooooohme.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2006/10/23/baltimore_4/feed/ 10 Destination: Argentina http://www.salon.com/2006/10/16/argentina_3/ http://www.salon.com/2006/10/16/argentina_3/#comments Mon, 16 Oct 2006 12:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/literary_guide/2006/10/16/argentina Bruce Chatwin, writing in "In Patagonia" (1977), his great travel book about the remote tip of the Americas divided along the Andes between Argentina and Chile, tells the story of a French farm boy who took it into his head to become king of the Araucanian Indians. In 1859, at the age of 33, Orelie-Antoine de Tounens set out for Patagonia, where, after a short parley with the Araucanians, he proclaimed his kingdom and unfurled a tricolor. Not long after, his majesty was arrested by the Chilean police, imprisoned, and then deported, a sequence of events that would be repeated in Argentina. He died a pauper back in France, where the imaginary crown was handed down at least into the 1970s. According to Chatwin, when Orelie-Antoine's immediate successor tried to get the Vatican to recognize his realm, a South American prelate said, "This kingdom exists only in the minds of drunken idiots."

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2006/10/16/argentina_3/feed/ 15 Destination: Southern Italy http://www.salon.com/2006/10/09/southern_italy/ http://www.salon.com/2006/10/09/southern_italy/#comments Mon, 09 Oct 2006 12:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/literary_guide/2006/10/09/southern_italy U.S. tourists, even Italophiles, hesitate to make their way into Sicily, Sardinia and the regions south of Rome. In contrast to the lushness of Tuscany and Umbria, the polish of Milan, and the smoky elegance of Venice, the Mezzogiorno (high-noon region) is perceived as being too poor, too coarse, too Mafioso and hotter than an inferno. Americans usually stop in Rome, where the traffic makes them wish they were back in Florence.

Much of southern Italy is poor, rough around the edges and Mafioso, but for those of us whose families emigrated from here, there is, under the skin of obvious problems, a heartbeat that feels unerringly true. It's not that the south is anything so simple as sincere; rather, there is a historical, political and psychological complexity to these regions that becomes both clearer and more complicated with each visit. I've spent months at a time in Calabria but always leave feeling I haven't stayed long enough.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2006/10/09/southern_italy/feed/ 10 Destination: Louisiana http://www.salon.com/2006/10/02/louisiana_4/ http://www.salon.com/2006/10/02/louisiana_4/#comments Mon, 02 Oct 2006 12:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/literary_guide/2006/10/02/louisiana Y'all want to visit a country within a country? Then come to Louisiana. Those of us who grew up here know what a bewitched and mythical place it is, full of the sweetest joys but also sorrows of unending depth. To paraphrase a friend who is one of Louisiana's most acerbic observers: "You love and hate Louisiana on a constant 30-minute cycle, and if you don't, you're not paying attention to it."

Katrina's aftermath only exacerbates what was already a complicated emotional stance of Louisianians, voluntary expatriates, Katrina's forced evacuees, and those who have managed to return to their mother state.

Louisiana is still, and always will be, a world unto herself -- authentic, life-loving, and replete with people who laugh loud, party hard and are friendlier than any clan I've ever known. I encourage anyone who wants to experience a part of the country filled with soul to visit the Bayou State, and I can suggest several books as traveling partners.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2006/10/02/louisiana_4/feed/ 11 Destination: The Alps http://www.salon.com/2006/09/25/alps/ http://www.salon.com/2006/09/25/alps/#comments Mon, 25 Sep 2006 11:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/literary_guide/2006/09/25/alps If, like Gore Vidal, you think of Hemingway as humorless, you might look again at this late passage in "A Farewell to Arms" (1929) where two border officials compete for the attention of a foreign couple, arguing over which idyllic Swiss resort offers the best winter sport: Italian-speaking Locarno, where they are standing, or Francophone Montreux, on the eastern end of Lake Geneva where the little Montreux-Oberland Bernois railway rises steeply above the town and runs deep into the Alps, toward Gstaad. The comedy anticipates the sorts of polite hostile exchanges one would later find in Beckett and Pinter. In Montreux, says the one official, there are possibilities for "luge-ing," adding perhaps unnecessarily, "Luge-ing is certainly winter sport." His colleague turns to the foreigner: "Is luge-ing your idea of winter sport, sir? I tell you you would be very comfortable here in Locarno." It continues:

"The gentleman has expressed a wish to go to Montreux."

"What is luge-ing"? I asked.

"You see he has never even heard of luge-ing!" That meant a great deal to the second official. He was pleased by that.

"Luge-ing," said the first official, "is tobogganing."

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2006/09/25/alps/feed/ 6 Destination: Australia http://www.salon.com/2006/09/18/australia_8/ http://www.salon.com/2006/09/18/australia_8/#comments Mon, 18 Sep 2006 11:10:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/literary_guide/2006/09/18/australia "Australians can't bear it that the outside world pays so little attention to them," writes British-American author Bill Bryson in "In a Sunburned Country," his 2001 travel memoir on Australia. This is true. While we're not often surprised that nobody knows that Canberra (not Sydney) is our nation's capital, Australians are interminably dealing with terrible, old jokes involving Paul Hogan, Foster's, kangaroos as transportation, and shrimp on the barbie -- not to mention constant incredulity that humans survive in a country teeming with poisonous snakes, spiders and sharp-toothed beasts.

In preparing a non-Australian for down under, it's also true that the best accompanying literature is that which risks reinforcing the cliché of Australia as the land of the wild, the dangerous and the empty. Our literary history is packed full of the stereotypes that Americans, at least, hold so dear. But, at its best, Australian literature manages to cut through the cliché and reveal some of what is at the core of our collective rough-as-guts personality.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2006/09/18/australia_8/feed/ 25 Destination: Norway http://www.salon.com/2006/09/11/norway_6/ http://www.salon.com/2006/09/11/norway_6/#comments Mon, 11 Sep 2006 10:26:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/literary_guide/2006/09/11/norway Norway's lands, like Hawaii's beaches, remain legally open to all. So it was that this spring, on my first visit to the ancestral homeland, my Norwegian editor, Jon Erik, could take me to an ancient burial mound on private land. A man was mowing the lawn. Jon Erik chatted with him for a moment, and then led me to a bulkhead door in the side of the hill; we might have been entering a New England potato cellar. The passageway was lined with stone. We went deep into the darkness to the central chamber; then Jon Erik activated the flashlight on his cellphone to show me the sad details of eternity. The vault was empty, the skeleton with its related artifacts having long since been removed to a museum, but Jon Erik said that on his uncle's property there also rose a mound, and his uncle was not going to let anybody open that one.

One of the things I love about Norway is the way that the past is so present. The Norwegian literature that allures me is equally past and present. Recently, I hired an artist's model to pose as the seeress in "Voluspá" (about which more momentarily), and as she lay there nude before me she began to recite from that ancient poem. It was as if someone in England had suddenly chanted some episode from "Beowulf," and in Old English.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2006/09/11/norway_6/feed/ 11 Destination: Turkey http://www.salon.com/2006/09/04/turkey_15/ http://www.salon.com/2006/09/04/turkey_15/#comments Mon, 04 Sep 2006 12:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/literary_guide/2006/09/04/turkey My husband knew better than to get me a diamond ring when he proposed. What I really wanted was what I always want -- plane tickets somewhere far away from wherever I happen to be. Rather than spend any money on a wedding, we decided to blow our rather paltry savings seeing the world. Right after eloping to city hall, we spent six weeks in Greece and Turkey. Then we came home, put all our stuff in storage, tied up the loose ends of our lives and bought one-way tickets to Saigon, commencing a yearlong jaunt through Asia. We've been to other countries since then, mostly in the Middle East and Europe. When I look at maps of the earth, I'm awed by all the places I haven't been, but I'm lucky enough to be fairly well-traveled. Last year, when I staggered over the finish line of a book deadline, exhausted and brain-fried, my husband and I decided to take another trip. We wanted to go somewhere foreign but familiar enough to be relaxing. I thought for a moment about where, in all the world, I'd most like to be. I didn't have to think long. Turkey.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2006/09/04/turkey_15/feed/ 16 Destination: North and South Korea http://www.salon.com/2006/08/31/korea_7/ http://www.salon.com/2006/08/31/korea_7/#comments Thu, 31 Aug 2006 12:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/literary_guide/2006/08/31/korea The DMZ runs across the Korean peninsula like a barbed wire belt, hiding an estimated 3 million land mines. Loosely formed during the waning days of the Korean War, the dividing line was made official during the 1953 armistice. The wire sprung up like kudzu vines and rifles haven't been put down since. Over time, the democratic capitalistic South has prospered, while the North limps along as a pariah nation led by a dictator's son who runs his fiefdom like an open-air prison.

North Korea is called the black hole of Asia. So little is known about the country that the intelligence community relies on satellite imagery and defector debriefings to create a picture of what is happening there, the world's most reclusive and repressed police state. One cannot expect much fine literature to squeak out of its closed borders, especially when famines waste the population every few years. What exists in the English language about North Korea mostly consists of outsider analysis -- scholars and journalists assembling what they can from scraps of press-trip propaganda and borderland interviews of refugees.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2006/08/31/korea_7/feed/ 6 Destination: Japan http://www.salon.com/2006/08/28/japan_12/ http://www.salon.com/2006/08/28/japan_12/#comments Mon, 28 Aug 2006 12:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/literary_guide/2006/08/28/japan The sidewalks in my childhood neighborhood in Kobe were lined with cherry trees, so each April I walked to school under their blossoms. Still, my mother took me to Kyoto, an hour away by train, to see the trees planted in temple gardens, their petals falling over quiet ponds. Appreciating beauty required a special trip, not a daily walk. These trees were trimmed perfectly, and cast dappled shadows on the rocks and the water. In Japan, tranquility comes from rigorous discipline. The gardens of Kyoto struck me as beautiful, but sad -- like my mother, who tried to overcome her unhappy marriage by being impeccably cheerful, polite and elegant. I left Japan at 20 to live in the States, but when I return in my reading, I am drawn to books that illuminate the austere rigor of beauty that's the essence of Japanese culture.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2006/08/28/japan_12/feed/ 12 Destination: Afghanistan http://www.salon.com/2006/08/24/afghanistan_52/ http://www.salon.com/2006/08/24/afghanistan_52/#comments Thu, 24 Aug 2006 11:30:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/literary_guide/2006/08/24/afghanistan Unless you are one of those intrepid Japanese who turn up occasionally here as in the remotest of places, chances are that you're not visiting Afghanistan as a tourist. There hasn't been much of that since the early '70s, when shaggy young Westerners made their way through Afghanistan en route to India, smoking hash and buying those bulky embroidered sheepskin coats that still lurk in vintage stores back home.

Today most foreign visitors either have a job to do or are visiting expat friends. And it may feel self-indulgent to travel for pleasure in Afghanistan now -- why aren't you helping the poor or starting a business and working six days a week like the other internationals?

It shouldn't. The country badly needs tourism to bring cash to the provinces, especially isolated, mountainous areas unlikely ever to develop other legitimate sources of income. While many visitors are under the impression that Kabul is safer than the outlying provinces, the reverse is usually the case. Common sense would dictate staying out of actual war zones -- these days, that's Helmand and Kandahar provinces -- but after six trips to Afghanistan and visits to 42 other countries, I'd say that the 10 Afghan provinces I've visited are no more dangerous than rural South America or Africa, places that routinely attract determined visitors.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2006/08/24/afghanistan_52/feed/ 7 Destination: Chile http://www.salon.com/2006/08/21/chile_7/ http://www.salon.com/2006/08/21/chile_7/#comments Mon, 21 Aug 2006 10:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/literary_guide/2006/08/21/chile Mad, crazy, insane.

Una loca geografía.

A geography gone mad.

That is how Chile was described to me almost as soon as I arrived on its shores in 1954, a 12-year-old Argentine boy who was to fall in love with that country and make it his own. "Una loca geografía" was, in fact, the title of a 1943 book (translated as "A Geographic Extravaganza" in the U.S. and which I cannot, alas, recommend because it has long been out of print) that friends of my parents kept foisting on me as a gift. The real gift, of course, was that wondrous land itself, which stretches from the stormy Straits of Magellan, up through Patagonia and the fiords, and then through an exuberant volcanic lake district with rivers the color of emeralds under the sun. And farther north are rolling semi-arid hills and verdant vine-clogged valley, leading on and on northward into the driest desert of the world.

A country not quite like any other: thousands of miles long and never more than a few hundred miles wide, isolated from the outside world by the cordillera de los Andes to the east and the most turbulent ocean on this planet, ironically called the Pacific, roaring to the west. As if Norway and the Gobi, Oregon and Italy, the Alps and Nantucket, had been compressed into one small nation, a land that doesn't fit into a novel, a land that demands the delirium of poetry. No wonder Chile is known as "un país de poetas."

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