As any avid reader knows, the journey of the mind is the greatest voyage of all. Regardless of where you are or the state of your finances, literary experimental travel gives you a ticket to ride—even though your physical destination may be no further than your nearest bookshelf or library.
Literary experimental travel gives you the opportunity to explore unknown (and familiar) regions. It is also the only Experimental Travel game in The Lonely Planet Guide To Experimental Travel, by Rachael Antony and Joel Henry (Lonely Planet 2005), that allows you to travel through time.
Whether your interest is in revolutionary Russia, 14th-century China or prehistoric France, you can travel there with the help of a book—and a little imagination.
Literary experimental travel: how to do it
Hypothesis: Travel around the world via a bookshelf.
Apparatus: You will need a bookshelf containing books, plus a pen and paper to keep track of your journey.
Method: Choose a book from the bookshelf and commence reading. Continue reading until a foreign country is mentioned in the text. Then choose a second book that’s somehow related to that country and begin reading again. Repeat until you have either returned to your point of origin or have completed one circumnavigation of the globe.
When I was at school, the librarian used to force us to engage in Uninterrupted Sustained Silent Reading (USSR). Although the Soviet Union may be dead, I approached this experiment determined to prove that the world of imaginary literary travel is glamorous, exciting and relevant.
And so quietly, respectfully and in the spirit of bookishness, I decided to travel around the world. Using nothing but other peoples’ words.
Literary experimental travel: the results
Departure: Dublin, Ireland
I began my journey at the top left-hand corner of my own bookshelf. There, I found James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
Therefore, my object would be to return to Ireland within an arbitrarily decided number of books—in this case, ten. Failing that, I would circumnavigate the world using Joyce’s bildungsroman (coming-of-age novel) as my starting point.
I settled into a comfortable armchair and began reading. I thought it might be several hours or hundreds of pages before I received a hint about my next stop.
Not so: on page five a reference to the Mozambique Channel sent me scurrying for my atlas. Unfortunately, I possess not one book either by, for or about Africa—let alone Mozambique. I needed to think fast. I was already ‘literally’ on a plane from Dublin, heading south for the great continent.
My solution was Craig Werner’s A Change is Gonna Come, a history of African-American music. Close enough. I started reading, and on the sixth line of the first page I received my next destination: Vietnam.
Things started happening pretty quickly after that. From Neil Sheehan’s Two Cities: Hanoi and Saigon it was a short and perhaps predictable step to France, and Jean Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers.
This sent me ricocheting across Europe to Germany, courtesy of Günter Grass’ Local Anaesthetic. The first page directed me to Alexandria, Egypt, where I came across another problem not unlike that posed by the Mozambique stopover. I had nowhere to get off my ‘plane’.
Transit: the Sahara …
I settled on Paul Bowles’ The Sheltering Sky, set in Morocco, or somewhere near it. The Sahara in any case. Not too far from the Nile. I wouldn’t be staying long, however.
No sooner had I sat down to read than I was ordered to catch the next plane to the United States. There, I picked up a copy of Nicholson Baker’s The Size of Thoughts.
For a moment I feared that this philosophic and reflective set of essays might prove to be my Waterloo. Leaving me bogged down and unable to continue moving.
I need not have worried. After about 10 pages I was offered a chance of escape via Lake Ontario. Ah, Canada! If only I was a Margaret Atwood fan. This stop, therefore, proved a dead end.
I continued with Baker until he made a reference to New Zealand. Okay, this was more like it! From Ireland to Mozambique to Vietnam to France to Germany to Morocco to the USA to New Zealand. And all within about 30 minutes reading time.
My flight route was beginning to look like a child’s drawing—a series of red lines hastily scribbled across the globe. Would I make it back to Ireland in time for tea?
Arrival … ?
My fate ended up in the hands of Captain Cook himself. A copy of Cook’s Journals, written while in Aotearoa, allowed me to island-hop my way north to Tahiti.
This led me to Bengt and Marie-Thérèse Danielsson’s impassioned history of nuclear testing in the Pacific, Moruroa, Mon Amour. They promptly sent me to England. Which was fine by me: nine books down, and I was almost back where I started.
Unfortunately, the next book on my shelf by an English writer happened to be Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure. And I found myself whiling away the rest of the afternoon In its Wessex setting.
I never did make it back to Dublin. But then again I did manage to see quite a bit of the world. I also realised that I needed to revamp my book collection.
My journey ended up as a real tour de force, not unlike a Tom Clancy novel. It’s an exercise that might come in handy if you are already overseas. Perhaps staying with a friend, and the weather outside is so foul that you cannot possibly leave the house. An afternoon spent touring the globe via your friend’s book collection could be just the ticket. And a very cheap ticket at that.
Librarian’s tips
An alternative, and perhaps more conventional, approach to this experiment is to read each book from cover to cover. To create an itinerary, choose your destination—the Middle East, for example—and start tripping around the region via its literature.
For serious literary frequent flyer miles, start with an author from your country, then read a book by someone from a neighbouring country and continue until you make your way around the globe. Note: this long-distance read will require around 193 books.
This is an edited and updated version of ‘Literary Journey’. It was first published in The Lonely Planet Guide To Experimental Travel, edited by Rachael Antony and Joel Henry (Lonely Planet 2005; out of print).
