Travel Writers Online

Is literary tourism a phenomenon that can be experienced?  The novelist, Marcel Proust, expresses the effect that literary texts have upon places in the minds of certain readers in his most famous novel. Just a note before you plunge in, Bergotte was Proust’s character whom he based on the Nobel laureate, Anatole France: Going to the Champs-Élysées Garden was unbearable for me.  If only Bergotte had described it in one of his novels, I would probably have wanted to get to know it, like all those things whose 'double' had been planted in my imagination.  Description warmed the things, made them live, gave them a personality, and I wanted to find them again in reality; but in this public garden nothing was attached to my dreams. (Proust)   Aller aux Champs-Élysées me fut insupportable. Si seulement Bergotte les eût décrits dans un de ses livres, sans doute j’aurais désiré de les connaître, comme toutes les choses dont on avait commencé par mettre le « double » d...

I was invited to give this talk to final year Cruise Management undergraduates, They are working on a travel blogging activity for their assessed fieldwork in Belgium.  Here are my Powerpoint slides if you would like to go through them again. They are stored on my Google Drive, so for the best viewing experience it is worth using your free Google login, or opening a free Google Mail and Google Account. This will also give you free cloud storage for your presentations. Travels in search of

English-language readers will be pleased to hear that another of Patrick Modiano’s novels has been translated from French and is available in the UK. If, like me, and my blog followers, you have become addicted to Modiano’s writing then this next one should be a real treat.  The original French version, called L’herbe des nuits has been around in paperback since May 2014, its literal translation would have been, well, Nights’ Grass , Night Grasses , the story itself holds a clue as the narrator searches for the lost words of a manuscript from the 1960s, one is put in mind of the lines from a poem by Mandelstam:   'What pain - hunting for the lost word, lifting these sore eyelids,   And, with lime in your blood, gathering night grasses for alien tribes'                                     ...

Back in July 2022, Hugues invited me to do some research and development to update literary walking guides. We were working on a project for Winchester and Emerald. I re-visited the ramble-strip design I had made for iPhone screens back in October 2014; I found it again on ResearchGate. By early August, I had a draft design, which makes a nod to the style of webtoons, with their gap between frames. My essential ramblestrip is still at the heart of the vertical scrolling pdf and ebook versions, though. Of course, I wanted to retain what I had learnt about narrative knowing, so you will see I have kept an I-narrator, and those all-important, past tenses to recount the walk across town. The comics sensibility, with its call-out speech bubbles, lets me add a second gloss to the voice of the narrator. The narrator’s cartoon memoji can hail the reader direct from the Waytale as it unscrolls down the phone screen. The webtoon wave has found its home in South Korea, where webtoon comics have...

Supporting the claim that readers build up a list of must-see places that their favourite authors frequented is this discovery in Rossi’s Le Voyageuse immortelle (2001, 10-11): Rossi remembers some friends of his saying they absolutely must see the place of the former Broussais Hospital on the corner of rue Curie in the old Doulon quartier of Nantes because it is the place where they believed, in 1916, André Breton worked as a medical intern.  André Breton met there Geneviève Mallarmé-Bonniot (1864-1919) as well as Jacques Vaché (1895-1919).   Vaché was a great inspiration to Breton; sadly, he died in a hotel room in Nantes on 6 th January 1919, from an overdose of opium.     The unpublished journal, or diary, of Mme Geneviève Mallarmé-Bonniot consists of 204 handwritten sheets running from Sunday 5th July 1914 to Tuesday 8 December 1917.  The part about Nantes starts at leaf or page 47. The journal was held by Mme Jacqueline Paysant in the 1990s. ...

Social Media researches across YouTube and through following WordPress blogs has yielded an exciting new detective fiction writer who both lives in Nantes and has set at least two of his novels in the city.  The main character in the stories is Capitaine de police Isabelle Mayet who moves to Nantes in Forge’s 2014 novel, La Trace du Silure .   In his next work, Un Parfum de soufre (2015) Capitaine Isabelle Mayet again investigates in the city.  In a YouTube video, filmed here in Nantes, Sylvain talks about how the intrigue takes place in the Jules Verne Museum. I am ordering my copies of these and look forward to writing more on Forge’s work for my travel writing research project on Nantes. Jules Verne was born in Nantes Jules Verne was born in Nantes on 8 February 1828. It is nearly the 200th anniversary of the writer’s birth. The house is marked with a bronze plaque, which I found during my stay at the Maison of Researchers. The address of the birthplace is 4 Ru...

  Emmanuelle Petit provides a more contemporary view of the city of Nantes than than the authors we looked in previous posts, Gracq or Rossi. In Petit;s 2010 police novel, Elle n'était pas Marilyn . The key theme is one of setting off into new and unknown ways of living coupled with a slightly wistful look at the ways of life that will be lost.  This theme is grounded in two places that Petit uses in the story and which can be easily identified and visited today.   Capitaine Dubreuil crosses the Loire The first scene occurs very early in the novel (Petit 2010, 12) when the main police detective, Capitaine Dubreuil crosses the Anne de Bretagne bridge in his car and stops at La pointe de l'Île de Nantes beneath a large grey coloured crane, ‘sous la grue grise’ (Petit 2010, 12).  Dubreuil likes to come to this point to think, he can see out along the river Loire to the bridge, Le Pont de Cheviré.  Pont de Cheviré was inaugurated in 1991 and creates a link in t...

Some types of research you simply cannot quantify, such as a chance text message to a friend in Brussels about my search for novels set in Nantes.  The results: he sent me a link to the WordPress site of the Novelists of Nantes or in French, Les Romanciers Nantais .  From over 120 books by about 30 contemporary authors from in and around Nantes my first selection is this set of three.  Only deciding by the publicity on their web-site, my first selection are novels that use named streets or places that can be found in Nantes today, or at least say they are set in contemporary Nantes.   The Novelists of Nantes Via their WordPress Comments box I am attempting to make contact with the novelists to see if any would like to tell me about the places they use in their narratives. In my doctoral research I identify key moments in the detective novel, The Yellow Dog , when Maigret, the character, is in the exact same spot that Simenon, the author, would have known (Mansfie...

Airport transfers Airport transfers are a perfect example of tourism knowledge transfer at its most practical level. I use the example of ferry departure points in one of my lectures as a mystery unknown to the holiday visitor. The airport transfer mystery has just surfaced for our group of 15 as we plan our fieldtrip to Nantes.  How do you move 15 people, with luggage, from L’Aéroport Nantes Atlantique, Bouguenais (NTE) into the city centre of Nantes, within walking distance of, say, rue la Fayette or rue Descartes?  If you have never been before, then it is very difficult, perhaps impossible to find that important piece of knowledge.  UK travel company staff do not speak French so they cannot find the answer for their customers.  Besides, who are they going to call? Google Maps tells us it is 12 kilometres and takes 19 minutes by car, but we do not have a car, we’ve flown in.  Ah, you say, click on public transport in Google Maps, but Google says: ‘Sorry, we...