Travel Writers Online

Thursday morning, 27th July 2023. The research project on slow tourism for the Channel ports is still very much in Step 1, the Library Stage. The earliest step in our process methodology using the book for travel researchers. In the last few days, though, a literary connection with the city of Caen has begun to emerge. It's exciting enough to report here on Travel Writers Online. Using dialogue journaling a trustworthy link has been established with a fellow blogger, Claude at the blog Livres d'un jour . Claude had published a review of a detective novel, Canicule sanglante (2022) by Pierre Guinot-Delery (b.1949).  The title would translate as The Bloody Heatwave . The review starts like this: " The city of Caen is suffocating under the effect of a heat wave. One morning, the body of the vice-president of the chamber of commerce and business leader is found dead in front of the courthouse." That was enough to make me order a copy from Amazon. It's due to arri

In 1952, between 23rd and 28th August, Michèle Bernstein spent time in the French port of Le Havre, Normandy seeking out the places that had inspired Jean-Paul Sartre’s novel, Nausea , or so we learn from some fragments left by Patrick Straram, collected together as Les bouteilles se couchent .  The Sartre novel which inspired Michèle Bernstein was from 1938; it was Sartre's first published novel. Sartre set the story in the port city on the estuary of the river Seine in Normandy where he had been a schoolteacher.  Nausea is written as diary entries, with street-names that should be easy to find for any literary dériviste ; in the quotation from Nausea below, the narrator, Antoine Roquentin has just come out of the library. A bronze statue of Gustave Impetraz stands nearby: Thursday, 11.30 I have worked two hours in the reading-room. I went down to the Cour des Hypotheques to smoke a pipe. A square paved with pinkish bricks. The people of Bouville [Le Havre] are proud of it becau