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. ...