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Author: Michael Gorra
Nobody writes travelogs about Germany. The
country spurs many anxious volumes of investigative
reporting--books that worry away at the "German
problem," World War II, the legacy of
the Holocaust, the Wall, reunification, and
the connections between them. But not travel
books, not the free-ranging and impressionistic
works of literary nonfiction we associate
with V. S. Naipaul and Bruce Chatwin. What
is it about Germany and the travel book that
puts them seemingly at odds? With one foot
in the library and one on the street, Gorra
offers both an answer to this question and
his own traveller's tale of Germany.
Gorra uses Goethe's account of his Italian
journey as a model for testing the traveller's
response to Germany today, and he subjects
the shopping arcades of contemporary German
cities to the terms of Benjamin's Arcades
project. He reads post-Wende Berlin through
the novels of Theodor Fontane, examines the
role of figurative language, and enlists W.
G. Sebald as a guide to the place of fragments
and digressions in travel writing.
Replete with the flaneur's chance discoveries--and
rich in the delights of the enduring and the
ephemeral, of architecture and flood--The
Bells in Their Silence offers that
rare traveller's tale of Germany while testing
the very limits of the travel narrative as
a literary form.
From Booklist
Gorra's introspective, impressionistic account of his travels through Germany
is shaped--perhaps even haunted--by figures from the past: historical,
literary, personal. His musings on Weimar, for example, are shaded by
both Goethe's oak and the nearby woods, Buchenwald, and the way in which
their mutual presence mediates the visitor's experience. Lubeck and the
Hanseatic north are untangled with the help of, among copious others,
Thomas Mann, Walter Benjamin, Italo Calvino, and W. G. Sebald. Few travelogues
are as literary, and even fewer as self-conscious about the aspirations
and failures of travelogues in general. Yet for all his erudition, Gorra
enters the deep waters of German cultural memory a humble, inquisitive
novice, weaving personal and literary experiences, always uber-aware of
Germany as the foreign, the cultural Other, no stranger to malevolence.
Seasoned Germanophiles may well raise their eyebrows, but by journey's
end, they will likely also be reminded of what they found so fascinating
about Germany in the first place. A captivating, unique work of synthesis,
this selection will draw readers back to the library, bibliography in
hand. Brendan Driscoll
Copyright © American Library Association. |
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$24.95 (hardcover)
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