What setting (time or place) from a book or story would you most like to visit? Eudora Welty said that, "Being shown how to locate, to place, any account is what does most toward making us believe it...", so in what location would you most like to hang out?
I have read so many novels that have such lush and beautiful settings that I have been instantly transported there, and, more importantly have wanted to stay there. If I had to choose just one, though, it would probably have to be India, a place that in literature seems at once so exotic and strange, but then in an instant can seem exactly like home. I think I have read too much Salman Rushdie recently, but I have also felt this effect from The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy- the childhood the children have seems so incredibly different to my own, but then they just go to the cinema, and everything seems to realign again. It is this feeling that I often seek to find when I travel: to have wonderful new experiences and sensations, but then for it to also feel like home in whatever small way it can.
India does sound like a great place to visit - I would like to spend time in the villages described so lovelingly by R. K. Narayan. Perhaps meet Margayya who sits in the park in Malgudi in The Financial Expert. It is a small corner of the very big world of India.
ReplyDeleteAh, I've not read anything by Narayan, I just always find that books by Indian authors tend to describe nature in such a lush and wonderful way. I've just started reading Walden, however, and I might have to reconsider my ultimate visiting place as one of solitude in the woods, because that sounds pretty nice too!
ReplyDelete