Chapter and verses on the road to discovery
It’s a great joy to read about new destinations, before, during and after a trip.
It’s a great joy to read about new destinations, before, during and after a trip. Not just useful travel guides and personal accounts, but fiction that brings places and people vividly to life. “I read; I travel; I become,” wrote poet and playwright Derek Walcott. So before holidaying in Lisbon I read a translation of Antonio Tabucchi’s mesmerising novel, Pereira Maintains (corr; not mountains). Even in 1938 under fascist dictatorship, the city sparkles: “… Glittering, literally glittering … and a sky of such blue as never was seen …”
I also read novels by Portugal’s Nobel Prize-winning literary son, Jose Saramago, which help set the scene before absorbing the flavour of this beautiful old city, crumbling in places but always magnificent. I am equally delighted when seeing foreign-language editions of prominent Australian works in local bookshops. One day in a public library in Lisbon I am thrilled to discover, in prime position on the “Recent Returns” shelf, a copy of Richard Flanagan’s brilliant Tasmanian novel Gould’s Book of Fish in Portuguese. I’m intrigued, and wish I could compare notes with the mystery reader.
At the airport I buy a copy of Spanish-born Canadian Yann Martel’s The High Mountains of Portugal to read on the flight home, just because of its title. Recovering from jetlag, I rewatch a DVD of the film Night Train to Lisbon, exclaiming at all the locations I recognise. It’s my way of keeping Portugal with me just a little longer. Pascal Mercier, Swiss author of the novel that inspired the film, noted, “We leave something of ourselves behind when we leave a place, we stay there, even though we go away. And there are things in us that we can find again only by going back there.”
Indian novelist Anita Desai expressed a similar sentiment: “Wherever you go becomes a part of you somehow.” Lisbon, you are in my heart.
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