I loved this post on this blog. And it got me thinking - if I could visit any of the places from the imagined landscapes of the books I've read where would I go. It's a charming thought really. And for me, that's what books are all about at the end of the day. About people and places that are so delicately imagined that by the time you're finished with the book they already seem familiar.
So here's my list of top five literary destinations in no particular order:
1) Macondo from Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude
2) Dehradun and Mussourie from Ruskin Bond's stories
3) Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry from J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series
4) Malgudi from R. K. Narayan's Malgudi Days
5) Istanbul from Orhan Pamuk's My Name Is Red
There are of course many many more like The Faraway Tree from Enid Blyton's stories, Miss Havisham's ruined mansion from Great Expectations, the fantastic cityscapes described by Marco Polo in Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, Mr. Biswas's house from V.S. Naipaul's A House For Mr. Biswas and Jack's Garden from his Enigma of Arrival, 1968 Prague from The Unbearable Lightness of Being to name a few. Even some not so pleasant lit-scapes like Orwell's dystopia from 1984 - Oceania, the Oklahoma dust bowl from Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath and Limerick in Ireland in the 1930's and 40's from Angela's Ashes.
I'm tempted to list out fictional characters I'd like to meet (from literature and cinema), films I'd like to live in and and works of art I'd like to be! This could take a while.....
(....more later on literary landscapes.)
9 comments:
nice list to make !! tried making my own...hard with the erratic reading i do!
Im sure u had a nice time making this one.......well..but there are so many more places to go ! so ;ooking forward to more such lists!!!!:D
mine would be pianosa from Catch-22.. though ive never quite finished don quixote, ive sorta got La Mancha visions stuck in my head.. another favourite, albeit scary, is the railway tunnel in susan sonntag's deathkit..
@aravind - figured pianosa would figure on your list :D
hehe i had my own visions of the bomber base and the b-25 mitchells based there.. the movie well far short of what was in my mind.. and it was a shitty movie anyway, killed off a lot of the little characters and quirks that make catch 22 really interesting.. .. the book rules forever :)
LOVELY :) Macondo is one of my all time favourites, i was muttering macondo when i read the first para of your post and then whoa! there it was first on the list...i would also love the busy marketplace from Love in the Time of Cholera...and 1968 Prague, in fact Prague or any city from any Kundera tale is lusciously tempting (read Life is elsewhere?)...and also the quaint village from 'Railway children' by ER Nesbit,..and faraway tree...i loved moonface and that crazy saucepan man...loved this post...just my kind of whimsy :)..keep making your lists!
oh and also while im at it, id like to be in all the rajasthani folktales :)
Yummy. I would love to run into you in lots of places on that list. Also the sunderbans from Midnight's Children, Huxley's dystopia in brave new world, Narnia and the middle earth!!
When I was younger I wanted to marry atleast one character in every book I read. (And then the books changed and so did I?) but I still have a big crush on Lord Henry from The Picture of Dorian Gray...
Malgudi and Mussourie are definitely on my list.
Malgudi more so.
Well,Pamuk definitely makes us jealous elucidating Istanbul so nicely....middle east specially the Turkish landscapes are definitely on my list :) well thought post.
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