Literary Landscapes, edited by John Sutherland review – 'thereness' in literature

From Dickens’s charnel-house London, to Henry James’s elegant New York to Pooh Corner ... essays by 45 writers

I spoke once to a distinguished dramatist who was hesitating about writing his first novel. “I hate novels,” he said. “All those descriptions.” He went on to write a very good novel that, in the tradition of, say, Ivy Compton-Burnett, consisted largely of dialogue. Clearly Literary Landscapes will not be for him. It is for the rest of us, who cherish “the descriptions” that create and embody the world of the novel, that it is addressed. The present volume is the terrestrial counterpart of Laura Miller’s Literary Wonderlands, which celebrates the fantastical; offering short essays on more than 70 novels, the book sets out, its editor John Sutherland tells us, to explore “thereness” and the accompanying “fluidities and meltingness that places are subject to”. The selection follows three criteria: each book must conjure a land that exists or has existed; the books must be rooted in historical time as well as landscape; and in them place must always be more than setting.

The collection is divided into four chronological sections, from the 19th-century Romantics to the modernist period, from postwar panoramas to contemporary geographies. It is not entirely clear why the survey should start in the 19th century – are Fielding’s or Tobias Smollett’s landscapes less vivid than those of their successors? Or Goethe’s? Or Rétif de la Bretonne’s? To say nothing of Rabelais. But its range is nonetheless remarkable, considering that it deals largely with fiction and avoids travel writing altogether, however distinguished its literary pedigree. It takes in not only the self-selecting great depicters of place – Dickens and Balzac, Hardy and Joyce – but also Alessandro Manzoni, August Strindberg, Jorge Amado, Chinua Achebe, the to-me-unknown Dutch writer Gerard Reve and his Norwegian confrère Tarjei Vesaas, a whole swathe of writers from Port of Spain, New Zealand, Kars, Henan province, Kolkata and the Amazon rainforest, as well as Winnie-the-Pooh, Anne of Green Gables and the somewhat more downmarket Grace Metalious (of Peyton Place fame) and Françoise Sagan.

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from Books | The Guardian http://bit.ly/2Q6F4W8