Literature and Lanscapes

        In the library to find some poetry by William Blake the other day, I passed an irresistible book on a new-books shelf called Literary Places. Its cover—copper-shiny lettering over a painting of a red-roofed Greek city at the edge of a blue sea—was as enticing as its title. I took it home, of course.

        What a wonderful book! Its premise—that to travel to a place made vivid in fiction is to relive that book in that place—is the same as that of my first lecture for the Oregon Council for the Humanities' Chautauqua Lecture Series, "Swedish Literature and Landscapes." I chose novels and poems in which the Swedish landscape is as significant as the characters, such as Vilhelm Moberg's The Emigrants, set in Smaland, and, most strikingly, Gösta Berlingssaga, by Selma Lagerlöf, the first woman and the first Swede to win the Nobel Prize in literature. That novel's vividly evoked Värmland is the perfect backdrop for such a wildly romantic tale of 18th-century Sweden. Driving through it in the summer of 2015, I could easily imagine the wolves running alongside Gösta's sledge as he carried away the beautiful Anna Stjärnhök. I could see the Burlita Cliff, where Major Fuchs refrained from using a silver bullet to kill the great bear so the sexton could do it and thus win the hand of the lovely Fröken Faber. The novel's dashing romanticism, its bargains with the devil, the loves lost and won, the cavaliers so goodhearted and so worthless, the struggles to do right in a world where passion and human weakness work against the desire to do the right thing—such tales are rightly placed in such a landscape.

        How could Sarah Baxter, who wrote Literary Places, have left out Gösta Berlingssaga? How could she, in fact, have left out My Antonia, in which the characters' lives and personalities are formed by the Nebraska prairie; or Jack London's The Call of the Wild, a novel in which landscape is character if ever there was one. Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings's young adult novel, The Yearling, depicts the Florida landscape in so much detail that my son and I made a relief map of it, placing the house, the bear hunt, the swamps and roads and fields of the book exactly in place. Albert Camus's The Stranger is so intricately involved with the landscape of Algeria that Camus described Mersault, its protagonist, as "a citizen of France domiciled in North Africa, a man of the Mediterranean, an homme du midi yet one who hardly partakes of the traditional Mediterranean culture" because he is so much a part of Algeria. The cities and deserts of North Africa are so well depicted in Paul Bowles's The Sheltering Sky that they become characters themselves, powerful forces in what I found to be a horrifying work of psychological terror. How could Liertary Places have left out these significant landscape-and-literature books?

        But that's the way with book lists, isn't it? Someone is going to have some favorite that the list-maker omitted. Baxter did include many books I would have included, the omission of which would have been egregious according to anyone's list: Victor Hugo's Les Misérables (Paris), Elena Ferrante's My Brilliant Friend (Naples), Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist (London), Gabriel Garcia Márquez's Love in the Time of Cholera (Columbia, though I would have chosen 100 Years of Solitude instead), and, above all, James Joyce's Ulysses, with its descriptions of Dublin so detailed I could walk Bloom's entire day's journey, from book's beginning to book's end, when I was in Dublin in 1967; and Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights, a book whose characters could not be imagined anywhere except on those wild, windswept, cloud-glowered moors of northern England.

        You're probably wondering how I could leave out your favorite landscape-and-literature book. My reason is no doubt also Baxter's: There is a limit. One has to stop somewhere.