The Library: Stefan Zweig's Journeys – On memories and places

Review: Paul Scraton

Throughout his life Stefan Zweig was a traveller. The Austrian writer made numerous journeys in Europe, criss-crossing the continent by train. They began as trips of leisure and inquiry, for the summer season of 1902 in Ostend or a trip in 1904 to explore the ancient streets of Bruges. By 1934 he was travelling for a very different reason; a Jewish writer in exile following the rise to power of the Nazis. First to England and then to the United States, before one, final, journey to Brazil where he committed suicide with his wife.

This collection of travel essays does not take Zweig beyond Europe, beginning as it does with that trip to Ostend in 1902 and ending, in England, with the ‘Gardens in Wartime’ of 1940. Presented chronologically, the essays that make up Journeys comprise a journey as a whole, through time and a changing Europe, one which begins with the security and stability of the Austro-Hungarian Empire of Zweig’s childhood and early adulthood and that passes through World War I, the flux of the aftermath, the rise of the Nazis and the (beginnings) of the horrors to come. 

Zweig’s own feelings about the transformation of the continent in those first decades of the 20th century can be read in his 1942 memoir The World of Yesterday - completed the day before he committed suicide – but it can also be felt in this collection, as the excellent translator Will Stone comments in his fascinating introduction to the book:

“It would probably be true to say that as Zweig gains experience as both a traveller and a writer, especially after the trauma of world war, his essays exhibit more depth and his concerns take on more urgency.”

And it does feel, as in his later memoir, that World War I is a defining period in Zweig’s life, such a violent upheaval that transformed the world he knew into the World of Yesterday, changing him as both man and a writer. On a personal level, as someone who has spent a lot of time thinking and writing about place and memory, and places that become ‘sites of memory’, it is the essay on Ypres that I return to time and again.

The essay is written in 1928, ten years after the end of World War I and in it Zweig is reflecting on the nature of how the battlefields of Flanders had become a tourist destination. The first Thomas Cook tours had begun barely months after the cessation of the hostilities, with the guns still warm and the landscape still scarred. Stefan Zweig writes:

“Presently the name of Ypres, the ville martyre, shouts from all the posters, from Lille to Ostend, from Ostend to Antwerp, and far into Holland. Organised tours, excursion by automobile, individually tailored visits; it’s a veritable bidding war. Every day some ten thousand people (perhaps more!) come to pass a few hours here: Ypres has become Belgium’s star attraction.”

This is something that I think about a lot, especially here in Berlin where it feels as if there is a memorial on nearly every corner; where it is possible to watch people climbing on the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, playing hide and seek or holding fashion shoots among the columns; where it feels, like Ypres does to Zweig, that the whole city is a ‘site of memory’. I have long come to the conclusion that this is a necessary process, and indeed when I have written about the subject of tourism and sites of memory it is a Zweig quote from this collection that always comes to mind:

“Nevertheless: it is good that, in some places on this earth, one can still encounter a few horrifying visible traces of the great crime. Ultimately it is something good too when a hundred thousand people, comfortable and carefree, clatter through here annually, and whether they care for it or not, these countless graves, these poisoned woods, these devastated squares still serve as reminders… All that recalls the past in whatever form or intention leads the memory back towards those terrible years that must never be unlearned.”

Sadly, this is the other power of this collection. Alongside his sharp observations, well-written descriptions and thoughtful reflections, as the essays progress there is something else at work that has nothing to do with the writer and everything to do with the reader: our knowledge of what is to come, especially in the later essays. For however comfortable and carefree those visitors were in 1928, there would soon be more graves, more woods poisoned and more squares devastated. The lessons were indeed unlearned. It is perhaps this realisation that led Zweig to take his own life across the ocean as the continent he loved was consumed by war once more. And it gives these essays a melancholy power, beyond simply the nostalgia for times gone by and places changed beyond recognition. It is not so much that they have changed, but the how and the why. 

Journeys by Stefan Zweig, translated by Will Stone, published by Hesperus Classics, 2010.
Tourism and Sites of Memory, an essay by Paul Scraton appears on Traces of a Border.

Elsewhere No.03 featuring writing on place, interviews and reviews, is out now and available via our online shop.

The Library: While Wandering, edited by Duncan Minshull

Review: Marcel Krueger

Next day I rose early, cut myself a stick, and went off beyond the town gate. Perhaps a walk would dissipate my sorrows.
Ivan Turgenew, First Love (1860)

When it comes to physical activity, I am hardly ever fazed by the fact that sweating and cursing on, say, a football pitch or in a gym smelling of old socks could be beneficial for my health. I prefer to exercise in an armchair, holding a book with one hand and occasionally raising a tea cup to my mouth with the other. The only exception I make is when it comes to walking. The reason for that may be that I come from a family of walkers: my grandmother, after growing up on a farm in the 1930s and crossing half of Europe after World War II, always spurned cars, buses and trains and preferred to walk, taking me on long hikes to chapels in the middle of nowhere when I was six or seven; my father and stepmother share a love for hiking the Alps, while my mother runs forest walks for the German Nature and Biodiversity Conservation Union.

So, I was raised a walker and have always walked since. I was also raised a book lover, and soon started reading what others thought about my favourite  - and only - physical activity. I read Fontane and about his ramblings in Brandenburg, followed Josef Martin Bauer through Russia in As Far as My Feet Will Carry Me, and escaped over the Himalaya with Sławomir Rawicz in The Long Walk. Over the years, two books on walking have stayed with me, my copies now dog-eared and mud-crusted from many days on the trail: one is Rebecca Solnit’s Wanderlust, the other Duncan Minshull’s beautiful anthology While Wandering.

In this 400-page book Minshull has summoned 200 writers past and present from around the globe, all who have written about the act of walking. In here are novelists, poets, film directors; among them the Brontë Sisters on the heath, well-known flâneurs Charles Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin, hiking veterans Robert Louis Stevenson and Bruce Chatwin, and psychogeographer Ian Sinclair. Some writers are represented in excerpts from longer works, some with poems, others with whole short stories like Edgar Allan Poe’s The Man of the Crowd (1841) or Daniel Boulanger’s The Shoebreaker (1963). Minshull has sorted all these excerpts topically, with chapters named “Why Walk”, “In The City”, “Tough Tracks”, or even “March Parade Procession” - all chapters posing questions to the walker that Minshull himself has answered in giving the excerpts new titles. Here an example from “Why Walk”:

WARDING OFF MADNESS

I am told that when confronted by a lunatic or one who under the influence of some great grief or shock contemplates suicide, you should take the man out-of-doors and walk him about: Nature will do the rest.
Apsley Cherry-Garrard, The Worst Journey in the World, 1922    

There are a thousand and one reasons for setting out, be they physical, psychological or spiritual. And that, for me, is the beauty of this collection (which, despite being in hardcover, has the perfect size for rucksack and duffel bags) - everyone who walks will find himself reflected in here, with all the positive and negative aspects the activity brings with it: setting out early on an autumn morning, the mountain trails waiting; the hundreds of impressions that even the shortest city stroll will convey; the misery of rain, blisters, and exhaustion. Even though I’ve read it over and over again, I know that whenever I open it anew will find something in here that connects me with other writer-walkers, reminding me that walking gives rise to thought, which in turn might lead to expression. Or sometimes just cursing on a hillside - which I prefer to cursing on a treadmill.  

As Robert MacFarlane writes in his introduction, “What I mean in sum to say is that this is the best anthology I know about an activity I cannot live without.” I do thoroughly concur.

While Wandering on the publisher’s website. Support your local bookshop!

The Library: The Moor, by William Atkins

Review: Paul Scraton

What do we read when we look at a landscape? What do we see, and perhaps as importantly, what do we feel? I have lived in Berlin for a decade and half, a move eastwards from my childhood home in West Lancashire first to Leeds and then to the German capital. Until I left England the landscapes of my imagination were always raised ones – the sea cliffs of Anglesey or the mountains of Snowdonia – and in Germany I had to learn to love the different and distinct attractions of the flatlands, the forests and lakes of Brandenburg or the big skies and low dunes of the Baltic.

Alongside the mountains and cliffs of North Wales, the other landscape of my imagination and the one that I would think of when I thought of “home”, was the moors. Living in Leeds for four years and returning ever since to visit family and friends, moorland spotted through a car window on the drive from Liverpool or Manchester airport gives me that first feeling of a sense of return… to land at Leeds Bradford is to play “spot the rocks”, searching through that tiny cabin window for a glimpse of the Cow & Calf above Ilkley and the brooding expanse of moors squatting above the towns and villages of Wharfedale below.

So it was not surprising that, standing in an English-language bookshop in Berlin, I was drawn to William Atkins’ The Moor and its cover image of boggy ground and tough grass. Subtitled A journey into the English wilderness I reached for the book as a salve to a bout of homesickness that comes every so often. What I found when I opened the pages was a captivating journey from south to north, from Bodmin Moor to the White Lands of the Otterburn Training Area, and a book that combines travelogue, history, ecology, literature, folklore and reportage in the way of the very best writing on place.

There is much that is thought-provoking about Atkins’ book, not least the fact this very “English wilderness” has been, for thousands of years, shaped by humans. From the Mesolithic tribes to the Romans, humans cleared and burned the uplands that would grow ever more hostile as global temperatures cooled. And so the people moved ever lower, felling more trees and clearing more land as they did so, the moors following them ever deeper into the valley.

It was man, then – man, with the climate, but not ‘nature’ alone – that made the moors. And it was man who continued to shape them: sheep grazing under the abbeys discouraged the resurgence of all but the least palatable vegetation: mat-grass, purple moor-grass, cotton-grass.

In recent centuries the moorland streams were dammed to create reservoirs to provide water for the ever-expanding cities of the industrial age, and heather was encouraged for the raising of grouse to be shot by guns of the great and the good. Indeed, it is only in exploring a restricted zone that had been declared around a military base over halfway through his journey that Atkins finds an expanse of moorland that has not been burned, grazed or afforested.

If man was to be eradicated, here was what would happen.

The other big question that The Moor inspires the reader to ask is that of land ownership and the impact of this human influence, not just on the moorland itself but for the communities below. I read The Moor as much of northern England was under water, as those “hundred-year floods” returned for the second or third time in recent memory, and the book explains exactly how burning and land management above, in order that a few rich folks can shoot a Land Rover’s boot-full of birds, can have catastrophic impacts on the people living below.

These are just a couple of aspects of what makes The Moor such a fascinating read. There is also plenty of literature, for one of the great gifts of the English moorland has been its inspiration for writers and poets. Atkins is no different, and as he describes the wildlife or the people he encounters, tells the stories and legends of the moors, or reflects on the politics of land and its uses, he does so with lyrical writing that certainly does justice to the melancholy and mysterious nature of these places that are, to my mind at least, both forbidding and appealing all at the same time.

William Atkins’ website

The Library: The Island that Never Was, by Robert Alcock

Review: Paul Scraton

As stories go, the building of the Zorrozaurre peninsula in Bilbao is a fascinating one. In the 1950s and 1960s a canal was dug to improve access to the Euskalduna shipyard as part of Franco’s policy of industrial expansion. Many of the residents of the area had already been rehoused when the plans changed and the project ground to a halt. The canal, that would have created an island, never reached its destination. And as Robert Alcock explains in his short but fascinating The Island that Never Was:

“Instead of an island, after the economic collapse of the early eighties the peninsula had become a lost world, forgotten by the rest of the city. Most people had no idea that four hundred residents still clung on.”

It was into this forgotten neighbourhood that Alcock moved in 1999 with his partner, and overthe course of the nine chapters that make up this book he creates a portrait of a community, of his neighbours and their worries and concerns, of the graffiti and where it came from, of its plant- and wildlife, and crucially how different people – some important and listened to, others not – had plans for Zorrozaurre that would completely transform the peninsula and by definition the lives of those people who called it home. Faced with a development master plan that would see many of them evicted, the locals were finally roused into action, including forming a residents association and taking to a bit of street-art themselves to paint a mural depicting life in the neighbourhood:

“It was a reminder that the neighbourhood existed – a fact of which, even now, most people in Bilbao remained ignorant – and a collective nose-thumbing at the authorities. It wasn’t only the squatters who could paint walls.”

It is not simply the story of an anonymous neighbourhood and its struggle for recognition and self-determination that makes this book interesting, although it most certainly does. It is the fact that it reminds us once again that everywhere – every district, every estate, every village, every town – has its story and there is a value to listening to what it is. It is the fact that it reminds us once again that communities develop on what seem, on the face of it, unlikely and perhaps even unappealing locations. And that what makes a community is worth fighting to protect.

Although it is not explicitly stated, the fact the The Island that Never Was has been published in a tri-lingual edition – English, Spanish and Basque – would suggest that Alcock’s intention was to make sure his neighbours in Zorrozaurre have access to this telling of their story. I am sure that they would be very proud.

Robert Alcock is a writer and ecological designer who moved to Bilbao in 1999 to undertake fieldwork for a PhD in marine ecology. He and his partner lived in Zorrozaurre for several years and were founder members of the Forum for a Sustainable Zorrozaurre. They still keep active ties with the neighbourhood. You can order The Island that Never Was via the Abrazo House website, where it is also possible to purchase an Ebook version.

The Library: Imaginary Cities by Darran Anderson

Review: Paul Scraton

I began to read Imaginary Cities in a bar on a pretend High Street of a make-believe village that was actually an out-of-season holiday camp on the German Baltic coast. From the bar you looked out onto the (indoor) street scene, complete with pretend houses, mock gas lamps and the chairs and tables of cafes and restaurants spilling out onto the “pavement”. The holiday camp was an imagined city of sorts, a self-contained world built in the 1970s for escape by the seaside. And such was the depth of the research and the scale of the ambition of Darran Anderson’s book, I half-expected to turn the page at one point and find a description of this particular imaginary city waiting for me on the other side.

It is a remarkable book, as Anderson takes the reader through and to almost every conceivable city of the human imagination, from the plans for actual cities realised or not, real cities in fictional settings, cities of myth and cities of legend, cities that we can walk through (and some that we could have done, had we lived in another time or place) and cities that have only ever existed in the mind, as a film set, or in the pages of a book. The scholarship involved in such an undertaking is apparent from the very first page, and it is how Anderson that marshals his material that makes the book work. Like a city itself, the book is fractured, with plenty of distractions along the way, and although sometimes you feel like Anderson might have taken you down a dead-end-street, you realise it was actually a diversion that took you to the intended destination by a more creative and interesting route.

As I read, both in the candlelight of the bar and the next day, rain and Baltic winds rattling the window of the apartment, each section of the book brought more to think about and more scribbles in my notebook. I left to go for a walk or a run and found that the book came with me as I attempted to process what I had been reading. And it is a feature of the book, and the quality of the writing, that I found myself writing out (and repeating to myself) direct quote after direct quote. Here are just a few, directly from the pages of my notebook:

On the bias of cartography and the stories maps can tell us… “decisions which haunt us to this day.”

On the law of unforeseen consequences and how pollution helped give birth to impressionism… “the future not only has side effects, it is side effects.”

On historical cities that although we know existed remain imaginary… “we know the dimensions of rooms… but we can only make educated guesses at what transpired within them.”

On the Tower of Babel… “every age built it again according to their own methods and pulled it down for their own sins.”

The book moves ever forwards, towards the next story, the theory, the next city of the imagination. We visit stories of the past told through stone and ruins. We learn about how cities are branded by their cinematic depictions or in books and art. We consider how buildings that once existed “exist little more than the planned buildings that were never built.” We think about the cost of cities, whether the workers who built the Pyramids all those centuries ago or those that built the new cities in the gulf (and are building the stadiums for a football World Cup). We question the politics of cities, and the morality play of meritocracy, where everyone gets the city they “deserve”, whether a villa in a gated community or the favela on the other side of the wall.  And we are forced to confront those places that were born out of the darkest corner of the human imagination to become the worst cities on earth. Places that were never supposed to be known about but whose names resonated through the second half of the 20th century and beyond. Auschwitz. Treblinka. Stalag.

By the time I returned to Berlin from the holiday camp by the sea I had finished the 500+ pages of the book. But it was not the scale of the ambition and the knowledge exhibited in the book that impressed me the most, although impress it did. It was that – like the best writing on place (or the idea of place) – Imaginary Cities influenced how I looked at my own city as I caught the S-Bahn from the main train station and then walked the handful of oh-so-familiar blocks from the station to my apartment building. Any book that provokes us into new ways of understanding our surroundings and moreover leads us to ask questions, about not only how we do live but how we should live is worthy of inclusion in any library of place, whether imaginary or not.

Imaginary Cities by Darran Anderson is published by Influx Press.

Follow the twitter feed @Oniropolis for Imaginary Cities updates, debate and musings.

You can read an interview with Darran Anderson in Elsewhere No.03 - available via our online shop here.

The Library: Lost and Found in Johannesburg, by Mark Gevisser

City of Gold and Empty Spaces

Review: Paul Scraton

After a brief prologue that sets the scene for a brutal and frightening home invasion in Johannesburg, 2012 - a story which will be told in harrowing detail later in the book - Mark Gevisser starts his story with a childhood map-reading game called ‘Dispatcher’ played on the pages of the family’s Holmden’s street atlas of the South African city. The young Gevisser would take addresses from the phone book and attempt plot the course of an imaginary dispatcher moving through the city… Only, it was not that simple and his dispatcher would sometimes come up short due to the seemingly illogical nature of the layout of the maps:

“Sets of neighboring suburbs were grouped - in admittedly pleasing designs - as if they were discrete countries, often with nothing around the edges to show that there was actually settlement on the other side of the thick red line.”

Some of the maps are recreated in the book, showing little islands of streets surrounded by empty spaces, the compass arrow marking north pointing this way and that. And sometimes those settlements on the other side of the red line were not to be discovered anywhere in the book, not even on a different page. For the Holmden’s Register of Johannesburg not only presented the city on the whim of a creative designer, but also erased entire black townships or else presented them as if on another planet. Attempting to dispatch a courier from his home to an address in the black township of Alexandra, Gevisser came up against uncrossable white space. The destinations may have been only two pages apart in Holmdens, but there was no route between them:

“The key plan might have connected the two pages, but on the evidence of the maps themselves, there was simply no way through.”

It might have been geographically inaccurate, but the atomisation of the city through these maps did reflect the divisions between black and white, rich and poor. Through this game played on the pages of Holmden’s in the back of his father’s Mercedes, the young Mark Gevisser begin to come to terms with the reality of life in his home country. It was, he writes, the start of the development of his political consciousness.

This rediscovery of his childhood cartographic games leads Gevisser to take a step further back, to explore the first commercial street guide to Johannesburg published by W. Tompkins in 1890, just a couple of years after the discovery of gold in Witwatersrand. This map was as much a fantasy as it was a reflection of the facts on the ground… many of the neighbourhoods laid out their in neat rows on the map were speculations, and some of them would never even be built. But the most meaningful discovery for Gevisser is the two small patches of land plotted out south of the railway tracks. Like islands in the open veld, one portion was allocated to “coolies” (workers of Asian descent) and one to “kaffirs” (black labourers).

This speaks to the viewer in two ways. Firstly, that “apartheid was embedded in the development of Johannesburg from the very start”. And the second was that all the workforce that would be needed to build this new city could be contained in twelve city blocks. “Here, then, represented by the Tompkins map, is the folly of apartheid capitalism and the reason why it was destined to fail, even if it took a century to do so.”

From this point on Gevisser, not only through his words but also through maps, photographs, newspaper reports and other documentary evidence, tells the story of the city and of his own family, who came from Lithuania as Orthodox Jews and ended up in a rich white suburban neighbourhood in South Africa. He tells the story of his own personal political development, in the bohemian corners of bookshops and bars, of his own sexuality and the lives of gay men under apartheid, and the many, myriad ways in which people were kept apart - and not only through the white spaces on a map.

The writing is gentle and fluid, leading you through the pages like he once led his imaginary dispatcher through the city streets, only with no dead ends along the way. Gevisser is excellent in its descriptive powers and with a creativity that can conjure entire imaged scenes from a single photograph.

In parts it is a gripping tale, especially when we get to the story of an attack on the apartment of his friends whom he was visiting at the time. It is brutal but could, in Gevisser’s own reflections, been worse (and what does that say?), whilst the aftermath paints a less than positive impression of the South African judicial system and the investigatory powers of the police. And while this is going on, Gevisser is self-aware enough to consider the classic reactions of guilty white liberals when faced with such a crime.

In this he is reflecting on contemporary South Africa, contemporary Johannesburg, and how the present - especially the new boundaries that have developed in the city, those new spaces between people that have been thrown up in the twenty years since the euphoria of those first democratic elections - are still being shaped by the divisions of the past. And yet he finds hope for his hometown, despite the continued difficulties and the challenging realities of everyday life, in one of the world’s most complex and fascinating cities.

Mark Gevisser's website

Elsewhere No.02 is out now, featuring great writing on place, reviews, photography, illustration and interviews. You can find out more information and order your copy online here.

The Library: Irish Journal, by Heinrich Böll

Review: Marcel Krueger

A lanky man in a raincoat and hat walks along the deck of the steamer bound for Dun Laoghaire. Irish families, travelling as cheaply as possible, have bedded down for the night, their possessions piled around them like tiny fortresses. The man overhears hushed conversations; between families, laundresses on their way home from London, priests. Sometimes he stops and leans against the railings, pretending to smoke but instead listening to the Irish complain about God and their fate. He is going to put them in a book.

Heinrich Böll (1917-1985) was always a political writer. A member of the famous German writers’ collective Gruppe 47, he started publishing novels, short stories and essays in 1949. Böll received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1972. His ideals were comparable to those of George Orwell: fiercely contesting totalitarianism, narrow-mindedness and prejudice. However, the further away from Germany he travelled, the more Böll the political novelist became Böll the explorer. And it was in this latter incarnation that he composed one of the classic works of German travel writing: his Irish Journal.

Böll and his family visited Ireland often, spending most of their summer holidays in the 1950s on Achill Island, Mayo. Appearing first as serial in Frankfurter Allgemeine newspaper, the collection was published in 1957 as Irisches Tagebuch, or ‘Irish Journal’. The journal is a series of sketches about life in Ireland, at that time a country of extreme poverty, strict Catholicism and torrential rainfall. As well as eavesdropping on conversations aboard the ferry from Holyhead, Böll strikes up conversations in pubs and, being German, marvels at how things are run without the slightest nod towards efficiency and yet still get done.

His portrait of Ireland is partly fictionalized, an idealistic rural alternative to life in industrialized Wirtschaftswunder West Germany. Böll was captivated by what he saw as a friendly, classless society living at a more leisurely pace. The contents of this short book, with an epilogue written 13 years after his first visit, is a reflection on the essence of the place that has, for some, become evergreen – in every the sense of the word. His words still reverberate with the many Germans who visit Ireland today:

“… here on this island, then, live the only people in Europe that never set out to conquer, although they were conquered several times, by Danes, Normans, Englishmen – all they sent out was priests, monks, missionaries who, by way of this strange detour via Ireland, brought the spirit of Thebaic asceticism to Europe.”

Maybe it is this idea of an innocent haven that has always drawn the visitors here. After all, Ireland was neutral during the Second World War; for the first German visitors after the war, the difference in landscape and mentality must have been striking. And maybe this fascination was somehow transported to Germany’s subconscious, and is what makes Ireland one of the favourite destinations for Germans even today.

Böll certainly plays with this perception of an innocent place steeped in mythology, and it seems to prevent him from engaging fully and critically with the Irish and their history. Some of his characters are almost stereotypically flat: the priest, the doctor’s wife, the drinker. Böll is fascinated by the poverty he sees, but to him that poverty is honourable, resulting as it does from overcrowding and a lack of resources, rather than from war and megalomania. Not once does he question the origin of this poverty, or dare to criticise the priests – he was a good Catholic himself. In his epilogue Böll even comments with horror on the arrival of the pill in Ireland. While admitting that it might liberate women and save the country from overpopulation, he writes “… this absolutely paralyzes me: the prospect that fewer children might be born in Ireland fills me with dismay”.

But this book, now 50 years old and smoothly translated by longstanding Böll translator Leila Vennewitz, was never meant to be a strict non-fiction travel report from an unbiased observer. Rather, it is a novelist’s way of both recording and making up his favourite country. Böll himself admits as much in his first sentence: ‘This Ireland exists: but whoever goes there and fails to find it has no claim on the author.” We have been warned.

This review originally appeared in our “zero edition” for the crowdfunding campaign.
Elsewhere No. 01 is out now - featuring writing from the Romney Marsh and Loch Fyne, Gyttorp and the Oderbruch, Bankstown and Nowa Huta, Arniston Bay and Prespa - get your copy via our online shop.

The Library: 60 Degrees North, by Malachy Tallack

Review: Paul Scraton

What does home mean to you? This is a question that we ask all our contributors in the series of interviews on the Elsewhere blog, and it is a question that shapes an awful lot of writing on place. In 60 Degrees North, Malachy Tallack follows the sixtieth parallel from Shetland to, well, Shetland. Along the way he passes through Greenland, Canada, Alaska, Russia, Finland, Sweden and Norway, always following that invisible line, reflecting not only on what he discovers along the way but also on his own personal story, starting with the sudden death of his father, just at the moment he had moved to England to live with him, a moment when he thought he had left Shetland behind.

It is the loss of his father that is the starting point for Tallack’s changing relationship with Shetland and his eventual journey along the sixtieth parallel, and it is fair to say that loss is a central theme of this book. In Greenland he reflects on the loss of culture and tradition, and the complex issue surrounding increased opportunity via education for young people that, simultaneously, presents a threat to an old way of life. Another theme, also that he begins to discuss in Greenland but which follows throughout the book, is the question of our relationship to place and to land.

In Canada, he reflects on the people who live in the area around Fort Smith, one third of which are Dene – a group of northern First Nations, one third Metis – aboriginal people of mixed European and First Nations descent, and one third ‘white’. As in Greenland, Tallack leaves with a sense of a people for whom the connection to place is different to that in Europe, and one which is linked to existential factors such as how life is lived and how society is organised. In Greenland, all space is public because it is a society of hunters, not farmers. The notion of private property developed alongside agriculture, a process Tallack describes as a colonisation, an attempt to tame, to fence it off in order to harness the resources it offers. In Fort Smith, he finds a similar attitude at work:

“For the Dene, the land is not a resource, it is a presence; it is not something separate from their community, it is integral to it.”

This connection to land and place can be found all along the sixtieth parallel, perhaps because of the harsh reality of existence in the north. And Tallack leaves Canada with more questions than answers, for if “we” as Europeans have lost this connection to land and place, then can we ever truly be at home? This is one of many questions provoked by the journey around the sixtieth parallel, and it is no criticism of the book to say that Tallack does not have all the answers. Indeed, it is instead a strength of the book that it asks questions of its readers, and provokes a response that will be as individual as the circumstances of the person holding it in his or her hands.

Interestingly, one conclusion Tallack does come to as his journey progresses is that our attachment to place – and thus a feeling of being “at home” in a place – is not something innate, that we are born with or carried in our DNA. On reflecting on his own background and family history, Tallack is is clear:

“Certainly it means nothing when compared to the connections I have made in my own lifetime. For culture and history are not carried in the blood. Nor is identity. These things are not inherited, they exist only through acquaintance and familiarity. They exist in attachment.”

So although 60 Degrees North is a book about a journey, and a very personal journey at that, it is one which provokes in the reader their own internal discussion about place, attachment, and what it means to be home. For this reviewer, it meant putting the book down for a moment or two to be transported to a back garden in West Lancashire, a cliff top on Holy Island with a view across to Snowdonia, or walking the coastal path along the Baltic Sea in northern Germany. It asks big questions about humans and their connection to and impact on the land we live on, but it gets its power from the questions it asks of us as individuals and our own relationship to place. As a writer asking these questions, Malachy Tallack can only answer them for himself. For the rest of us, we have a lot to think about when we turn the final page.

Elsewhere No. 01 is out now - featuring writing from the Romney Marsh and Loch Fyne, Gyttorp and the Oderbruch, Bankstown and Nowa Huta, Arniston Bay and Prespa - get your copy via our online shop.