Globe Corner Blogs

As a child I always loved the tales in which the characters escaped into paintings, portals to a new world. I have a vivid memory of the scene in the BBC’s production of C.S. Lewis’s Voyage of the Dawn Treader where two school children are sucked up from their humdrum school day into a framed piece of artwork to land in the middle of a strange world where the creatures are fantastical and the colors are new. Up until last month, I considered this phenomenon to only exist in the world of myth. That was before I traveled into one of Cezanne’s paintings.

My husband and I were visiting his cousin in the south of France, when our hosts decided to give us a tour of Aix en Provence, where they had previously lived for 20 years. We eagerly followed them through the narrow streets lined with walls the color of creamed corn with pigeon-blue shuttered windows. We watched the cobblestones for the markers that showed our path to be Cezanne’s. Eventually we ended up at an exhibition where we viewed some of Cezanne’s early works, the painter’s palette, along with a book of Emile Zola’s, inscribed to his childhood friend, Cezanne. All of these artifacts were thrilling, but the real treasure had greeted us along the horizon as we approached the town by highway, a presence I felt looming beyond the city streets: Mount St. Victoire, the subject of several of Cezanne’s most stunning landscapes.

On our way out of Aix en Provence, we drove la Route Cezanne, the route which Cezanne used to stroll, pausing to capture the fields, trees, and occasional houses on canvas. As we careened around the narrow roads, closer and closer to the base of Mt. St. Victoire, I rolled down the window and stared. Golden fields stretched before me, bordered by dark green Cypress trees. Occasionally a small cream stucco house would appear with a red-orange tiled roof. I recognized it all with something of the thrill of reunion and the sudden realization: We were inside one of Cezanne’s paintings. The colors were unmistakable: we had arrived, entered a world where life and art blurred into brilliant shades of color and sudden dashes of light.

I understood then, why Nichole Robertson in her new book, Paris in Color, decided to capture the city she loves in the brilliant shades distinct to that place. Robertson arranged her photos of the simple daily life of the city by color: pinks, whites, blues, greens; causing us to see Paris in a new light, through the lens of color. Virginie Raguenaud has also discovered the joy of traveling by color in her new guide to French and Spanish Catalonia, Colors of Catalonia. This book explores how the landscape and people of Catalonia shaped the artists who passed through that place, including Matisse, Picasso, Dali, and Chagall.

In his essay “My Monet Moment,” published in Alibis: Essays on Elsewhere, as well as anthologized in The Best American Travel Writing 2011, André Aciman writes about a pilgrimage he made to the site of a Monet painting he had previously only experienced in a wall calendar. “Stepping out of Monet’s tiny room,” Aciman writes of the experience, “I am convinced more than ever that I have found what I came looking for. Not just the house or the town or the shoreline but Monet’s eyes to the world, Monet’s hold on the world, Monet’s gift to the world.”

To encounter an original painting that you have only seen as a reproduction hanging in your dentist’s office or pixelated on the screen can be a breathtaking experience in itself; the texture of the brush strokes and vibrant colors make what was an interesting image into something new, on which you can reflect, something alive that begs for a more participatory interaction. To travel to the very landscapes out of which the artist’s inspiration sprung is a whole other experience, the kind of travel that allows you to walk the very lines between the painter’s brush and the canvas, between the real world and the re-created.

A few weeks ago, I had a work dream. You know, the kind of dream with not quite enough monsters to qualify as a nightmare but which nevertheless extends your eight-hour work day into the wee hours of the morning. Luckily, I work in the travel department at Booksmith, so while some of my work dreams have me shelving for 12 hours straight, other times I get to slip off into an unknown land I glimpsed on the cover of a guide during the day.

On this night I dreamed I was sorting through some folded maps at Booksmith. But instead of dividing the White Mountain National Park maps from the Green National Park maps, as I had during the work day, in my dream I was sorting National Geographic’s new line of “Maps to Marriage.” The bride’s maps were white, and the groom’s–green.

This dream may not come as a surprise to those of you who know I eloped to Europe last month and returned to Booksmith a married woman. We conceived of our elopement as a Voyage Out, after Virginia Woolf’s first novel, which is at once a travelogue about a group of British citizens adventuring in South America, and the story of a young girl’s initiation into life and love.

Travel, I discovered over the past few weeks of strolling the boulevards of Paris, hiking in the French Alps, and gazing over the red tiled roofs at the Tagus from the top of one of Lisbon’s seven hills–is the perfect metaphor for marriage: a dreamscape of new discoveries difficult to map, unpredictable, and sometimes startling, but always full of the potential for new life for the way it brings us out of our individual habits of being and plunges us into new encounters with the other: be that a new  language, landscape, or lover.

So go find your traveling partner, book your flights, and we’ll supply the maps.

Ulla the Golden Retriever

There comes a time in life when bluffing your way through adulthood actually turns into “Being a Grownup (capital G).” This is an important realization. Nobody ever knows what they’re doing really, but somehow they get there anyway. Which is, as it happens, one of the best perks of being a Grownup: having the freedom to take off and search for parts of yourself in faraway places. MiddleGround blogger, traveller, and Grownup Dylan Fitzgerald had a little help reaching her destination, and we are very proud that a member of the GCB staff gave her the inspiration to get where she needed to go. Obviously, we’re talking about Ulla the Golden Retriever, the Globe Corner Bookstore’s resident travel agent/guidance counselor extraordinaire.

It all started when Dylan read Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises in high school and made a promise to herself: One day she would stroll beside San Sebastian’s harbor and take in the sights from one of the nearby cafés, just like the novel’s main character Jake. After college and several dead-end jobs, Dylan wasn’t sure what to do with herself. Thankfully, fate brought her to Ulla during an afternoon walk around Harvard Square. Being the great Hemingway admirer that she is, Ulla encouraged Dylan to fulfill her old promise. After a few belly rubs and some serious conversation with her “new life line,” Dylan booked a trip, hoping to discover France, Spain, and maybe a part of herself too. “Paris. Bordeaux. Provence. Nice. Madrid. Barcelona. San Sebastian . . . I headed to Ulla’s bookstore shortly thereafter and started buying maps.” Continue Reading »

Globe Corner Bookstore’s Shortlist of Paris Literature

This shortlist contains work by French writers and by writers who secretly wish they were Parisian. From the literary life of the ’20s to the trials of a modern expat to classics by the likes of Hemingway and de Beauvoir, this list will satisfy anyone who wishes they were seated at an outdoor bistro with a café au lait right now.

. . .

Paris In Mind
edited by Jennifer Lee
In this captivating anthology, American writers share their pleasures, obsessions, and quibbles with the great city and its denizens. Including essays, book excerpts, letters, articles, and journal entries, this seductive collection captures the long and passionate relationship Americans have had with Paris. Accompanied by an illuminating introduction, Paris in Mind is sure to be a fascinating voyage for literary travelers.

. . .

Memoirs of Montparnasse
by John Glassco
In 1928, the nineteen-year-old John Glassco escaped an overbearing father and the dreariness of North American university life for the wilder shores of Montparnasse, the haunt of geniuses from Modigliani and Brancusi to Hemingway and Man Ray, not to mention a legendarily limitless source of sex and booze. He remained there for more than a year, in the course of which he ran into everyone who was anyone and had the time of his life.

. . .

The Flaneur: A Stroll Through the Paradoxes of Paris
by Edmund White
A flaneur is a stroller, a loiterer, someone who ambles through a city without apparent purpose but is secretly attuned to the history of the place and in covert search of adventure, esthetic or erotic. Edmund White, who lived in Paris for sixteen years, wanders through the streets and avenues and along the quays, taking us into parts of Paris virtually unknown to visitors and indeed to many Parisians.

. . .

Paris Stories
written by Mavis Gallant
This selection of Gallants stories, edited by author Michael Ondaatje, gathers the best of her many stories set in Paris, where Gallant has long lived. Here she writes of expatriates and locals, exile and homecoming, and of the illusions of youth and age, offering a kaleidoscopic impression of the world within a world that is Paris.

. . .

The Sharper Your Knife the Less You Cry: Love, Laughter, and Tears in Paris
by Kathleen Flinn
In 2003, Flinn, a 36-year-old American living and working in London, cleared out her savings and moved to Paris to pursue a dream diploma from the famed Le Cordon Bleu cooking school.

. . .

. . .

The Elegance of the Hedgehog
by Muriel Barbery
In this enthralling international bestseller, two girls live inconspicuous lives in the center of an elegant Paris apartment building. It is only when a stranger moves into their building–and sees through the girls’ disguises–that Paloma and Rene discover their kindred spirits.

. . .

A Year in the Merde
by Stephen Clarke
A Year in the Merde is the almost-true account of the author’s adventures as an expat in Paris. He becomes immersed in the contradictions of French culture: the French are not all cheese-eating surrender monkeys, though they do eat a lot of smelly cheese, and they are still in shock at being stupid enough to sell Louisiana, thus losing the chance to make French the global language.

. . .

Paris to the Moon
by Adam Gopnik
Gopnik is a longtime New Yorker writer, and the magazine has sent its writers to Paris for decades–but his was above all a personal pilgrimage to the place that had for so long been the undisputed capital of everything cultural and beautiful. As Gopnik describes in this funny and tender book, the dual processes of navigating a foreign city and becoming a parent are not completely dissimilar journeys–both hold new routines, new languages, a new set of rules by which everyday life is lived.

. . .

A Moveable Feast
by Ernest Hemingway
This vibrant portrait of Paris in the 1920s, published posthumously in 1964, is vintage Hemingway–evocative, self-mocking and frank. In an extraordinary chronicle of the sights, sounds, and tastes of Paris in a bygone era, Hemingway offers readers a view of his life and the people that populated his expatriate world- Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound and other literary luminaries.

. . .

The Mandarins
by Simone de Beauvoir
In her most famous novel, Simone de Beauvoir takes an unflinching look at Parisian intellectual society at the end of World War II. In fictionally depicting the lives of her circle–Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Arthur Koestler–and her passionate love affair with Nelson Algren, de Beauvoir dissects the emotional and philosophical currents of her time. At once an engrossing drama and an intriguing political tale, The Mandarins is the emotional odyssey of a woman torn between her inner desires and her public life.

. . .

Between Meals: An Appetite for Paris
written by A. J. Liebling, illustrated by James Salter
The many present and future friends of A.J. Liebling will find no better place for passing an evening with the grand man than Between Meals, his eulogy of the great restaurants of the golden age of Paris dining. Here Liebling looks back at the year of study in Paris that formed his joyous apprenticeship in the fine art of eating.

. . .

Paris: The Secret History
by Andrew Hussey
Andrew Hussey brings to life the urchins and artists who’ve left their marks on the city, filling in the gaps of a history that affected the disenfranchised as much as the nobility. Paris: The Secret History ranges across centuries, movements, and cultural and political beliefs, from Napoleon’s overcrowded cemeteries to Balzac’s nocturnal flight from his debts.

Veuve Cliquot estate

Tomorrow night, thousands, nay millions, of bottles of champagne will be popped, sprayed around and drank. As I try to figure out where, and if, I’ll be having a champagne toast this New Year’s Eve, I couldn’t help but reminiscing about my semester in Paris and my visit to the champagne cellars in Reims, France. I visited the Pommery and Veuve Cliquot-Ponsardin champagne houses. Touring the champagne valley may sound luxurious and extravagant, but in actuality, it’s less pretentious than it sounds.

While the Pommery and Veuve Cliquot houses and showrooms aren’t exactly modest, the best part of the tours, and the most important part of any visit to the region, is walking through the chalk and limestone caves in which each and every bottle of champagne ferments for well over a year. Even if damp, dusty, cool wine cellars don’t appeal to you, never fear, for each visitor is rewarded with a glass of bubbly at the end of the tour. So whether you’re toasting with Andre, Veuve or Dom Perignon, Happy New Year!!

Read more about the Veuve Cliquot empire in the recently released book, The Widow Cliquot by Tilar J. Mazzeo and about the Champagne valley in the Michelin Green Guide for the Alsace Lorraine Champagne region.

Rough Guide to Brittany and Normandy

The new destination for the month of July at the store is France (15% off all titles for France!). I always think that I am “over” France, but then something always comes along to remind me why I love it so much. I think that it is precisely all the cliches about France that I love the most. I love the Eiffel Tower, going on bateaux mouches, cafes, crepes, red wine, pain au chocolat and when people mock my “bizarre” accent when I massacre the French language. I lived in a microscopic village in Brittany for a year and now I sound like a strange American-French hillbilly with really outdated slang. I have even been told by professors that my French sounds like the equivalent of what would happen if you sent a Japanese student to the Deep South for a crash course of English. This did loads for my confidence, but in the end I have chosen to think that the way I can’t pronounce my “r” is endearing.

Which brings me to one of my favorite books that deals with being an American struggling with genders of nouns while living in rural France, Me Talk Pretty One Day, by David Sedaris. He makes me laugh and not feel like a linguistic failure. He also makes me really wish that he sat next to me in one of my language classes. I have a feeling he would be the best dialogue partner ever!

The 2008 Red Guide France came in on Friday, 05/09/08, and the 2008 Red Guide Paris is on its way! This year’s updated maps for France also made it safe and sound to our squeaky, but beloved, Michelin spinner.

Cycling Southern France: Loire to Mediterranean is one of the new cycling books and maps we’ve just received. Info on each long-distance or area ride includes text and annotated 1:200K Michelin map images. The 8.5″ x 6″ guide is spiral bound.

Also just in–regional maps for European cycling in the high (Germany/Austria/Switzerland) and low (Benelux) countries, as well as guides with maps for both U.K. mountain biking (in the Lake District, Downs, the Dales, the Midlands and the Peak District) and long-distance cycling routes.