Once you have traveled through a book, there are those who prefer,
as dessert, to know the house, the grave or the streets through which the writer who has put us on edge
.
Fernando Savater and his wife, Sara Torres, undertook various adventures through the worlds of eight authors they admired.
Those wanderings looking for the lost scent met in
Lions Live Here.
Travel to the lairs of the great writers
(Debate).
"No one doubts that the urban or natural landscape where an author has lived necessarily marks his work, although it is often not explicit", says the philosopher and restless professor Fernando Savater (San Sebastián, 1947) in the prologue.
"The neighborhood of Palermo or the outskirts of Buenos Aires are not the same for Borges lovers as for others
, and strolling in London through Bloomsbury is not simply sightseeing but visiting unforgettable pages of contemporary English literature, as soon as one has Read Virgina Woolf and Lytton Strachey. Fetishism? Well, go ahead with fetishism. "
William Shakespeare, Ramón María del Valle-Inclán, Edgar Allan Poe, Giacomo Leopardi, Agatha Christie, Alfonso Reyes, Gustave Flaubert and Stefan Zweig were the eight names chosen. Each chapter is spiced with anecdotes, curiosities and references to this or that book. For example, the one dedicated to
Leopardi
, entitled
The glorious wretch
, Savater begins in this guise:
"He was rickety, hunchbacked on his back and chest, asthmatic, always sick with his stomach, joints
, nerves, almost blind. at the end of his life (...) He fell in love with love several times, although it seems that he never had the rare luck of sleeping hugging a woman ".
He then traces the literary career of Leopardi (1798-1837), who traveled to find a husband for his sister, wrote a kind of intellectual diary that he called
Zibaldone
(it reached 4,000 pages) and liked to climb the calloused lava slopes of Vesuvius .
The book includes a photograph of the villa delle Ginestre, where the poet stayed and wrote, another of his tomb, the Torre del Passero Solitario in Recanti, which he mentioned in a poem.
The philosopher and writer Fernando Savater.
Curious character Leopardi, who loved and suffered so much. Only in this way can this be written:
"The idea of happiness is always a delusion
. All illusions, the wonderful and colored illusions, are delusions; and yet they constitute the essential part of our existence, without which we would only die." .
Let's take a leap to the France of Flaubert (1821-1880), who this year marks the bicentennial of his birth. There Savater appears, in front of the Croisset pavilion where the author of
Madame Bovary
lived, read and wrote a good part of his work, "at the gates of Rouen,
on the banks of the Seine, a beautiful 18th century house with a beautiful garden that descends to the river "
. Savater says that the mansion or much of the garden no longer exists, "although the
gueuloir
can still be located more or less
, the walk between trees that shouted through the landscapes that he had just written to see how they sounded".
Savater leads us through the intellectual rooms of Flaubert with loose, precise, accurate notes like this:
"all the talent of writing does not consist in the end more than in the choice of words"
, a snippet from one of the many letters he wrote to his friend Louise Colet and where he related both his literary troubles and the confinement to which he applied himself when he was not traveling in Britain or the East.
The room where Flaubert was born, the Gefosse residence where he spent youth seasons, the Trouville beach he frequented ... Savater in front of a pharmacy in Ry, the town that is supposed to have inspired
Madame Bovary's
Yonville
. And a grave of the unintentional inspiring of Madame Bovary. These photographs bring us closer, they draw us into the world of
the epileptic writer who was inspired by a chronicle of events to portray the soul of a woman who is part of our life
. Savater writes: "It is suggested by the pathetic fate of a former student of his father [surgeon], Eugène Delamare, a doctor in the small Norman town of Ry, married secondly to Delphine Couturier, who tricked him into committing suicide later with poison Dr. Delamare died of grief shortly after. "
Shakespeare. A bedroom with a four-poster bed in green and red fabrics, white pillows, candles, a potty (enamel or ceramic, not seen in the photograph),
the Globe, a balcony
of
Romeo and Juliet in Verona
, a bust of the Bardo next to a window of leaded glass, the tombstone with these letters that he himself wrote: "
Friend, for the love of God refrain / from disturbing the dust that is kept here, / blessed is whoever respects these stones / and damn whoever touches my bones
. "
Similar to Poe: his house museum on Amity Street in Baltimore (USA).
Fernando Savater and Sara Torres in the house in the Bronx, a snapshot of the kitchen, the grave.
Or
the facade of the hotel where Agatha Christie disappeared (today it is called Old Swan) for 11 days
.
A customer identified her after seeing the photo on the front page of a newspaper.
She had registered with the name of the secretary her husband had more than an
affair with
.
All very Hercule Poirot style.
Life and literature always mixed.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
Know more
culture
literature
Philosophy
TheaterThe most violent Shakespeare: the revenge of Juliet, Desdemona and the others
Summer readings: five novels that Megan Maxwell would put in her vacation suitcase yes or yes
Literature Carmen Maria Machado: "Most domestic abuse is completely legal"
See links of interest
Last News
Holidays 2021
Home THE WORLD TODAY
Spain - Brazil, live
Pablo Carreño - Daniil Medvedev, live
Spain - Serbia, live
Spain - Argentina, live