Jonas Thente: Some writers are lost in the geography

Since few months, I have lost me in the geography. I have been lost in the american literature, the wilderness ago I dropped off my map. It was about 3 x 3 metres, on the back were Alaska and Hawaii, and folded, was it to a format as thin as a normal book of poems. It may have been between two heavier books in any of the shelves. Until its found or replaced, I find it hard to read american novels which do not take place in the larger cities.

Some of you will understand why.

in Addition to a difficult kartfetischism I have an almost neurotic relationship to litteraturgeografi. If a novel is set in a completely fictional world, I can relax somewhat, but is anchored in reality, I immediately restless: looking for place names and other markers that will allow me to follow the story's characters as they travel by car from X to Y, and stops to pee in the Z.

With my map missing, I have difficult to read any of the novels and collections of short stories set in the american rostbälte where mining and bergsruckel glows in the dark.

”the Murder of the commander-in-chief”, gave me immediately a feeling of discomfort. The narrator describes his residence, in a valley south of Tokyo, but with the sea to the sea to the southwest. To the southwest? My hasty survey, made it clear that it must move about the peninsula of Izu, which is surrounded on three sides by the Pacific ocean. Läslugnet falls.

But soon, said Murakami to the cottage is located ”in the hills outside of Odawara” located above the peninsula, and I have a very hard time to get it all to go together when I look at the map. There may possibly be an advantage to read the fantastikförtjuste Murakami with a sense of situationell concern, but I would have preferred a more stringent terrain.

Some authors the blinds to the geography, but leaves the hints. Unfolds Dimitris Alevras novel ”the Man in the room” in Lund? It must never know, but the narrator can go from one side of town to the other in an hour and a half. And station in relation to the square... Yes, maybe, Lund, sweden. The author grew up there. But on the other hand... And so where I agree on.

begins with a confusing perspective. He is very careful with their contemporary environments in stockholm, but that is precisely why it will be a landslide when his narrator goes on the walkway along with the ”Centralbrons railway track towards the Old town and see the Bridge in the fund, and the town Hall to the right.

It takes all three nervous seconds before I realize that, well, he must have turned toward the west. Without clarifying this. Thus, it would have been ”... the railroad tracks toward the Old town and look to the right”. I can imagine other readers with an affliction similar to mine, but who are unfamiliar with the route – japanese, maybe – and desperate rustle with the map.

I'm exaggerating. But some writers are very sloppy with their environments, when they are altogether often make them up. They can suggerera me that the ”neighbor” spoken of with the utmost security lives in the house right next door, after a couple hundred pages to make it clear that the one where the neighbor is, in fact, live diagonally opposite, on the other side of the pitch.

can destroy a reading experience. The reader obtains an image of the site which is quite secure, so that the figures that move in it can be, how chaotic that time. To suddenly shift the neighbors and petrol stations, and grill-kitchen and glades, or to shift directions anyway, this is a breach of contract. There is that to consider a hötorgstavla titled ”Gryningsfiske in Bohuslän” and note how the sun rises over the horizon.

On the other hand. In a fantastic analysis of the last part of Marcel Prousts ”In search of lost...” drew patafysikern Jean Ferry a schematic of a building according to the novel's description, and came to the conclusion that the narrator, from the angle he was standing, do not, under any circumstances, could have seen the baron de Charlus being whipped by a male prostitute. Ferry shows the cunning that the only possible explanation is that it is the narrator himself who have committed themselves to this activity.

So can a sloppy cartoon environment also become a life subtitle, in the hands of a dedicated reader.

Read the other bokkrönikor by Jonas Thente, for example, an interactive on interactive literature.