Image: David Thuku, “Untitled XI (Motion),” paper cuts on paper, 2019, One Off Gallery, Nairobi. Courtesy of One Off Gallery and the artist.
This month we’ve traveled back in time and through our archives to bring you compelling international tales of journeys. Writers from nine countries document their own trips or send characters on their ways to destinations ranging from Corsican cemeteries to Indian train stations. W. G. Sebald climbs to a ruined graveyard and meditates on death and remembrance. Witold Gombrowicz embarks on a dyspeptic turn through Argentina, while Gabriela Wiener takes multiple sorts of trips. György Dragomán dispatches a desperate couple on a new form of transit. Subodh Ghosh and Peter Weber find dramatic surprises in train stations. Laila Stien tracks a seasonal migration turned tragic, while cartoonist Liniers records a cheerful car trip through Eastern Canada. And Gabriella Ghermandi’s harried narrator discovers she can go home again.
Road Stories: International Writing on Travel
Some of the writers here document their own trips, while others invent characters and send them on the road.
Campo Santo
The dead were thought of as extremely touchy, envious, vengeful, quarrelsome, and cunning.
A Trip through Ayahuasca
It is said after the vomiting comes the visions. I wasn’t seeing anything yet.
bilingual
from “Rabbit on the Road”
The island lights look like the stars came down from the sky and queued up.
Journey toward the Island
Forty animals drowned. The people will never forget it.
from “Peregrinations in Argentina”
At first we feel hatred toward other tourists—but eventually we begin to hate the tourist in us.
Haul
"The bears are tame, I broke them in myself."
The House of Wax
“Have you been able to forget me?”
Fish Television
I was clouds transforming, a sinking billow.
The Neighborhood Phone
For seventeen years I had dreamed of what my return to my country would be like.
On International Literature and Travel
This month, we’re engaging one of the more pressing questions facing the literary sphere.
On the “Good” in “Good Traveler”
Travel is a self-improvement project that has been sold to us as a world-improvement project.
We Usually Ask Literature to be Humanizing Only When It’s from “Over There”
Our dignified survival as a species probably depends on finding ways to listen to each other.
The Desire to Travel Responsibly Must Come before the Desire to Learn through Literature
There is a surer way for international literature to make us better tourists.
The Reader’s Openness to the Unfamiliar
When we ask whether international literature can make us better travelers, who are the supposed beneficiaries?
Book Reviews
Zeruya Shalev Connects Private Woes with Political Strife in “Pain”
Reviewed by Yael Halevi-Wise
The trauma of a terrorist attack and the disillusion of unrequited love haunt the protagonist of a new novel by the Israeli author, in whose work the past usually returns to impinge upon the present, clamoring for repair.
A Balkan Road Trip Leads to a Reckoning with the Past in Olja Savičević‘s “Singer in the Night”
Reviewed by Hannah Weber
A successful soap-opera writer struggling with memory loss sets off on a quest to find her vanished first husband in this new book by the Croatian novelist, poet, and playwright.