LITERARY JOURNEYS

A richly illustrated catalog highlighting the literature of motion, from Homer to Amor Towles and much between.

The “world of travel,” notes former San Francisco Chronicle books editor McMurtrie, was once the province of men, though lately women and members of overlooked literary communities—Vietnamese, Arabic, Latine, and more—have been contributing significant works to the broad genre. The contributors take a suitably wide-ranging approach. It’s surprising, in that regard, to see Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Bram Stoker’s Dracula categorized as works of travel literature, though the monster and the vampire do go off and see the world as part of their mischief-making. More expected works, such as The Odyssey and Bashō’s Narrow Road to the Deep North, figure prominently, described with intelligent commentary. Readers could do far worse than to use this book as a kind of suggested-reading list in which a few of the usual suspects—On the Road, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Grapes of Wrath—join the compendium. (The commentary on Twain, linking the Mississippi River to the great rivers of classical literature to be found in Homer and beyond, is particularly sharp.) It’s toward the end of the book that the surprises begin to multiply, as the contributors proffer books likely not to be known to many readers—e.g., the Korean novelist Kang Eun Jin’s No One Writes Back, whose protagonist is “a traveler who goes from motel to motel,” or Zimbabwean author Petina Gappah’s Out of Darkness, Shining Light, a novel that reimagines the African journey of David Livingstone. More familiar recent works—such as Barbara Kingsolver’s Poisonwood Bible, Roberto Bolaño’s Savage Detectives, Colson Whitehead’s Underground Railroad, Towles’ The Lincoln Highway, and Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove—round out the well-selected inventory of travelogues.

A pleasingly instructive survey for fans of literary travel.