I was hurting for some reading material and I found my nephew’s copy of East of Eden at my sister’s house. Surprisingly to me, I guess I never read it. On my way back home, I stopped in Salinas at the In’N’Out Burger and was looking at my GPS trying to figure out where Kate Trask’s whorehouse was and where Adam and Lee lived. I drove a bit up Castroville Street, but didn’t have the time nor the book on hand to try to figure out where everything was.
So, have you ever wandered around a town looking for the streets and landmarks in a novel?
I’ve wandered around Dublin trying to retrace the steps of Leopold Bloom, and had a Guinness at the bar he entered (what the hell was it called) which was no longer an Irish pub, but a god damned fern bar. But I have to admit it, I’ve never made it past the first couple pages of Ulysses.
I know there’s lots of other towns that I’ve attempted this in, but none come to mind at present. I’ve also driven to Las Vegas in a red convertible, but I won’t comment on the details.
It’s Davy Byrne’s bar in Ulysees - not been myself but I always thought it was a going concern and a popular spot on ‘Bloomsday’ - people doing exactly as you describe on 16 June.
I once wandered around North London in the early hours looking for the ‘Euston Tavern’ referenced in the Pogues song ‘Sick bed of Cuchulainn’ - Didn’t find it
In New Orleans once I looked for Constantinople St., the address of Ignatius J. Reilly from Confederacy of Dunces (though I don’t believe it ever gave the street number). Turned out it’s a very long street so I didn’t stay on it long and didn’t look anymore like the book’s description of the house than anywhere else in the general area (and has probably been renovated substantially since the book- the block or three I was on seemed a bit gentrified), but I got a pic of the street sign at least.
And of course so touristy I hesitate to mention it, but I took a Midnight in the Garden of Good & Evil tour of Savannah, GA. I was glad to go on it, but frankly I’d signed up for a Civil War tour but the Civil War tour guide wasn’t available and the one who showed up only knew the Midnight locations and some generic “that’s where Sherman stayed” stuff (they gave me a half-refund and I gave her a nice tip, and I did enjoy the book so nice to see the places).
Harlan Coben has written many books that partially take place in Livingston, New Jersey. It’s still kind of creepy when he talks about streets I know well, and even weirder when he mentions certain neighborhood streets where I actually know people live.
Not me but my Dad’s first order of sightseeing business on the first trip visiting my Brother who had recently moved ton Manhattan was to go West 35th Street to look at Nero Wolfe’s Brownstone and neighborhood.
That’s it! It still is Davy Byrne’s but when I was there in 2001 it had a feminine bright and airy feel to it that could not have been the way it looked it during Joyce’s day.
The sci-fi author Lee Killough wrote a series of three cops novels, set in the near future(maybe 2060’s?) They were set in Topeka, Kansas, my home, and while of course there were a lot of new places, there were streets and neighborhoods that are totally familiar to me. The most fun was visualizing the new places and things in place of what’s there now. Hey, a shuttle port out at Forbes airport! And Lake Sherwood neighborhood is still where a lot of rich folks live.
I had a high school English teacher who told us he took his wife on a tour of the locations in A Farewell to Arms, his favorite book. When we started on *Dracula *I asked him if he ever took her to Transylvania. In response he leaned in close and said, “are you talking about my wife, you little shit.” I don’t think he works there anymore.
I’m a big fan of Anne Tyler (especially Breathing Lessons, The Accidental Tourist and Searching for Caleb) and I understand her novels are “very” Baltimore- that you can find pretty much all of the places she describes. Next time I’m in that area I plan to test this.
I’ve never been to Memphis (only through it), but my brother says that John Grisham’s early works are practically a travelogue (Time to Kill [the parts where Carl secures the gun, deleted from the movie], The Firm, The Client, etc.).
I’ve never made it through Ulysses either, but I have a much better appreciation of it now, having been in Dublin on Bloomsday (June 16th) in 2000. I was with a friend who had taken a class on it and was able to explain things to me. We started at the tower at Sandycove in the morning (where Stephen Dedalus starts) instead of having breakfast with Bloom (eating “with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls”).
The best thing we did was to do the “Laestrygonians” chapter walk, along with a costumed member of the Balloonatics, a group that was leading the activities. In this chapter Bloom is hungry and looking for something to eat, so most of the text alludes to food and eating in some way! We crossed the river Liffey and fed the seagulls, and stopped in the restaurant where Bloom had a Gorgonzola sandwich and a glass of Burgundy. We also stopped by Sweny’s to buy a cake of lemon soap (they were doing a brisk trade).
Rather fun, and something I wouldn’t mind doing again!
I read Steven Womack’s Dead series when I lived in the same part of Nashville where they were set. He was pretty much dead on with the landmarks and many of the businesses mentioned were very thinly veiled versions of ones in the neighborhood.
I did cruise out some of the places that I had not been to prior to reading his work.
Yeah, I specifically had a Lucky Dog in commemoration of John Kennedy Toole. I would’ve had one anyhow because it is classic street vendor food. Also, I’ve had a beer at McSorley’s in NYC. This is another two-for; it is one of the oldest bars in NYC, and it was featured in Joseph Mitchell’s Down the Old Hotel.
I was sitting in Lorry’s Café in Oslo, reading Jo Nesbø’s “Rødstrupe” when I got to the part where the main character walks by Lorry’s Café in the middle of august, cursing out all the young, pretentious Interior Designer students drinking their coffee lattés with fashionable scarves wound around their neck while reading faux poetry or working on their pearly-white macs.
I was wearing a scarf, reading and drinking a latté :smack:
In 2002, a friend and I traced the path of Catherine Morland’s dash across Bath in Northanger Abbey. We didn’t run, though. We also looked up several other locations mentioned in Jane Austen’s novels set in Bath.
On the same trip to England, we also visited Rye, which is the setting of E.F. Benson’s Mapp & Lucia novels (renamed as Tilling in the novels). Benson describes the streets so exactly that if you are familiar with the novels, you know your way around the town even if you’ve never been there before.
I’ve never set out to do so, but years ago, after leaving a convention center on the West Side of Manhattan, I was walking up West 35th Street and realized I was passing where Nero Wolfe’s brownstone was supposed to be. So, I looked around just a bit for any block that looked like it might contain a house such as Rex Stout described.
