About this product

Product Identifiers

PublisherSeagull Books

ISBN-101803090308

ISBN-139781803090306

eBay Product ID (ePID)23057296095

Product Key Features

Book TitleTramp : or the Art of Living a Wild and Poetic Life

Number of Pages322 Pages

LanguageEnglish

Publication Year2022

TopicEssays & Travelogues

GenreTravel

AuthorTomas Espedal

Book SeriesSeagull World Literature Ser.

FormatTrade Paperback

Dimensions

Item Height0.8 in

Item Weight10 oz

Item Length7.9 in

Item Width5 in

Additional Product Features

Intended AudienceTrade

Dewey Edition23

ReviewsEven as his fame has grown in his native Norway, the range of what Tomas Espedal writes about has shrunk. Instead of an ever-expanding autobiographical space in which to tell his life story, Espedal's project is more of a paring-down, an endlessly repeated return to a single scene. In Tramp: Or the Art of Living a Wild and Poetic Life , Espedal journeys on foot to places like Germany, Wales, Greece, and Turkey, meeting a host of interesting figures along the way. . . . In establishing the silent context of family and home, Espedal brings to the foreground a past that is far more distant and not as clear-cut as the travels he explicitly relates. Chronological time and authorial distance give way to a personal history that is at once more primordial, and in its way, more poetic. Espedal's memoir thus becomes an especially vivid and deeply satisfying account of a 'wild and poetic life.'

Dewey Decimal910

Table Of ContentPart 1 Why not begin with a street Going to the dogs Before I go An impossible living room The dream of vanishing To walk away from a relationship A lonely wanderer's reveries I should have had a trade Down the open road Swansea. Wales. Summer '98 Staufen. Germany. Spring '99 The origin of loneliness So full of leave-taking The perfect day I found a resting place Breakfast with the Dales in Modal To the mountains Night in the mountains The sun's reveille With Anders Øvrebø at Ortnevik Boots and the Man, I sing! At the hairdresser's Faun's evening To go alone or with a companion The wayfaring books The diaries An attempt A midsummer night's dream Sleeping out On the beach Part 2 Sports and entertainment Giacometti and the prostitutes The Rimbaud route How does a journey begin? Finding the way Out of Greece, into Turkey Walking the streets of Istanbul The Lycian way A sojourn at Olympos Homesickness Epilogue

SynopsisA lyrical travelogue charting Tomas Espedal's journeys to and ruminations around the world, from his native Norway to Istanbul and beyond. "Why travel?" asks Tomas Espedal in Tramp , "Why not just stay at home, in your room, in your house, in the place you like better than any other, your own place. The familiar house, the requisite rooms in which we have gathered the things we need, a good bed, a desk, a whole pile of books. The windows giving on to the sea and the garden with its apple trees and holly hedge, a beautiful garden, growing wild." The first step in any trip or journey is always a footstep--the brave or curious act of putting one foot in front of the other and stepping out of the house onto the sidewalk below. Here, Espedal contemplates what this ambulatory mode of travel has meant for great artists and thinkers, including Rousseau, Kant, Hazlitt, Thoreau, Rimbaud, Whitman, Giacometti, and Robert Louis Stevenson. In the process, he confronts his own inability to write from a fixed abode and his refusal to banish the temptation to become permanently itinerant. Lyrical and rebellious, immediate and sensuous, Tramp conveys Espedal's own need to explore on foot--in places as diverse as Wales and Turkey--and offers us the excitement and adventure of being a companion on his fascinating and intriguing travels.

LC Classification NumberPT8951.15.S64