Writer Unboxed

Back home now, having swapped an exceptionally cool European summer for a crystal-clear cold Northern New South Wales winter, I’m starting to reflect on my long and rich and amazing six months away. And one of the things I’ve been thinking about is how different a travel experience is if you are already deeply immersed in the literary and/or historical traditions of the country or place you are visiting, to one where you don’t know much about either but learn about it on the job, as it were.

 That’s how I can contrast my experiences not only in Paris and France which of course I know very well, having been brought up completely bilingual, not only for speaking but reading, so that I grew up with French picture-books, novels, poetry and plays every bit as much as English (and in fact missed out on some English-language childhood classics, like nursery rhymes, because I was five before i was exposed to any English-language stuff—but I grew familiar with them when I had my own children!) But also in Rome, which I felt I knew from the classics, both in books and films, and most especially in Russia, whose literature I have loved since about the age of 12.

In all those places, a thorough grounding in the literature deepened and enriched my experience immeasurably, peopling the landscape not only with the very real people and events I could see before me, but also with a host of characters I had encountered in the books set there. I could see Chekhov’s doomed families sitting at shabby tables in the long grass and frenzy of flowers of a beautiful, tender, so ephemeral Russian spring in the countryside; could spot Dostoevsky’s tormented souls slipping down that narrow alley in St Petersburg, away from the baroque magnificence of the great boulevards; imagine Tolstoy’s generals agonising over sacrificing Moscow. In the faces of people in the street, faces you saw hanging too on the walls of the Tretiakov gallery, I saw characters from a host of novels and plays and poems that I had thrilled to and loved and been puzzled by in equal measure, from Chekhov to Bulgakov, Tolstoy to Makine, Akhmatova to Dostoevsky, and many more. It’s such an atmospheric, extraordinary country, with such a terrible, wild and bloody history, and its literature portrays that, but also portrays the lighter side—the Russian sense of humour, which combines a black cynicism with a gossamer amusement and a deft play on words; the love people have for the countryside, for nature, for simple pursuits like fishing and walking and growing vegetables; the close family ties which are also constantly at breaking point, the love of conspiracy theories, the rich artistic, literary and musical sense(which is all still very much in evidence), born out of long, long winter evenings—and the fatalism. It wasn’t just ‘high’ literature of course, that I’d read—I’ve always been a sucker for anything set in Russia, spy novels, thrillers, adventure stories, comic books, everything.

It was weird, because literature had prepared me for some things, and so some of it felt familiar, like I understood—and other things, not at all. Some things literature had not prepared me for at all and I felt these with the shock of the new: for instance, the general lack of obvious surveillance (there were less police in the streets of Moscow and St Petersburg than in Paris, for instance), the eye-popping way Russian girls, especially in Moscow, seem to dress (generally, men seemed pretty macho; women very feminine, particularly young women who bloom apparently as colourfully but ephemerally as Russian flowers—the older chic lady you saw so often in Paris was totally absent in Russian cities);the general ignoring of regulations in places like museums which in France would have had some guardian dragon tut-tutting fiercely; the extraordinary revelation that many Russians had not been scared of the US during the Cold War—but of Germany, possibly a legacy of World War 2 heightened by Communist propaganda..All these things, and a lot more, I learned; but the knowledge I had before, coming out of that long literary immersion, only enriched those as well.

The experience of Rome, too, was gilded and highlighted for me by my earlier reading—for while nothing replaces the absolute lived experience of a place, to come to it armed with literary and historical allusions did not for me veil reality but only enhanced it.

 But one experience was rather different—when we went to Malta, a place of which I knew very little, apart from the fact there are many immigrants from Malta in Australia, and that it was the home of that amazing medieval order (which uniquely amongst such orders still exists), the Knights of Malta. I had not read anything set in Malta before we went there on a family visit—but discovered a beautiful, charming little place that had echoes of Italy and rather more distantly of England but was still very much its own thing, a cosy, intimate island nation with a rich, tormented history for its tiny size—the target of so many invaders, from Phoenicians to Arabs to Italians to French to English–and a long long culture, starting from the most amazing Neolithic temples I have ever seen (much older and more elaborate than Stonehenge for instance). It was quite an eye-opener and sent me on a crash course of trying to find out more; sent me in the direction of books set there, in an attempt to retrospectively understand, put in context, some of the things I saw there.

 Two ways of doing things; and whilst I think I still prefer the former, of coming to a place after having been immersed in its literature, the latter, coming to it unexpectedly, also has its charms. And both serve to portray the truth of the old adage—that travel really does broaden the mind! And that is perhaps especially true for a writer, whose lifeblood is surely in observation and discovery and experience, all transformed by the spice of imagination and the freshness of a unique voice.

Sophie Masson has published more than fifty novels internationally since 1990, mainly for children and young adults. A bilingual French and English speaker, raised mostly in Australia, she has a master’s degree in French and English literature. Her most recent novel, The Madman of Venice, was written for middle school children, grades ~6-10.

Sophie Masson

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