Seagull World Literature – serie

A 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.

In this novel from esteemed political writer Tariq Ali, a father, Vlady, loses his job when he refuses to renounce socialist beliefs in the newly unified Germany—and as a result wants to explain to his alienated son what their family’s long and passionate involvement with communism has really meant. The story he tells is of Ludwik, a Polish secret agent and Gertrude, Vlady’s mother, whose desire for Ludwik is matched only by her devotion to the communist ideal. As the plot unfolds through the political upheavals of the twentieth century, Vlady describes the hopes aroused by the Bolshevik revolution and discovers the almost unbearable truth about the family’s betrayal. Written with deep political insight and sensitivity, Fear of Mirrors relates the extraordinary history of Central Europe from the perspective of those on the other side of the Cold War.“Ali folds his drama around the tight, cultlike atmosphere of Communist Party life, peopled by idealists who find their lives encumbered by betrayals, power grabs, and corruption and who, in the post-Communist era, must come to terms with their complicity with Stalinism. . . . This is a valuable book, especially for those interested in the current thinking of the European left.”—Publishers Weekly, on the first edition