Oh Canada

We've got a lot of travelers at Booksmith, and this summer, more than one of us has ventured across the border into Canada. For travel tips and resources to guide you into your next trip to Montreal or Quebec City, or simply to travel there vicariously through the adventures and observations of Shoshana, check out our blog at http://globecornerbookstore.com/blogs/.

Baedeker's Back

THEY'RE BACK. Find out more at Booksmith's other blog, http://globecornerbookstore.com/blogs/.

Travel by Color

As a child I always loved the tales in which the characters escaped into paintings, portals to a new world. I have a vivid memory of the scene in the BBC's production of C.S. Lewis's Voyage of the Dawn Treader where two school children are sucked up from their humdrum school day into a framed piece of artwork to land in the middle of a strange world where the creatures are fantastical and the colors are new. Up until last month, I considered this phenomenon to only exist in the world of myth. That was before I traveled into one of Cezanne’s paintings.

My husband and I were visiting his cousin in the south of France, when our hosts decided to give us a tour of Aix en Provence, where they had previously lived for 20 years. We eagerly followed them through the narrow streets lined with walls the color of creamed corn with pigeon-blue shuttered windows. We watched the cobblestones for the markers that showed our path to be Cezanne’s. Eventually we ended up at an exhibition where we viewed some of Cezanne’s early works, the painter’s palette, along with a book of Emile Zola’s, inscribed to his childhood friend, Cezanne. All of these artifacts were thrilling, but the real treasure had greeted us along the horizon as we approached the town by highway, a presence I felt looming beyond the city streets: Mount St. Victoire, the subject of several of Cezanne’s most stunning landscapes.

On our way out of Aix en Provence, we drove la Route Cezanne, the route which Cezanne used to stroll, pausing to capture the fields, trees, and occasional houses on canvas. As we careened around the narrow roads, closer and closer to the base of Mt. St. Victoire, I rolled down the window and stared. Golden fields stretched before me, bordered by dark green Cypress trees. Occasionally a small cream stucco house would appear with a red-orange tiled roof. I recognized it all with something of the thrill of reunion and the sudden realization: We were inside one of Cezanne’s paintings. The colors were unmistakable: we had arrived, entered a world where life and art blurred into brilliant shades of color and sudden dashes of light...

Find the rest of this post and discover books about traveling by color on our blog at globecorner.com.

Searching for Saudade in the City of Lisbon

Our first day in Lisbon dawned clear and bright. We wandered blinking through sunny Rossio Square, down the grand grid-like avenues (designed by the Marques de Pombal after the devastating 1755 earthquake, our DK Eyewitness Lisbon guide informed us), and out into a brilliant Praça do Comércio, a wide square that opens to the Tagus River, which sparkled and danced before us.

Looks like Lisbon has thrown off its melancholy," my companion noted as I rushed toward the water, eager to see the line "where the earth ends and the sea begins," a phrase Jose Saramago appropriated from Portuguese poet Camões to begin his novel, The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis.

I reached the line, marked by two glistening white pillars, and bent down to touch the water. Warm waves lapped invitingly at my fingertips. I straightened and looked out to the horizon, expecting to think of distant lands, but was distracted by the immense red suspension bridge to my right, a twin to San Francisco's Golden Gate and created by the same designer. But this wasn't sunny California. When Saramago's character Ricardo Reis reached these shores from Brazil, it was raining. He was lonely, searching, though he was not sure for what. He knew only that the poet Fernando Pessoa had just died.

I had a copy of Pessoa's Book of Disquiet in my pack. But I didn't feel the disquiet that I had expected to descend upon my arrival, and I couldn't sense the strain of sorrow that runs through almost every book I have ever read set in the city of Lisbon, from Saramago and Pessoa to John Berger’s Here is Where We Meet and Dutch author Cees Nooteboom's The Following Story. In all of these books the boundaries between life and death blur like the constant flux of the Tagus on riverbank, and everyone yearns for something they cannot have.

"It's the Portuguese saudade that you’re after," our host at the Lisbon Story Guesthouse, Bruno, explained when I told him I didn't feel the same way in the real Lisbon as I did in the imagined. Saudade. I first heard the word while reading Berger, who defines it as: “the feeling of fury at having to hear the words too late pronounced too calmly.”

"Saudade is a word that has no definition," Bruno told us. "The closest I can tell you is that it is a longing for something that can never happen." He described a Brazilian musician who conceived of the idea as a mother continually unmaking and remaking the bed of her dead child.

I looked at Bruno. "I guess if I was after that, I shouldn't have come to Lisbon on my honeymoon. I should have waited for some heartache."

He nodded. "You cannot help but be a tourist now. But when you live here day to day, you begin to see it. The Portuguese are a sad people, for many reasons."

But slowly, Lisbon revealed its story to us...

Read more about our search for saudade on our blog at the globecorner.com.

Travelin' Partner

A few weeks ago, I had a work dream. You know, the kind of dream with not quite enough monsters to qualify as a nightmare but which nevertheless extends your eight-hour work day into the wee hours of the morning. Luckily, I work in the travel department at Booksmith, so while some of my work dreams have me shelving for 12 hours straight, other times I get to slip off into an unknown land I glimpsed on the cover of a guide during the day.

On this night I dreamed I was sorting through some folded maps at Booksmith. But instead of dividing the White Mountain National Park maps from the Green National Park maps, as I had during the work day, in my dream I was sorting National Geographic's new line of "Maps to Marriage." The bride's maps were white, and the groom's--green.

This dream may not come as a surprise to those of you who know I eloped to Europe last month and returned to Booksmith a married woman....

Read more about the elopement on our blog at globecorner.com!