Writers On Their Hometowns

What do writers think of the cities they come from? 

Writers fall in love with cities faster than any other tourist. In the urban squares and cafes, they find dialogue, in the arcades a play of light and shade, in the everyday humdrum activity they find an affirmation of the very truth of human existence. It would not be wrong to say that while men and women build cities, writers breathe life into them.

But how do writers look at the cities they were born in, the ones that contributed to making them who they are? Apart from the inevitable stirrings of memory and nostalgia, what catches their eye for detail, or makes them smile and sigh? This list is potentially endless but we chose to turn our focus away from the much celebrated charm of London and New York, and listen to a few contemporary writers and their evocative accounts of where they come from:

1) Joan Didion, on the sense of loss in California

Many people in the East…have been to Los Angeles or to San Francisco, have driven through a giant redwood and have seen the Pacific glazed by the afternoon sun off Big Sur, and they naturally tend to believe that they have in fact been to California. They have not been, and they probably never will be, for it is a longer and in many ways a more difficult trip than they might want to undertake…I happen to know about that trip because I come from California, come from a family, or a congeries of families, that has always been in the Sacramento Valley…If I could make you understand that, I could make you understand California and perhaps something else besides, for Sacramento is California, and California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension; in which the mind is troubled by some buried but ineradicable suspicion that things had better work here, because here, beneath that immense bleached sky, is where we run out of continent.

2) Hisham Matar, on the white heat of Tripoli

The ground was hot. I thought of returning to collect my sandals. It was a good walk still to the sea…I thought of putting on my flippers, but that would have made me walk as slowly and awkwardly as a pigeon. I tried to keep as close as I could to the walls of the houses, but the sun was vertical, the shade narrow and mean. It was quicker to walk in the sun. I walked like an insect, my elbows raised up to my ears, my back arched, my feet curling against the heat. I hopped quickly as if I were dying to pee. Several times I stopped to sit down and give my feet a break, rubbing them and blowing at them. I thought of the bridge sizzling above the fires of hell, the one we all have to cross to reach paradise. I held the sea as my target, my paradise.

3) Patrick Modiano, on post-war Paris burying its past

“…this autumn, [when] I went back to explore the area around the Rue des Jardins-Saint-Paul. The junk shop with its iron curtain was no more, and the surrounding buildings had been restored. Once again, I had a sense of emptiness. And I understood why. After the war, most buildings in the district had been pulled down, methodically, in accordance with a government plan…And on this wasteland, they have built row upon row of houses, altering the course of an old street in the process. The facades are rectangular, the windows square, the cement the colour of amnesia. The street lamps throw out a cold light. Here and there, a decorative touch, some artificial flowers: a bench, a square, some trees. They have obliterated everything in order to build a Swiss village, in order that nobody, ever again, would question its neutrality.

4) Juan Gabriel Vasquez, on the carnival of life in Bogota

The streets were starting to be adorned with Christmas lights: Nordic wreaths and candy canes, English words, silhouettes of snowflakes in the city where it’s never snowed and where December, in particular, is the sunniest time of year. But in the daytime unlit lights do not adorn: they obstruct, sully and contaminate the view…The pigeons have more wires to rest on, it’s true, and the corn vendors couldn’t keep up with the tourists who wanted to feed them, and the street photographers couldn’t keep up with demand for their services either: old men in ponchos and felt hats who seized their clients as if they were driving cattle and then, at the moment of the photo, ducked under a black cloth, not because the machine demanded it but because their clients expected it.

5) Orhan Pamuk, on Istanbul and its glorious past

What I enjoyed most about our family excursions to the Bosphorus was to see the traces everywhere of a sumptuous culture that had been influenced by the West without having lost its originality or vitality. To stand before the magnificent iron gates of a grand yali bereft of its paint, to notice the sturdiness of another yali’s robust moss-covered walls, to admire the shutters and fine woodwork of a third, even more sumptuous yali…even for a child, it was to know a great, now vanished, civilisation had stood there, and from what they told me, once upon a time people very much like us had led a life extravagantly different from our own – leaving us who followed them feeling poorer, weaker and more provincial.

6) Haruki Murakami, on life in the slow lane in Tokyo

I sat in the last seat and watched the ancient houses passing close to the window. The tram almost touched the overhanging eaves. The laundry deck of one house had ten potted tomato plants, next to which a big black cat lay stretched out in the sun. In the garden of another house, a little girl was blowing soap bubbles. I heard an Ayumi Ishida song coming from somewhere, and could even catch the smell of curry cooking. The tram snaked its way through this private back-alley world.

7) Rohinton Mistry, on Bombay and its everyday colours

In the flower stall two men sat like musicians, weaving strands of marigold, garlands of jasmine and lily, and rose, their fingers picking, plucking, knotting, playing a floral melody. Kariman imagined the progress of the works they performed: to supplicate deities in temples, honour the photo-frames of someone’s ancestors, adorn the hair of wives and mothers and daughters. The bhel puri stall was a sculptured landscape, with its golden pyramid of sev, the little snow mountains of mumra, hillocks of puris, and, in among their valleys, in aluminium containers, pools of green and brown and red chutneys …It was all as magical as a circus, felt Kariman, and reassuring, like a magic show.