I kind of hate travel guides for a lot of reasons. For one, I hate traveling, and I am always suspect of the tone and content of a lot of them. So seeing a hotel listing from 1996 doesn’t usually tell me a whole lot about what to do in Paris these days. Also, it makes me think of the narrator of We Need to Talk about Kevin.
Anyway, this is a literary traveler’s guide to the French Riviera/Cote d’Azur starting on the western end at Hyeres and ending on the eastern front/Italian border with Menton.
For the most part I think this is fine. It’s a solid list of the kinds of writers who traveled in, wrote in, or wrote about the area. On the other hand it’s an odd collection of vignettes and factoids that are distracting and offensive at times. Also, a lot of the information I found here was just wrong.
So I do actually have some literary knowledge, and Ted Jones has plenty of geographical knowledge. So we’re at odds here. But some of his way presenting information is off, off-putting, or clearly based on a fact-only sense of the literature.
Is it true that James Baldwin wrote plays? Sure, but would you call him a “Novelist and Playwright”? No! You would call him a “Novelist and Essayist”. Also, Nabokov wrote “early notes about Lolita” here, but also…umm he wrote a whole novel that became the backbone of Lolita as well.
So it’s a limited guide…and belongs in a summer house, but I was frustrated by having to correct this as I went.
(Photo: https://www.amazon.com/French-Riviera-Literary-Travellers-Paperbacks/dp/1845114558/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=the+french+riviera+literary&qid=1552327006&s=gateway&sr=8-1)