How better to while away the lazy days of Twixmas than planning adventures for the coming year? The Book Lover’s European Bucket List by Caroline Taggart is a wonderful gift for wandering bibliophiles, a combination of practical guide and paean to European literature. One hundred literary landmarks are explored, from the heart of Shelley’s Rome to the contemporary Stockholm of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy. Meticulously researched and littered with writers’ quotes, Taggart whisks us away to a continental idyll, where you can ‘linger over a coffee or a cognac and imagine you are waiting for Simone de Beauvoir’.
We begin with literary heavyweight, France, and its Paris of Quasimodo and his beloved bells of Notre-Dame cathedral (thankfully reopening after the devastating fire of 2019). Taggart makes some interesting observations linking the cathedral to Victor Hugo’s classic 1831 novel, The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, an exercise she repeats with a tour of the Paris Opera House, recalling the plummeting, shattering chandelier unleashed by Gaston Leroux’s infamous phantom.
Those with a taste for the luxurious are also treated to a tour of the hotel where Oscar Wilde reputedly declared on his deathbed, ‘Alas, I am dying beyond my means’. One wonders what Wilde would’ve made of the Left Bank bohemianism that sprang up in the decades following his death, here Taggart treats us to a tour of the cafés and bars frequented by the ‘impoverished intellectuals who drank, danced and never seemed to go to bed- at least, not to sleep.’
Wandering into Germany, it’s practically compulsory to visit Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin, where we also discover Theater am Schiffbauerdamm, for many years the artistic home of the decidedly uncheery Bertolt Brecht, a playwright who once said that he did not write ‘for slobs who want me to warm the cockles of their hearts.’
Tourists wishing for warm cockles will, however, be delighted by Grimstad, Norway’s ‘Town of Poets.’ Visit Smag & Behag restaurant and enjoy a seven-course recreation of the Nobel banquet enjoyed by Knut Hamsun in 1920, the year he won the Nobel Prize for Literature.
The Nordic literary circuit takes us to Finland, and inevitably, some Tove Jansson Moomin-related fun. Although Taggart happily shares the various Moomin locations, she emphasises Jansson’s artistry, and also her love of Pellinge, a cluster of islands in the Gulf of Finland. It is here, she believes, that you will find the Finnish icon’s heart.
With literary stopovers throughout Europe, this fascinating guide is particularly wonderful on the underbelly of Venice. Take Thomas Mann on the strangeness of gondolas and their coffin-like blackness.
‘…a vehicle evoking lawless adventures in the plashing stillness of night, and still more strongly evoking death itself, the bier, the dark obsequies, the last silent journey.’
Wrapping up alphabetically in the UK, which is also blessed with some splendid literary locations, we’re treated to, amongst others, Jane Austen’s Hampshire, Shakespeare’s Stratford, and of course, Dickens’ London, where the festering streets immortalised in Oliver Twist now boast multi-million pound properties.
Published by The British Library and featuring some beautiful illustrations, this immersive guide is sure to spark ideas for your own literary grand tour.
The Book Lover’s European Bucket List by Caroline Taggart is published by The British Library, 224 pages.
