I picked up my first novel by Patrick Modiano in a bookstore in Strasbourg last fall. He had just won the Nobel Prize and it was obvious that the bookstore had scrambled to find copies of his books: there were new paperbacks with moody photographs on the covers and red paper straps that read “Prix …
You could smell them before you saw them, what Raymond Chandler called “that peculiar tomcat smell,” so evocative of southern California. I did not expect to smell them in a forest in Galicia, in northwestern Spain, where I spent a week last September walking the pilgrimage route to Santiago de Compostela. But there they were, …
Anita Guerrini 