Martínez de Pisón, Geography as Literature

There is nothing. This book is not just a few walking and viewing notes, but above all, those of an avid reader and appearance. If the great director and writer Gonzalo Suarez usually recalled, “Cinema is the director’s gaze,” this is also the director’s gaze. Who describes, dreams. Live the landscape that will be, in the words of Bezu: “It is the human gaze that transforms the landscape, what was merely land, that interprets the landscape culturally.”

This volume is arranged in three parts, well differentiated and, therefore, perfectly complementary, to travel with the reader into geographies and times, Sailors, writers, adventurers, poets, philosophers and scientists who left an inescapable imprint of their experience and their writings. It should be noted, as a well-known and always impressive value, the closeness of the author’s prose. It seems as if what is being said is being recounted in a conversation between friends.

The remarkable erudition that appears on every page does not stifle, overwhelm, or beautify the reading because Peso’s counting combines, in the good Anglo-Saxon way, Knowledge of feelingsKnow and communicate. To underscore Ortega’s above words collected in one of the most relevant chapters, and in the greatest depth essay in the book, the part devoted to “Pedagogy and Landscape”: «Every landscape teaches me something new And urge me to a new virtue. Truly, I say to you, landscapes teach better than the most skilled educators.”

Here are all the landscapes mended by writing and witnessing, even ones as vast and longed for as those of ‘Lost Horizons’ (1933), those landscapes from a Shangri-La novel James Hilton And a movie Frank Capra That encouraged the dream of a better reality wrapped in dazzling landscapes, or “desert swimmers” than diamond count, He also produced a movie called The English Patient.

The book is an encyclopedia that forms and teaches about geography as literature, as a wonderful literary material, where there is not even a memory Dear Tintin. Now, if there is a chapter in which Peso’s skill reaches narrative perfection, i.e. “The Nantucket Navigator,” with Bo and Melville as redemption Of places lost and then places found, again, Melville, one of the greatest novelists, and fighting the white death of Valerian Albanov He narrated in his book “In the Country of White Death”. exceptional.

Or the secrets of the forest, a reason for us to delve into another wonderful book and another wonderful film, “Dersu Uzala”, the memoirs of Captain Arsenyev, brilliantly brought to the screen by Akira Kurosawa. And from there to Robinsons, Toro, Machado, Baroja, parks, neighborhoods (more than cities), ports, peaks, snow, volcanoes, forests. Landscape is a civilization, today’s thing is as essential as daily water.