Last Letters from Hav

Hav #1

by Jan Morris

Hav is like no place on earth. Rumored to be the site of Troy, captured during the crusades and recaptured by Saladin, visited by Tolstoy, Hitler, Grace Kelly, and Princess Diana, this Mediterranean city-state is home to several architectural marvels and an annual rooftop race that is a feat of athleticism and insanity. As Jan Morris guides us through the corridors and quarters of Hav, we hear the mingling of Italian, Russian, and Arabic in its markets, delight in its famous snow raspberries, and meet the denizens of its casinos and cafés.

Reviews: "After reading Last Letters from Hav, what travel writer would ever want to report from an actual place? . . . a vigorous literary hybrid; elegant fiction in its own right but also a respectfully witty homage to indomitable English travel writers like Lawrence, Burton and Blanch." -Elaine Kendall, Los Angeles Times

"A touching love-letter, not to an Invisible City but to life itself. Morris has penned a fable about an imaginary abroad to teach us about the here and now." -Peter J. Conradi, The Independent

"Jan Morris has marshaled reportorial insight and literary flair to describe nearly every interesting place on the planet. Unique among them is Hav, which she revisits in her latest, perhaps most insightful book yet." -Donald Morrison, Time

"Taken for the real thing on its first publication in 1985, this faux-travel memoir prompted fruitless calls to confused travel agents. It's no wonder: Morris's imagination is a marvel, her spectral country fully realized and fascinating. Hav, an eastern Mediterranean peninsula, rises believably in the mind, with its city skyline of onion domes, minarets, and one incongruous pagoda along with its glorious and complex history. Hav's past is ingeniously, believably intertwined with real events; its present is realistically faded and isolated, adding to the eerie feeling one gets of spying on a lost world." - Publishers Weekly

Genres: Fiction, Travel, Fantasy, Science Fiction Fantasy, Transgender, Science Fiction, Literature

203 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1985

About the author

Jan Morris was a British historian, author and travel writer. Morris was educated at Lancing College, West Sussex, and Christ Church, Oxford, but is Welsh by heritage and adoption. Before 1970 Morris published under her assigned birth name, "James ", and is known particularly for the Pax Britannica trilogy, a history of the British Empire, and for portraits of cities, notably Oxford, Venice, Trieste, Hong Kong, and New York City, and also wrote about Wales, Spanish history, and culture.

In 1949 Jan Morris married Elizabeth Tuckniss, the daughter of a tea planter. Morris and Tuckniss had five children together, including the poet and musician Twm Morys. One of their children died in infancy. As Morris documented in her memoir Conundrum, she began taking oestrogens to feminise her body in 1964. In 1972, she had sex reassignment surgery in Morocco. Sex reassignment surgeon Georges Burou did the surgery, since doctors in Britain refused to allow the procedure unless Morris and Tuckniss divorced, something Morris was not prepared to do at the time. They divorced later, but remained together and later got a civil union. On May, 14th, 2008, Morris and Tuckniss remarried each other. Morris lived mostly in Wales, where her parents were from.

Reviews

[mark monday · Rating 3 out of 5]

- and the impression is given of a monumental but neglected folly, built by a sequence of playful potentates for their own amusement down the centuries.

travel writer Jan Morris composes a requiem for all of her favorite places and cultures, casting them in the imaginary setting of "Hav" - a country similar to Turkey in style and to the cities of Istanbul and pre-civil war Beirut in its cosmopolitan juggling of cultures. the result is a beautifully written and melancholy trifle. the mournful tone comes from the notion that Hav is a country in sleepy decline, of course, but also from Morris herself, rueing the cultural erosion of such places by inevitable change agents. there is a mystery in the book: what exactly is about to happen to Hav that will change it utterly - and terribly? and why? it is a compelling mystery to wonder over; fortunately, Morris leaves many clues hidden throughout her concoction. overall this is a minor but still intriguing work. I was at first surprised at what I saw to be a central weakness: Hav is defined as a crossroads of many cultures - but apparently has no specific identity of its own. this seemed like such a strange oversight; even places like Malta that have experienced a succession of cultural influences from a range of countries still have their own unique identities. fortunately, Morris recovers - somewhat - from this lapse in creativity when she finally visits the troglodytic "Kretev", a curious race of Havian aboriginals who appear to be descended from ancient Celts, are the sole proprietors of fabled "snow raspberries", and house the endangered Hav bear within their network of caves and caverns. they are a fascinating creation; I could have read a whole book about them!

[Chris Whyte · Rating 5 out of 5]

I adore this book which I first read when I was a teenager not sure of my geography and whether Hav was a real place or not. Those who have described it as lacking plot are correct - not much appears to happen for most of the book. But those who complain of lack of characterisation are wrong because the character is the city itself to which all the vignettes Morris describes add layer upon layer of meaning. The resulting atmosphere is so compelling it's no wonder many people allegedly thought Hav was a real place.

[Jean-Luke · Rating 5 out of 5]

What better way to kick off Pride than to read my first book by travel writer/historian Jan Morris, who underwent gender affirmation surgery in 1972 and became one of the first high-profile transgender women in the UK. While Last Letters from Hav is fiction and does not specifically deal with this aspect of her life—given the disgusting times in which we are living, in the US specifically—transgender voices should be recognized and amplified, and not just during 🏳️‍🌈!

Now where exactly is Hav? Somewhere in Anatolia, in view of Cyprus and Syria, but only in Jan Morris's gorgeous imagination.

History has left Hav behind, and our own times too, like Professor Braudel, have wilfully ignored the place. Its modern reputation is murky. Its political situation, vague enough even when you are in the city, is a blur indeed to the world at large. There is no airport, no proper highway into the peninsula, no harbour deep enough for big ships, and only a trickle of tourists ever bothers to make the long and extremely inconvenient journey on the train. Not one foreign news agency or newspaper maintains a correspondent in Hav. Only the British have a consul here, though the Turks possess their own Delegation Office in the Serai, and Hav has no missions abroad.

Were it not for the vessels in the harbour, the train twice a week, and the vapour trails of the airliners flying high overhead to Damascus, Teheran and the further east, it would often feel as though the place occupied its own entirely separate plane of existence, insulated against everywhere else.

Throughout Morris teases her reader. Armand Sauvignon, the fictional novelist and creator of the fictional Polova, is said to have lived there. But the very real Hemingway visited as well, and the extra-toed cats at his Key West house are said to have Hav ancestry. Like the rest of Europe Hav endured WWI and WWII, but its history is long—even St Paul is said to have referenced the people of Hav. Chekhov mentioned Hav in one of his stories, and for a time Sigmund Freud lived on the eighth floor of the House of the Chinese Master.

Have you ever tasted a snow raspberry? Perhaps, but not the snow raspberries Morris is describing. Or Hav salt, said to be an aphrodisiac? You can find Hav referenced in Baedeker, and in the writings of Marco Polo, but don't expect to stumble across these references. Point is, if you do not like to be teased like a mouse by a Hav cat, then simply do not bother. Hav is, I suspect, a place in which Wes Anderson would feel at home.

[Jesse Whitehead · Rating 1 out of 5]

This may be not only the most boring, but also the most pointless book that I have ever read. I don’t read travelogues so I don’t know if this is good or bad by those standards, though Jan Morris, in the eighties, was one of the most respected travel writers.

The unfortunate, weird, and amazing thing about this one is that the city of Hav does not exist. This is a travel novel of Ms. Morris spending four months in a city that she made up. She mentions famous people that have visited this city (Hitler, Marco Polo, President Nixon, Darwin, etc.) and quotes authors who supposedly visited and wrote about Hav, including Mark Twain. She even includes some made up biblical references from Paul condemning the city.

The city is definitely a strange place and imagined with such realism that it seems like it could be real – there are actually a number of people who were rather upset when they realized they could not visit Hav.

Nothing happens. The city is decidedly banal (seemingly by design – both from its citizens and from the author) and the prose is abstruse and bloated. It is all descriptions of pedestrian settings or buildings that are not quite spectacular enough for tourists to have heard about it. If this was a city that I planned on visiting someday I might slog through it for ideas for what to do there. If I liked to live vicariously through other people’s adventures (is there any other reason that people read travel novels?) I probably wouldn’t get very far – it isn’t an adventure. As it is there is nothing to recommend it and I find myself questioning why I even bothered to finish it.

[David Gillette · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really loved this book. Morris is a great writer, with a great sense of history, so when she makes things up, it is very convincing. I found myself thinking, Wait, Rimsky-Korsakov can’t have been inspired by the Armenian trumpeter in Hav because there is no trumpeter in Hav because there is no Hav … the big problem with this book is that it made me a.) want to travel during a global pandemic to a place b.) that doesn’t exist. But it might as well! The conceit of a postcolonial city-state like Hong Kong or Singapore springing up in the Levant (presumably somewhere in the Turkish Riviera, or maybe where the Principality of Antioch was during the Crusades) makes some real sense, given the bizarre quirks of the way empires die.

She obviously draws a lot from Venice and Beirut (Hav’s fate seems to echo that of Beirut in the Lebanese Civil War), but it really is a fascinatingly persuasive portrait of a nonexistent place, a really delightful piece of mundane worldbuilding. It is also fun to see a trans woman gleefully insert herself into her story (a couple of years before Roth did it). I hope that the roof race hasn’t been taken over by douchey parkour types. I hope that the conflicts of the late eighties didn’t damage the House of the Chinese Master irreparably.

[Jim Rittenhouse · Rating 1 out of 5]

My god, I've read some horribly boring, pointless books in my time, but this is excruciating. Got about 20% in before it hit the nearest wall, hard, and is now in the to-be-donated pile. Not recommended for anyone anywhere.

[Brian · Rating 4 out of 5]

Every patch of broken ground, every gulley, every broken-down Grand Duke's or Sturmbannführer's terrace was lyrically overlaid with flowers, half of them strange to me — flowers something like buttercups, but not quite, flowers very nearly bluebells, flowers not unrelated to asphodels or recognizably akin to primroses — and there were clambering plants with pink petals wandering everywhere, and up the gnarled trunks of the olive trees a sort of blossoming moss flourished. The combined scent of all these flowers, and many another herb, scrub and lichen no doubt, resolved itself into something peculiarly pungent, not unlike a sweet vinaigrette dressing, and overcome by this I lay out there flat on my back encouched in foliage. There was not a soul about. All those once-blithe houses, with their tattered awnings and their sagging pergolas, seemed to be utterly deserted. Far away over the canal the towers and gilded domes of Hav, the great grey-gold mass of the castle, looked from that bowered belvedere like a city of pure fiction. [48–9]

🔈 Pelle Gudmundsen-Holmgreen / For Violin & Orchestra

[Niki · Rating 3 out of 5]

What a strange and delightful book. I’m not quite sure what’s holding it back from 4 stars. Enjoyed a lot.

[Snail in Danger (Sid) Nicolaides · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've wrestled with what to say about this ever since I first read it. I knew I liked it. A lot. If you have ever wished you could go to your favorite author's imaginary city or planet, then this book is for you. If you ever memorized all the bits of trivia that that the author let fall about your favorite imaginary society, then you should give this a try. Likewise if you want to be transported out of your chair or seat on the bus and into a beautifully realized imaginary place. If, however, you only want to read about things that are 100% real, then well, I'm sorry that some hapless bookstore or library employee caused this to be shelved in the travel or memoir section.

[Isis · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is essentially geographical fanfiction, and Hav is a Mary Sue: visited by every important person in history, written about by every contemporary literary light, peopled by Russians and French and Chinese and Armenians and Turks and a strange cave-culture; it's got the most luminous sunsets, the most exquisite sea-urchins, the rarest berries, the strangest customs. I thought it was great fun, but I can see why some readers rate it as pointless and boring.

[Siobhan Markwell · Rating 1 out of 5]

Lacking detailed characterization and plot line, travelogues work because the reader is interested in the location. If the location doesn't exist, "travel writing" needs an outstanding style and some sort of unifying message. To be honest, I found the tone pretentious and suspect I wouldn't enjoy Morris's writing on real places. What's more, I completely failed to reassemble hundreds of references to real civilizations and personalities into any coherent theme.

[Colin Davison · Rating 4 out of 5]

Was it true, as some publicity suggests, that travel agents were thrown into confusion by requests to visit the extraordinary, intriguing but regrettably fictional land of Hav after publication of Jan Morris’ vivid and affectionate novel?
Or should one conclude, as in her account of the origin of the peninsula’s annual race across the rooftops, that the myth makes it so?
Hav is somewhere apparently on the southern coast of Anatolia, yet at once many places and none, which might be in the Crimea, or a sort of tripartite Casablanca in the Eastern Mediterranean.
The people are of many origins and races - Minoans, Arabs, Turks, Russians, Chinese – even troglodyte Celts like author Morris, who lets us know the word Hav or haf means summer in Celtic languages. Indeed this is a land in which it seems always summer, a gilded society living if not in harmony then in reasonable and rational equilibrium.
Morris produces a Gulliver’s travelogue – a tourist de force Time Out called it – with wildly inventive and colourful descriptions of the communities and their rituals, the Chinese, the cave-dwellers, the hippies, and the putative and secretive 125th calif of Islam.
He is just the latest in the line of the most famous figures of history who have been drawn to Hav, from St Paul to Hitler, via Marco Polo, Diaghilev, Mark Twain and Princess Diana, with Sigmund Freud occupying an apartment in a Chinese tower of Freudian symbolism. And among its distinctive fauna are the wonderful Hav bear, the Hav hedgehog and the breed of extra-toed cats kept by Ernest Hemingway.
Morris has great fun with what these luminaries made of the place, teasing out opinions that parody their actual writing, during both the golden and tarnished ages of Hav.
There is ultimately a tragic quality to the place, however, as this allegorical land of genial tolerance is torn apart by invasion. Like the snow raspberries that appear for just four days of the year, was this a manifestation that could not last?
It’s certainly a highly original piece of writing, a loving portrait of the diversity of life, but more in the style of the travel journalism for which Morris is acclaimed than a wholly satisfactory novel. There is no character development, and no action except the final coup. The ending is sad like the popping of a balloon of invention, rather than having the poignancy of experiencing the woes of personalities one has come to care about.

[Stephen · Rating 2 out of 5]

SUMMARY - Mediterranean waters muddied in a clever but sterile mind game.
_______
The concept was intriguing: how to represent the overwhelming and unmanageable complexity of history through a fictional representation that reveals the selectivity, subjectivity and partiality of the historian's task. To a degree Morris succeeds. Hav is atmospherically rendered in its aromatic flora, bangled folkloric populace, and relative geographic (dis)advantages of its position in relation to its geopolitical advancement. The more I reflect on it, the better it looks from an evaluative distance.

Morris fictionalises herself carrying Braudel's history of the Mediterranean. Flashbacks to undergraduate lectures brought this nostalgically back from the far recesses of my mind as a landmark in historical ambitiousness, written by a historian who was determined to take the widest possible lens on historical analysis (across time as well as geography). Morris then applies the sweeping ambition to the very same pretended historical project in which she cites him. Einstein, Hitler, Trotsky, Leer and many others are linked to Hav, in a spare 187 pages that cover ethnographic commentary that is at once particular and attempts to get at the heart of the city. One passage mentions a planned intersection that has different cultures on each spoke. It is no coincidence that the maze is used on the cover, after being covered in the text as being representative of Hav.

So it's clever enough that Morris's afterword in the edition I read (actually the first 2/3s of her omnibus 'Hav') suggests many were taken in enough to believe Hav was a real history. Morris was after all an established historian who had never published fiction before this Booker-nominated effort. My issue was that it was more successful as thought exercise than fiction. Thankfully Morris didn't seek to extend this to the length of Braudel. However, even by the 150 page mark it felt like so much scenic repetition. There is some historical interest in here for plausibility but ultimately it reads as history undermined, and fiction half-baked. I have recently learned a love for historical fiction where it uses imagination to bridge unknowable realities, and does enough to keep a Chinese wall to history itself, but this admixture brought by Morris muddied the waters.

Top marks, though, to the verse that Morris introduced. Her recreation of 19thC Punch in particular was spot on.

[Ross Wollen · Rating 2 out of 5]

What a curious book this is, a fictional travelogue. I've thought about writing my own fictional travelogues, and this, one, by a master of the non-fictional travelogue, is a cautionary tale, because in my opinion is just didn't really work.

Hav is a fictional city on a fictional peninsula. It seems like it abuts Turkey, and it is certainly a crossroads of civilizations like Istanbul, but a small one, always on the sidelines of world history. The important thing is that its heritage is Greek, Venetian, Baltic, Turkish, and much more besides that, a patchwork of many different cultures. It is stitched together almost entirely of real elements.

That's sort of my issue with the book - for a fictional world, it is far too plausible. There's an immense opportunity to create something we've never seen before, but instead Morris was intent on repurposing a million different details of the world. There must have been many readers that actually thought this was a real place, and why wouldn't you, because Hav is not any more exciting or intriguing than real cities, except to the extent that it is impossibly diverse.

Most chapters explore one ethnicity at a time - this is where the Greeks live, this is where the Chinese live, etc. They're short, but it got a bit tiring. I did more skimming than I normally would for such a quick book. The history of the place is similarly cobbled together from scraps of reality - Marco Polo, Ibn Battuta, Hitler, Tolstoy, Saladin, Freud, Hemingway, Churchill - they've all been to Hav. Unique, redolent details about the place and the people are unfortunately few and far between. Nobody's really native to Hav, except the troglodytes that live in the cliffs on the border, and they get a mere 4-5 pages.

Nor is there much adventure, character, or humor. There's no story, it's all setting. I guess many travelogues are 100% setting, description without much of a narrative, but certainly not all, and in a fiction it's an odd choice.

I read the newer edition that includes the follow-up, Hav of the Myrmidons, but I'm not sure if I'll read it. Always glad to try a unique concept, but this just didn't do it for me.

[Josephine Draper · Rating 3 out of 5]

Conceptually one of the more interesting novels I have read. Telling the story of Jan Morris's stay in the city state of Hav between March and August 1985, before the 'events' mentioned in the preface. We never actually find out what the events are, but warplanes fly over, and warships enter the harbour of Hav as she leaves, so we assume an invasion.

Hav, and the entire book, is fictional, despite the author's provenance as a travel writer and the structure as a travelogue. Instead, this is the author's love letter to the imaginary vision of a faded Mediterranean melting pot city on the nexus of Asia, Africa and Europe - maybe shades of Istanbul, maybe shades of Haifa. It's certainly positioned somewhere in the eastern Mediterranean, somewhere within missile range of Cyprus, Turkey and Greece.

Hav has an extraordinary history, dating back to Celtic settlement, and throughout its history has seen immigrants from most of the world. In the book, Morris describes English, German, Greek, French, Italian, Russian, Chinese, Armenian, and Turkish communities, as well as a troglodyte community descended from Celts. She has imagined a fascinating melting pot of architecture, featuring an Arab medina, Chinese towers, Russian spires, the Iron Dog built by Spartans, and British-Indian mansions. A unique flora and fauna including the Hav Bear and snow raspberries, and cultural traditions including a trumpeter to summon the dawn, and a race across roofs.

The book reads exactly like a travelogue, the only giveaway really is the sheer diversity of inhabitants and unparalleled access Morris is able to achieve, including talking to a Nazi in exile, the Caliph of Islam, Russian, Greek and Chinese residents, the British Agent, as well as to the mysterious Cathars and troglodyte Kretevs.

A very unusual book. Morris certainly made me want to visit. The ending reminded me of the sad end of Seven Years in Tibet - where it became clear that this was to be the last faithful picture of a place.

[Shauna · Rating 2 out of 5]

I wanted to like this a lot more than I did. The concept is interesting and the city feels lived in—which I enjoyed—but the writing style bores me. I liked the bits of history and gossip that came up in her conversations with residents, which made it feel real. However, Hav itself seemed to just be comprised of bits and pieces of other places/cultures. I really wanted to see what Hav would really have to offer for it’s own culture—what all those bits and pieces would evolve and meld into over time. I also wanted to know more about the ending and wish the politics in Hav had been delved into more throughout the book.

[George · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars. A short novel about an imaginary visit to a fictional place in Turkey on the Mediterranean coast. Jan Morris is contracted by an American magazine to write letters from Hav. She describes a cosmopolitan city, the inhabitants, the unique buildings, famous visitors impressions, the early morning trumpeter and the traditional race across roof tops.

Readers who enjoy travel writing in particular should find this book a satisfying reading experience.

This book was shortlisted for the 1985 Booker Prize.

[aquila · Rating 3 out of 5]

she certainly knows her history and culture but without characters and a coherent narrative this book failed to get me "in the zone". absolutely not a fault of the book but rather indicative of my personal preferences. had several soyjak moments when references to real life historical events and figures popped up throughout. i even learned of a few things of which i was not previously aware. thanks jan!

[Sara Barton · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book was incredibly difficult for me to get into - I did not expect the amount of “world building” style of writing.

While there were a few chapters throughout with more pointed storylines, and I assumed at those points things would pick up, there didn’t seem to truly be a plot until the last few chapters of the book.

This book would be good for those that favor a descriptive writing style and a slower pace, but it wasn’t for me.

[Kris · Rating 5 out of 5]

An amazing exercise in world-building. You can see Jan's experience from her travel writing come out to tell a story that encompasses the complex history of the Mediterranean, a feeling of place and the power of myths.

[Shane · Rating 1 out of 5]

This has sat on my shelf for at least 20 years. Finally got to it, or at least the first 40 pages of it, before we gave up. It had potential, but once we realized there was no plot, just monotonous description, we decided to try something else.

[Kim Bridge · Rating 2 out of 5]

I picked this up somewhere along the lines not knowing much about it, but it just wanderers around a very loose plot. Some parts were interesting but nothing tied the story together.

[Christopher Walthorne · Rating 4 out of 5]

A brilliantly realised travelogue of a fictional country that is certainly a pleasure to read - but at the end of the day, what is the point of it, and what is it trying to say?

[Paul · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well written, old-school travel writing about a fictional city somewhere in the Mediterranean (?);allows Morris to weave various strands of European and Asian culture and style into the narrative. Slow going with no real story, but somewhat charming.

[Bas · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love this book, it is a kind of condensation of Jan Morris' travel experiences, and longing for other places. Some people call it dull, because Morris firmly keeps her narrative within the realm of the possible, although Hav doesn't exist, it totally feels like it could, and the experiences of the writer there are the universal experiences of travel writers. And just when you come to love this strange little town as a reader, you are forced to leave.

[Benedict Reid · Rating 2 out of 5]

Jan's first novel. And it suffers from being the first. You can tell that the author hasn't quite worked up the courage to write a novel so instead you get a generally dull travel book for a non-existant place. There are moments of delight, but in general in is remarkable for how it manages to be such a long slow read while being physically quite small.

[Catherine Siemann · Rating 4 out of 5]

Morris, a distinguished travel writer, here shifts from fact to fiction, but creates an imagined country to which she voyages just as she did many real ones. I remembered this book as being vivid, lyrical, and rather sad, and it's all of those things still; it also holds up to postcolonial scrutiny better than I'd feared.

[Qwerty88 · Rating 3 out of 5]

This library copy of the book was charmingly anachronistic, with the thicker paper that library books used to have, and a yellowed envelope in the inner page and a bunch of old due date stamps.

The book too started out very meta, knowing that it is memoir of a place that never was, but at the end I was wrapped up in the dream.

[Jrobertus · Rating 5 out of 5]

5*. morris creates an enchanting and whimsical 5 month visit to an imaginary place. so real i went looking for it on the map and so did my sister-in-law jamie! terrific reading.

[Keith Miller]

LAST LETTERS FROM HAV by Jan Morris (1985)