Comment parler des lieux où l'on n'a pas été? (Paradoxe)

by Pierre Bayard

L’étude des différentes manières de ne pas voyager, des situations délicates où l’on se retrouve quand il faut parler de lieux où l’on n’a pas été et des moyens à mettre en œuvre pour se sortir d’affaire montre que, contrairement aux idées reçues, il est tout à fait possible d’avoir un échange passionnant à propos d’un endroit où l’on n’a jamais mis les pieds, y compris, et peut-être surtout, avec quelqu’un qui est également resté chez lui.
Ce livre s’inscrit dans un cycle qui comprend également Comment parler des livres que l’on n’a pas lus ?, traduit en plus de vingt-cinq langues.

Genres: Travel, Nonfiction, Philosophy, Writing, Geography, Books About Books, France

158 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 12, 2012

About the author

Pierre Bayard (born 1954) is a French author, professor of literature and connoisseur of psychology.

Bayard's recent book Comment parler des livres que l'on n'a pas lus?, or "How to talk about books you haven't read", is a bestseller in France and has received much critical attention in English language press.

A few of his books present revisionist readings of famous fictional mysteries. Not only does he argue that the real murderer is not the one that the author presents to us, but in addition these works suggest that the author subconsciously knew who the real culprit is. His 2008 book L'Affaire du Chien des Baskerville was published in English as Sherlock Holmes was Wrong: Re-opening the Case of the Hound of the Baskervilles. His earlier book Who Killed Roger Ackroyd? re-investigates Agatha Christie's The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. His book on Hamlet which argues that Claudius did not kill Hamlet's father remains untranslated into English.

Reviews

[Heidi Wiechert · Rating 3 out of 5]

I received a free advance reading copy of this book through Goodreads First Reads. FTC guidelines: check!

How to Talk About Places You've Never Been is a funny little book. At first, I couldn't figure out what tone the author was wanting to convey because he, quite seriously, discusses why and how to describe places that the reader has never been- a topic that I, before I read this, didn't take seriously at all. I finally settled my inner dialogue to "slightly grizzled professor who is smiling while lecturing" and that seemed to fit the bill.

There's a lot to enjoy in here like Marco Polo's hilarious description of unicorns. Polo is presented as an armchair traveler because he left out so many important details about the area he was describing (like the Great Wall) and, quite brazenly, just made other stuff up: "They have great numbers of elephants and also great numbers of unicorns, which are not smaller than the elephants. Here is what they look like: they have the same hide as a buffalo, feet like an elephant, and they have very thick, black horns in the middle of their foreheads." pg 9 Oddly enough, that sounds rather like the Siberian unicorn, doesn't it? Only problem is- they became extinct so long ago, that Polo would have never seen one.

The character Phileas Fogg from Around the World in Eighty Days by Jules Verne, goes around the world and never leaves his cabin to see the sights. Bayard thinks this is an excellent strategy: "The idea of staying in your cabin for the entire journey highlights the importance of the imagination and reflection in our approach to place. These are activities that Fogg is able to commit himself to completely vis-a-vis the places passed through, with all the more energy because he doesn't waste precious time visiting them." pg 29

Chateaubriand went beyond simply trying to describe his travels in Ohio, he put an island into the middle of it in his "memoir" and Bayard applauds his imaginative creation as precise accuracy of physical locations is not what is necessarily important to an armchair traveler:"As Jean-Claude Berchet recalls, (the island) was first situated in what is now Florida at the time of Travels in America. Migrating, it then made a foray into the Mississippi at the time of an 1834 manuscript, before, following its movement northward, it found itself here in Ohio, several thousand kilometers away, clearly justifying the epithet of "a floating island." pg 57

Bayard's reasons why the reader may, one day, have to convince someone that they had been somewhere that they actually had not been: "The first is adultery. ... The second, murder, is fortunately less common, but any one of us might become confronted with the necessity of having to take this route to ensure our peace and quiet one day. pg 103 How exciting and dramatic! And here I thought this book was just about sitting in your chair and day dreaming. :)

"It is impossible to hope to speak with any conviction of places you haven't been to without a vivid imagination. The capacity to dream and to make others dream is essential to anyone wanting to describe an unknown place and hoping to capture the imagination of their readers and listeners." pg 123 Dream on, readers, dream on!

If you enjoyed How to Talk About Places You've Never Been, you may want to pick up The Art of Travel by Alain de Botton or The Art of Non-Conformity: Set Your Own Rules, Live the Life You Want, and Change the World by Chris Guillebeau but, keep in mind, these books recommend that you actually go to the places, not just dream it.

[Kristy · Rating 1 out of 5]

I found the topic of this book interesting. Having been unable to travel as much as I'd like in recent years, I often armchair travel by reading books. I've been brought around the world in sumptuously descriptive stories, experiencing different cultures and places through my imagination. So I was sorely disappointed by this book's in ability to grab my attention. I felt like Bayard could have summed up his main points for each chapter in just a few simple sentences. Yes, the merits of having an objective, distanced view when writing makes perfect sense. Rather than being tainted by their own experience of a place, an author can fully imagine and depict a world to delight its readers. I only wish Bayard has succinctly summed these points up and been done with it, rather than trying and failing to write an entire thought provoking book. I did appreciate the glimpse into a few interesting armchair traveling authors and journalists (many with social and mental issues), as I had not been aware of these characters before. I also appreciated the slight, almost undetectable humor it was written with. Unfortunately, the humor was off-set by the un-engaging academic tone and it often felt like I was reading an academic article with lengthily written evidentiary support. Because I'm a goal oriented person and this book was short, I did finish it, though I struggled to do so.

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

Bought on impulse, fittingly, in an airport. I expected it to be funnier than it was. Some of the stories were interesting though, and the theories around psychology, experiences, and writing. You really have to work for it.

[Leah · Rating 5 out of 5]

One book that I read recently and wanted to give a great review is How to Talk about Places You’ve Never Been by Pierre Bayard. Pierre is a French writer who also wrote How to Talk about Books that You’ve Never Read (another book that I will probably add to my to-read list). I went into this book thinking that it’d be great and I wasn’t disappointed. However, it was very different from what I thought it would be.
I was expecting just a straight-forward list of tips on how to participate in conversations with others about places that you’ve never been. However, what I found was an entertaining, and often sarcastic, telling of many writers and authors who have managed to pull their readers into places that they’ve never really been themselves. He told stories of people like Marco Polo, Edouard Glissant, Chateaubriand and many others who convinced their writers of their travels when really they were simply “armchair travelers” (Bayard’s nickname for them0
I think my favorite quote from this book is that “the most important thing for a writer is to make his readers travel.” Because so often when we are reading books, we want to be able to travel to a far away place and become immersed in another world.
Anyway, I highly recommend How to Talk about Places You’ve Never Been to anyone looking for a well-written non-fiction book.

[Mike Hunter · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is one fascinating read. I purchased the book thinking it was a tongue-in-cheek look at cocktail party conversation, it turned out to be a treatise on the fake travelogues of some pretty famous travellers. In the end, it does make it clear – and this satisfied my curiosity (though not about cocktail parties – about having a go at writing about places I've probably, well, let's say under-visited.

For one reason or another –head down to watch my step; stressfully poor premises or presentation; tempted by an inviting pub – I know I have under-visited many places I'd like to write about without contributing to the destruction of the ozone.

Anyway, fascinating read and well done. I recommend it.

[Anson Cassel Mills · Rating 2 out of 5]

What this book is NOT is a guide about how to talk with others about places you’ve never been. What the book actually is is harder to define except that it’s a kind of spoof, written by a French psychoanalyst and professor of French literature, about dishonest (or, at least, not-what-they-seem) writings about unfamiliar places. Bayard includes brief chapter-length references to Marco Polo, Chateaubriand, Margaret Mead, the impostor George Psalmanazar, the fabricating journalist Jayson Blair, and the German novelist of Westerns, Karl May. Some serious thoughts poke out of the bushes occasionally, but doubtless few readers really want to spend their time with book-length jokes, even short book-length jokes like this one.

[Jonathan Tennis · Rating 4 out of 5]

While I have not yet read his book about books you've never read, I will most likely pick it up after reading this one.

Bayard has a fun way of presenting his argument and backs it up with plenty of literary examples. I thought the book was supposed to all be a joke so I was a little shocked when the author went into such depth in supporting his claims on the benefits of armchair travel. Once I settled in the book was a delight and will recommend it to others.

[Zoli · Rating 3 out of 5]

It is an alright essay.

[Phoenix · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nu? Topia?

Grasping his own coat-tails, Professor Bayard's follow up to his 2009 best seller How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read is not quite as wry but interesting nonetheless. He discusses the types of fictitious accounts engaged upon by the armchair traveller. One genre is by the writers of fiction for whom the reader is willing to suspend judgement as to whether the writer has actually visited the realm described and who's reality may in fact be conditional on the necessities of character and plot. Jules Verne may have researched and interpolated the travels of Phileas Fogg but he did not actually traverse the routes that he describes in Around the World in Eighty Days. German popularizer of the Old West Karl May, who's characters Kleki-Petra, Winnetou and his companion Old Shatterhand shaped European perceptions of the old West and were the favourite fictional reading of Adolph Hitler, yet May had never been to the American West, and on his only visit to America occurred after he had written most of his novels. Even then he only went as far as Niagara Falls NY, perhaps as to not ruin the illusions he had created both for himself and for his readers.

A 2nd category examined are tales told to impress but aren't exactly true, if true at all. Having only learned of Marco Polo's Asian adventures through school books I was quite surprised to learn that that the actual accounts included encounters with unicorns and griffins. He also includes some very titillating but likely false notions of rather extreme Chinese sexual hospitality, Similarly Bayard calls into doubt Margaret Mead's reports of free love among young Samoans. While eagerly lapped up and folded into the sexual revolution in the West, Mead only spent 10 days directly observing the Samoans before retiring to more comfortable accommodation with an American family. Most of her writing is based on interviews with the Samoan women who came to visit her, and the stories she copied down may actually have been nothing more than their romantic exaggerations.

And then there are the blatant frauds. Former New York Times writer Jayson Blair, who, to cut corners, wound up writing most of his 1st hand interviews from the comfort of his apartment, filling details from other writers and books, and getting caught out as a plagiarist and a fraud. Drug and alcohol addiction seemed to be a contributing factor. George Psalmanazar, an 18th century Frenchman who made a living in England by lecturing and making a living concocting false tales of being a Chinese native of Formosa. Also Jean-Claude Romand, a man who who created a fictitious medical career at the World Health Organization, providing detailed fictions to his family of his travels on business abroad while scamming relatives with non-existent investments in order to maintain a rather mundane lifestyle of inexpensive and local motel rooms where he waited out the duration of his “trips”.

Bayard fills out this short tome with his own fictitious accounts of of travels that he has never made to Easter Island and details of a Boston Marathon that he has never run.

Is Bayard serious or is he writing a satire of post modernist literary analysis? I recently visited Bayard in his tastefully decorated antique white paneled Paris apartment located at the edge of 11ème arrondissement not far from the Père Lachaise cemetery where one of his subjects, the Vicomte de Chateuabriand is buried, and asked him that very same question. He smiled enigmatically as we sipped chamomile tea spiked with fresh mint selected from a basket of herbs hanging from his balcony. It had a view towards the national library and just a hint of the Seine visible in the background. “Are you really here,” he asked, “or are you the figment of my imagination? And does it signify anything different if you are not?”

And at that instant I felt we had captured the essence of the book.

[Ari · Rating 1 out of 5]

Unfortunately, this book was not for me. When I picked up this book, I was expecting something a bit more creative, idyllic, romantic, etc. in its approach to imagining many exciting places not yet seen. In actuality, I found it to be a cynical philosophical argument for not traveling when reading or learning about somewhere from home will produce more or less the same result. (Couldn't be me.) I have a few quotes to keep for myself for journaling promts but TLDR, I only recommend this book if you are looking for a cynical take on travel.

"If this book joins a long line of books denouncing the harmful effects of travel, it is not because it shares the sentiment of numerous authors that, all places being equal, there is no need to go to the trouble of leaving home and discovering any of them. This theory was popularized by a well-known poem by Baudelaire, "The Voyage" -- whcih includes the line "Bitter is the knowledge gained in traveling" -- and in which the poet develops the theory that visiting foreign countries only leads to boredom and, once the journey is over, leaves the traveler confronted with the terrifying void of his own personality." (xii)

"This permanent link between the travelogue and the practice of fiction means that weare placed in a different register of truth than in traditiional narratives, which are forced to choose between truth and lies. It is a register where fiction -- or at least indecision about the authenticity of the reported facts -- is considered to play an active role in the narrative and therefore doesn't shock the reader in the slicghtest since he accepts the principle." (13)

"If we think in terms of physical circulation, the logical question would be after how many kilometers -- or, in terms of time, after how much time spent somewhere -- could a traveler be considered to know a place, without forgetting that some people can spend their entire lives in the same place without really being able to say that they know it." (25)

"The fact that we do not have to contend with hypothetical real places when traveling but with arbitrary, subjective images, taken from an infinite number of representations, only makes it more essential to seek out what I have called "a view of the whole" in connection with books." (27)

Quoting Memoires d'outre-tombe, 507: "I mixed many fictions with real things and unfortunately the fictions gain a real character as time passes, which metamorphoses them." (60)

"[...] Druzhin, the friend Evgenii was supposed to join there and who is furnishing him with the information, only exists in his imagination, and he has been inspired in his description of the city of his dreams by letters that don't exist." (165)

"[...] the places we conjure up in our imaginations can allow us to travel within ourselves, and it is this journey to the inside of the self, made with company if possible, that mobilizes the armchair traveler, attentive to the things that foreign cultures can offer him and that he, in turn, in his desire to make the world known, transmits to others." (178)

[Meghan · Rating 2 out of 5]

During the epilogue of the book, Bayard says, "This book has amply demonstrated that getting to know cultures that are different from our own doesn't in any way require physical movement - far from it." I recognize that this book is meant to be humorous, and there were times that I felt certain he was speaking sarcastically, but I could never really tell what point he was attempting to make.

I enjoy travel firsthand, and I also enjoy traveling through the experiences of others. I was hoping this book would talk about loving to learn about and discuss places never traveled, rather than ways you could fool others into believing you experienced adventures you never have.

There were certain quotes within the book that resonated with me, though to be fair they are mostly taken out of the context within which they were written:

"If we think in terms of physical circulation, the logical question would be after how many kilometers - or, in terms of time, after how much time spent somewhere - could a traveler be considered to know a place, without forgetting that some people can spend their entire lives in the same place without really being able to say they know it."

"Choosing to describe a particular image from the vast array of possibilities offered by a space cannot be done without linking that space to a discourse that gives it meaning and integrates it into the greater unity of a reflection or vision."

"Physical presence is only one of the possible modes of presence and not necessarily the most profound."

"What Fogg [Around the World in 80 Days] is refusing here is the fact that however great the attraction of the sights proposed to him, they would mean following a preestablished route compiled by the general opinion of his predecessors, a route along which he would be as much at risk of missing the place by becoming absorbed in the community of opinions as of getting lost in infinite detail."

Overall, not the book for me.

[Witoldzio · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nie wiedziałem o czym ta książka będzie. Może to jakaś dowcipna opowieść o zmyślaniu? Sam jestem z pokolenia które wyrastało w systemie gdzie tylko niektórym dane było jeździć za granicę, nie mówiąc już o jeżdżeniu w odległe, tajemnicze, fasynujące regiony świata. Podróżowanie było więc marzeniem, czymś dostępnym tylko dla osób mieszkających na Zachodzie. Stąd w mojej głowie głębokie przekonanie że tylko osobista wizyta gdziekolwiek jest "prawomocnym" podróżowaniem, nie mówiąc już o tym że jest to ogromny przywilej móc podróżować. No i jak wogóle "można" cokolwiek o jakimś miejscu powiedzieć jeśli się tam wogóle nigdy nie było? Autor natomiast stawia wszystko do góry nogami. Stawia tezę że nasza własna wyobraźnia jest czymś nieslychanie bardziej ciekawym niż fizyczne przemieszczanie się po mapie. Tezę można rozwijać nie tylko na przykładzie literatury, co zrobił autor. Np. w historii muzyki, Debussy skomponował piękne utwory w stylu hiszpańskim, sam zaś po Hiszpanii nigdy nie podróżował. Czy to przyklad że nasza wyobraźnia może zastąpić (albo i nawet przewyższyć) wszystko co nam może dać wizyta osobista w jakimś miejscu? Już nie wspominając o tym że sama nasza obecność w danym miejscu zmienia to miejsce. Temat naprawdę fascynujący. Wartościowa książka z kategorii "inne", Zostanie w mojej pamięci.

[Melinda · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pierre Bayard seems to have made a niche for himself in challenging long understood stories. I've read his book on Sherlock Holmes where he revisits the Hound of the Baskervilles and reinterprets the book through the lens of Arthur Conan Doyle's hatred of his most famous creation. (see https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...) In that book Bayard also challenges "did Oedipus really kill his own father?" and "did Claudius really kill Hamlet Sr (who appears as the ghost) in Shakespeare's play?". All interesting, not totally convincing.... but still kind of fun.

This book is a bit of a similar slant, but approaches the question of "did Marco Polo really travel? Or did he just move to a different spot in Italy and interview travelers while sitting at the bar sharing a drink? It is still fun, but not quite as interesting as the Sherlock Holmes book.

[Timothy Schatz · Rating 2 out of 5]

I just finished the book because I wanted to read something short and not serious. I found the book to present its thesis well, that is that we do not have to be in a location to know it, but it tends to drag on during some examples. The best are offered at the bringing of the book which leaves the second half rather dry. The most interesting aspect of the book is its challenge to author authenticity which has a glimpse of a critique of a fact perspective on the world: not one of particular depth, simply that the impact of something doesn't always come from the facts themselves, but the belief in the truth of them.

[NoID · Rating 4 out of 5]

Alors que dans mon souvenir (forcément inexact) son essai "Comment parler des livres qu’on a pas lu ?" parlait de la (non)lecture en général, ce livre traite plutôt des grands mythomanes voyageurs, autrement appelés les voyageurs casaniers. Et c’est vraiment drôle et instructif !

Le livre commence peut-être par le plus célèbre d’entre-eux, celui dont je n’aurais jamais douté : Marco-Polo ! qui n’a possiblement jamais été plus loin que Constantinople !

Suivent ensuite des journalistes sportifs, écrivains, ou anthropologues… Magnifique et édifiant, cocasse et consternant.

https://www.noid.ch/comment-parler-de...

[Remy · Rating 2 out of 5]

I love the author's writing style and tone. A mix of academic with humor that makes the prose interesting to read. Unfortunately that's the only positive in this book. The content is mostly pointless - a handful of stories but no how-to or advice. Better off with a 2k word blog post instead of these 200 pages of fluff. This seems to happen a lot with commercial non-fiction. Oh well.

[Madison · Rating 2 out of 5]

I don't know what I expected

[Cam · Rating 2 out of 5]

disappointing since his other book was a masterpiece (that u actually should read)

[Story · Rating 4 out of 5]

Quite an interesting read, albeit fairly academic in tone.

[Gesa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ein Plädoyer für die Lehnstuhlreise. Auch wenn ich seine Spitzen gegen die teilnehmende Beobachtung nicht teile, fand ich es sehr lesenswert. Interessante Beispiele und Gedanken.

[JOAN BASSETS · Rating 4 out of 5]

Un més, el darrer, d'una trilogia fantàstica, molt ben escrita, amb molta documentació i que val la pena llegir. Et fa riure, si, però també pensar.

[mira · Rating 2 out of 5]

2,5 nie znam celu tej ksiazki, ale czytalo mi sie dobrze xd

[Sharon Robertson · Rating 2 out of 5]

Nice airport read but I personally found it lacked depth.

[Wilcza Dama · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5

[Simone · Rating 3 out of 5]

I don't think this worked as well as Bayard's other book, How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read, but it was an interesting jaunt considering it's not very long and didn't take much time to read. His Margaret Mead example was also difficult for me, having just read Galileo's Middle Finger: Heretics, Activists, and the Search for Justice in Science in which she disproves the attack on Mead that Bayard uses here. His points here, like in his last book, seem vaguely tongue in cheek, but he never succeeds in convincing me I must talk about places I've never been. Talking about books you haven't read is something that often comes in handy - knowing just enough about a cultural object to engage in a kind of shorthand with people about it is useful at dinner parties and whatnot. There seems to be no reason to fake having been somewhere, since people are far less likely to hold that against you? Eh. An interesting experiment.

[Mark · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was a fan of Pierre Bayard's previous book, How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read, largely because he provided such interesting literary examples. This time around, Bayard's act feels worn out. Despite a few interesting examples - the fraudulent Marco Polo, Margaret Mead relying on unreliable informants in Samoa, and odd defenses of Rosie Ruiz (who cheated in the Boston Marathon) and Jayson Blair - the obscurity of the literary theory on display was tiresome. Part of the fun of the previous book was that I constantly wondered whether or not the book was an extended joke ; now I'm convinced that the author is equally unsure.

[Michele · Rating 4 out of 5]

On the surface, this book is an intellectual dissection of the armchair traveler---that person who has poured over every atlas, every World Book, Foreign Affairs magazine article or a Thomas Friedman column in The New York Times, and can tell you about all the statistical, cultural, and geographical nuances of every continent and several countries, without having ever stepped foot on the land. Bayard respects this person. He respects the hunger and curiosity. Bayard understands, further, that travel is physical as well as intellectual.

His small book is a defense of the intellectual and imaginative and literary quality of travel.

[Marvin · Rating 2 out of 5]

Idée au départ intéressante: Pour bien décrire un pays étranger, on n'a pas besoin de se rendre sur place. En fait, on peut faire un meilleur travail en restant chez soi et en lisant les récits de ceux qui s'y sont déjà rendus. On peut ainsi garder une perspective plus globale du lieu à décrire.

Je salue la tentative faite par M. Bayard, mais quand j'ai refermé le livre, je me suis dit que non, finalement, c'est bien mieux de voyager, de découvrir les autres pays par soi-même et de se faire sa propre idée.

[Ms. Reader · Rating 2 out of 5]

I received this book from Goodreads First Reads in exchange for an honest review....

It's a decent and solid read, yet failed to keep me interested. I had a really hard time following with where the author was trying to take it's readers. It felt out of balance, and bounced all over the place. I've heard good things about the author and he does seem to have a lot of talent, yet this book felt bland to me.

[Logan Sander · Rating 1 out of 5]

Any good things about this book were overshadowed by its pretentious, overly sarcastic and not-funny narration. Bayard makes assumption after assumption, making wild claims about people and literature that are quite possibly not even remotely true. He also seems to pick unintuitive examples to support, like the story of a lying murderer, just for the sake of going against the grain or being cheeky. Truly a painful book to read.