Locations

by Jan Morris

Locations is an honest and insightful look at thirteen unique places from the woman who has, in her own words, been earning her living "by perpetual wandering and writing" for nearly forty years. One of the world's preeminent travel writers, Jan Morris is the author of a number of highly
acclaimed volumes. And now, in Locations , she presents yet another collection of provocative essays on destinations as varied as Paris and Oslo, West Point and Chicago.
These pieces reveal not so much how a place looks, feels, or sounds, but Morris's own response to a particular moment, her appreciation of history's causes and effects, her sharp eye for a telling detail, and her ability to find the meaning in a chance encounter. In Vermont, she retells with
delight how, like the keys to a city, she was given the gift of a piece of lead piping from which the stallion Justin Morgan (the father of the breed of Morgan horses) had drunk. She finds Oaxaca colored violently by its Indianness, where one can hear the arcane languages of the Mixtec, Zapotec,
and Ixcatec, and, five thousand feet above sea level, get a benign and hallucinatory effect of breathiness and romance. Morris captures what she calls the pungency of the Tex-Mex frontier, where one can not only find clans that maintain their immemorial feuds on both sides of the Rio Grande, but
also such unexpected settlers as a "blond and smiling Swiss lady, like someone out of a Renoir" in charge of a breakfast counter in Laredo. And we experience the mood in post-Wall Berlin, where "the awful fear that used to hang over the Wall like a black cloud" has vanished, and "the soldiers of
the People's Army have turned out to be human after all." For travelers, for lovers of adventure, for anyone who simply appreciates fine writing, Locations offers hours of enjoyable reading.

Genres: Travel, Nonfiction

160 pages, Paperback

First published August 18, 1992

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

[John Benson · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a collection of essays about different cities and places around the world in the late 1980s and early 1990s. While I read this book, some 30 years after they were first written, they do not seem dated as she highlights the issues of the day in each of her essays. Lately, I had read a few of her other books and been somewhat disappointed in them, but this is the type of writing where Jan Morris really shined--capturing cities and places at a particular moment in time (EX: the last essay captures Berlin in the days when the Wall was coming down). It was nice to be back to the type of writing I enjoyed best from her.

[Alistair Robinson · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is another installment in the collection of random travel essays published in the 1990s by the incomparable Jan Morris. This is a mixed bag containing nuggets on Berlin as the wall opens up, London, St Johns and Canberra. Some of the essays are brief and all are her musings on the place or an observed aspect of the city rather than being in anyway offering any coherent overview. That is the charm of much of her writing, offering passing thoughts on imperial history, food, a conversation or a book. Recommended and enjoyable.

[Owen Hatherley · Rating 3 out of 5]

This anthology is the first Jan Morris book I've read - she seems to have written hundreds. A dozen or so short city portraits, which I found very imprecise in their descriptions. She doesn't seem to have had much of an eye for architecture which is making things hard for yourself describing buildings.The more intangible mood of places is captured more effectively (Ottawa as Ruritania especially).

[R.J. Gilmour · Rating 4 out of 5]

Locations features a number of short essays by Morris that were previously published as stand alone magazine pieces. Each short essay looks at one city that Morris revisits to give her own unique view of the colour of the place & its people.

[Christopher Sutch · Rating 3 out of 5]

Given that Morris was a professional travel writer, it's not surprising that these essays are polished and filled with finely detailed observations of the many locations she traveled to. What I found more interesting was what Morris DIDN'T see, or rather, the evidence of the blinders that she often voluntarily (and perhaps knowingly) donned while experiencing life in various cities around the world. Her several instances of visiting anathema on "postmodern architecture" while simultaneously admiring the "mirror glass" buildings in some cities is mildly comical (I guess she was a child of her time, as are we all). An interesting read, overall.

[Alison Smith · Rating 3 out of 5]

She is the creme de la creme of travel writers: intelligent, quirky and very very well travelled. This book takes in Newfoundland, and then zips off the South America, with a quick stop in Venice & numerous other cities/places. Highly recommended.