Book as a Place, Place as a Book

In the book Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino, Marco Polo, the Venetian we all know, tells Kublai Khan about cities that are invisible to the sovereign, for even if they existed, he would not have time to visit them all; the empire is simply too large. At one point, the sovereign asks why Marco Polo never tells him anything about his home city, Venice. Polo responds by asking what does the great sovereign think he has been talking about the whole time if not his home. When describing other cities, he always says something about Venice. His idea is simple: to see the differences between cities, one of them needs to be used as the benchmark, and he uses Venice.

So, to see the differences between places, one place needs to be used as a reference point. Does this mean that to see the differences between books, one book has to be taken as a starting point as well? – I think this is what tends to happen with both books and places. From what I’ve read and heard, everybody appears to have that one place with deep connection and that one ‘eureka’ book that stands out among the other discoveries and serves as a kind of centre or anchor. Over time, other places and books may appear as well, but that one centre or anchor always remains the starting point.

It also seems that just like Marco Polo had lost his Venice in some way, a sense of loss almost always accompanies our “centre-place” and “anchor-book”. Yes, it is all the doing of Time The Great Sovereign. Even if the place or the book survive in one form or other, we are not the same. So we end up losing them all: the place, the book, ourselves. And that must be the reason why the people who like to play with words – the narrators – are so obsessed with places. They wish to recreate and thus regain lost places.

True, according to Calvino’s Marco Polo, memory’s images are erased, once they are fixed in words. That’s why he was afraid of losing Venice when speaking of it. But if something has already been lost, wouldn’t this mean that words might help to find it again? Only that the place we’ll find will inevitably be another one. Or, as there are countless storytellers, it would make more sense to say in plural: other places. Infinite variations of a place. For if a place is a book, it would be like Borges’ Book of Sand, with endless number of pages. Or a library. I’d like to think of a place as a library.

Let us consider for a moment the the festival’s motto, Book as a Place, Place as a Book. How can a book be a place? Firstly, of course, a book, I mean a book printed on paper, is a physical object. Thus, as you can metaphorically enter a book – much like a picture – it’s also a place in itself. In a book, as in any space one can find things, signs, traces. They are often linked to people: an autograph, a dedication, ex libris, a bookmark between pages, a postcard, a letter, a bank note, a flower put there to dry, underlined words, notes on the margin. An address on the back cover of a subscribed book. A drop of blood from a cut, a tear or drop of water blurring out the text; coffee marks; smells captured into the book from the places it’s been in; dampness or bleaching. All this brings something to life.
Or a book as a place, in the sense that a memory connects the book with the place where we read it. We don’t just remember the book and the thoughts we had or what we felt but also – sometimes even more – the place related to reading it, the sights, the light, the voices, and what (who?) we were at the time. A book as a place revives a past experience.
And then there are books about which we can say, if we describe them, that the place is its main character. Be it a city, a block, a street, a house, a room or perhaps a village, an island, a place in nature; or a place that doesn’t exist any more or not yet or not in the same shape or form, however, it has been revived so convincingly as if it really existed. The writings of this year’s festival guests have examples of almost all of these books-as-places.
Allow me now to return to Invisible Cities. The book has a passage where Marco Polo describes a bridge, stone by stone, and Kublai Khan wants to know which stone is the one that supports the bridge. Polo says that the bridge is not supported by one stone or another, but by the arch that they are all part of. When the sovereign asks why, then, Polo spoke of the stones and not of the arch, the explorer answers: without stones, there would be no arch.
What else is each and every one of those books-as-places if not another stone in the vast bridge leading us to places that exist only as long as they are written down. Be it Kjell Westö’s Helsinki, Leonardo Padura’s Havana, Markus Thielemann’s Lüneburg Heath, or Tartu or Tallinn of me and you – to give just a few examples – all of them are layers of an infinite map of infinite worlds. Books-as-places and places-as-books are the most modern and timeless mapping application that I’m aware of.

I wish you all find exciting journeys and – even more, that you make unexpected discoveries. May you find something at this festival you did not expect. Let’s continue celebrating Estonian Book Year!

Kai Aareleid

Patron of the 2025 Prima Vista literary festival