How to Talk About Places You've Never Been

Among the expanding requirements of the educated modern citizen are those of extensive travel and experience of foreign cultures. To be able to comment sensitively on African savannahs, at least one South American jungle and a handful of lazy Asian rivers has become almost requisite in sophisticated society. Literature professor and psychoanalyst Pierre Bayard provides the solution to this increased pressure as he cleverly unpicks the sovereignty of direct travel and petitions instead for an increase in the cultural currency of armchair travel.
His psychoanalysis of travel experience takes the reader from Marco Polos medieval China, through Kants Königsberg and Chateaubriands early modern North America, to lost islands, stolen marathons and the invented worlds of cheats, murderers, lovers and adulterers. Travelling around the world with Jules Vernes Phileas Fogg, disregarding time, geography and reality and blurring the definitions of a true story Bayard leads the reader to a fresh understanding of the world.
Bayard engages profoundly with imagination, space and psychological connections. He mixes impish humour with serious challenges in this entertainingly subversive book; he will provoke you to re-examine how you travel, how you dont - and most importantly how to talk about it afterwards.