In Tunis, the suburban rail service TGM (Tunis-Goulette-Marsa) leads from the Tunis Marine station to the beaches of La Goulette and Mersah via the very picturesque and touristic village of Sidi Bou Said. Several stations serve the very large site of the ruins of Carthage. The first one is Carthage Salammbô, name that evokes of…
The Little Prince created by Saint-Exupery has become a universal character. Translated into more than 200 languages, the poetic and philosophical tale written by the French aviator touches the hearts of people all around the world. Were you aware he left his planet to materialize on the Earth ? Do you want to know where and…
The latest novel by Michel Houellbecq deals not only with art and society, but also with places and their representations. The title « The map and territory » can be interpreted as a synthesis of the artistic journey of the hero, Jed Martin. The international career of this visual artist starts in the 2010s through a series…
As a first example of a local materialization of fiction, we present the cell of Edmond Dantès in the Chateau d’If, near Marseille and, more specifically, the tunnel that this character of the Count of Monte-Christo, novel by Alexandre Dumas, would have made to get Abbé Faria, his prison companion. Le premier exemple de matérialisation…
« Who is the murderer of the subway? Who is this man who pushes innocents under the train? And who are its victims? » Such is the plot of the thriller written by Frederic H. Fajardie in 1982. Police inspector Padovani (recurring character in the work of Fajardie) investigates. During a briefing with his staff, he says:…
In Exercises in Style, Raymond Queneau collects « 99 retellings of the same story, each in a different style. In each, the narrator gets on the « S » bus , witnesses an argument between a man with a long neck and funny hat and another passenger, and then sees the same person two hours later getting advice…
A picture is worth a thousand words says the favorite adage of people working with images. The two first pages of the novel The Betrothed (in Italian I Promessi sposi) by Alexandro Manzoni published in 1825, could illustrate this adage since they could be summarized with a map like this one. This novel starts with…
In his geocriticism (‘géocritique’) approach, Bertrand Westphal (2007) attempts to reconnect the mimetic arts such as literature, cinema and painting to the real world through the spaces they represent. To do so, Westphal proposes a set of conceptual tools relevant to understanding how human spaces structure themselves ‘by and in the text, by and in…
Google Maps appears in Joseph O’Neill’s novel Netherland. To the best of my knowledge, it is the first time that Google Maps appears in a literary work. If you have an earlier example, please write us a comment. Of course Google Maps doesn’t play a central role in the book. Google Maps appears in two…
(e)space & fiction 