In pursuit of a wild and poetic life A Contrary review by David M. Smith 
Tramp: Or the Art of Living a Wild and Poetic Life Tomas Espedal Translated by James Anderson Seagull Books 2010 Buy this book...> Even as his fame has grown in his native Norway, the range of what Tomas Espedal writes about has shrunk. Instead of an ever-expanding autobiographical space in which to tell his life story, Espedal’s project is more of a paring-down, an endlessly repeated return to a single scene. In Tramp: Or the Art of Living a Wild and Poetic Life, Espedal journeys on foot to places like Germany, France, Wales, Greece, and Turkey, meeting a host of interesting figures along the way. For Espedal, however, covering a greater and greater geographic area becomes a way of retreading the same, narrow ground. In addition to relating the author’s many walking tours, Tramp is an account of its own inception. “I’m writing a book about walking,” Espedal repeats several times over the course of his wanderings. “That’s a good idea,” someone suggests. “And that’s why I’m stuck,” Espedal replies. “I can’t write when I’ve got good ideas. Good ideas are about the worst things there are. They…seldom turn into good books.” Then Espedal meets a fellow writer, a Norwegian poet named Hildegunn Dale, who points the way forward. “Writing is opposing your own ideas,” she says; if this is so, then a book about walking must also contain a moment of its opposite, whatever is not-walking: “In some senses walking is the opposite of living in a house,” Espedal tells us. “This certainly applies to wandering, which is an extended, voluntary or enforced walking experience; wandering is wished-for or unwished-for homelessness.” If homelessness is at the negative pole of taking long walks, then the places and figures we encounter in this walking memoir must point beyond themselves, to a scene of home and family that is only felt in terms of its absence. This is especially pertinent given that Espedal’s travels take him to the homes of other famous writers, among them the house that belonged to Arthur Rimbaud’s mother in Roche, France. Rimbaud, too, was a wanderer, at 19 having already run away to Paris several times: “As a rule he walked there and back, on feet like the wind, with his hat and pipe, a short, threadbare coat, long hair, long legs, already a Bohemian and wild man, a rebel, a poet and visionary.” When Espedal follows Rimbaud’s footsteps in reverse, walking from Paris to Roche, he imagines “the scenes that took place between mother and son in that small house.” And it’s at this point that Espedal’s journey becomes a return of sorts for him: “I’d found the place that was the starting point for my own writing: the house where the young boy lived with his mother. The young boy who wanted to rebel, to leave, to go off, live that great freedom. The young boy who wanted to write. Who wanted to live a wild and poetic life.” The flight to a distant land, becoming a wanderer and a stranger, taking up a new language (that is, fleeing the mother tongue)—is it all just an emphatic going to one’s room, shutting the door and shutting out the mother? And if so, is the geographic distance even relevant? Whether it is the short walk up the stairs to one’s room, or an ocean that separates son and mother, the travels, we might say, still end up taking place inside the house. On his way from Mother Rimbaud’s house in France, Espedal is hailed from the street as a stranger, and he experiences this alternating moment of willed estrangement and perpetual return: The woman might have been my mother, she called: where are you going? I’m on my way home, I said. But where’s home, you’re not from round here, said the mother. I’m from Norway, I said. Are you walking all the way to Norway? she who must have been the mother asked, but I made no reply, I’d already left the house behind. Ultimately, Tramp achieves much more than a straightforward retelling of events. In establishing the silent context of family and home, Espedal brings to the foreground a past that is far more distant and not as clear-cut as the travels he explicitly relates. Chronological time and authorial distance give way to a personal history that is at once more primordial and, in its way, more poetic. Espedal’s memoir thus becomes an especially vivid and deeply satisfying account of “a wild and poetic life.” David M. Smith is a regular reviewer for Contrary. Formerly of Norway, he now lives in his hometown of Lawrenceville, Georgia. Tip Jar | Bookstore | Index of Reviewshttp://astore.amazon.com/contrary-20/detail/1906497680WritersFund.htmlhttp://astore.amazon.com/contrary-20Reviews.htmlhttp://astore.amazon.com/contrary-20/detail/1906497680shapeimage_1_link_0shapeimage_1_link_1shapeimage_1_link_2shapeimage_1_link_3

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