We Need an Elsewhere That Doesn't Exist. Re-Enchanting Travels
Original title: Nous avons besoin d’un ailleurs qui n’existe pas. Réenchanter le voyage
We Need an Elsewhere That Doesn't Exist. Re-Enchanting Travels
Original title: Nous avons besoin d’un ailleurs qui n’existe pas. Réenchanter le voyage
Synopsis
With a limpid pen, the author unfolds the link, since Plato, between the call of the distant and the desire for utopia. An enchanting journey from Istanbul to Benares. […] It is this delicate link between utopia and travel, the real and the imaginary, between discourse and the city, place and its representation, that Lucie Azema unfolds and deploys in this highly accessible new text, “We need an elsewhere that doesn’t exist”, whose subtitle might even sound like a secret plan: “Re-enchanting travels” – Juliette Cerf, Télérama
A manifesto for all the runners of horizons, eaters of the sky, and road burners, who as children, dreamed on maps or ridgelines, to better launch themselves into the vast world, into real or dreamed elsewhere. […] An ode to the imagination and dreams, powerful motives for travel, her book invites us to leave and never give up on this promise embodied by elsewhere, wherever it may be: that of a different world, renewed and which knows better. — RFI
The appeal of far-away places was born in geographers’ offices and books. We created dreams on maps, populating them with imaginary islands and fantastical creatures. The ambition was to come up against the limits of the known world, then to go beyond them, to venture beyond.
We were looking for the Garden of Eden. We went up the Nile, believing that paradise had its source there; we went deeper into the Amazon to find El Dorado, or the city of Z.
Lucie Azema tells us about the intimate links between utopia and travel at a time when the world is shrinking, where borders are rising, thus reducing our horizon.
She travels through History, to Antiquity and then, from Turkey to Kathmandu, takes the route of the sixties, that of the hippies who are sometimes criticized today. But they are the ones who democratized travel and showed that departure for a real country was also, and perhaps above all, for a dream country.
The inner worlds and the worlds physically crossed are deeply linked, respond and nourish each other, to the point of defining our intimate territories. This is the essence of travel, the promise of a greater space of freedom.
Marketing Information
Praise for her previous title Les femmes aussi sont du voyage (Flammarion):
“Lucie Azema encourages women to cast off and free themselves from all the sexist clichés that confine them to the household.” — L’Obs
“In this fascinating book, the author offers us a feminist review on both travel and women.” — Madame Figaro
“A potion and a divine book to savor, between nomadism and sedentarism.” — Télérama