In this frank, self-confessional travel memoir, Estonian bestselling author Epp Petrone goes looking for lost faces and memories and along the way must deal with the baggage she left behind. At twenty-four, the aspiring writer abandons her safe domestic life and high-paying career to follow an eccentric merchant around the world. On the road she finds a mix of exotic men, nomadic philosophers, wandering minstrels, kindred souls, unusual friendships, hard times, and lost children. All of it is captured in her precious journals – journals she leaves behind with an old Spanish sea captain who promises to wait for her. A decade later she decides to go back to retrieve her memories, but in order to get them back, she first has to reckon with her past. The stories here weave into stories, they take readers around the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, across Russia to Central Asia and the Middle East, from asylums to jails, arms factories to aquariums, and open-air markets to apocalyptic battlefields where the secrets of survival are revealed.
Оглавление
Epp Petrone. Around the heart in eleven years
Dear reader,
How I lost an old friend
The tale of a woman without a homeland
The geometry of relationships
On flying here and in space
Please take me with you!
Of fish and men
Warped mirror of the future
Where did the bag go?
Life on the stormy sea
The cops are coming, run!
While my daughters are sleeping
Toughening up on the other island
The decision to go back
The unfinished story
When there’s no one to blame
Does history repeat itself?
An awkward ride
From the asylum to the road
From the road to the asylum
How to lose children
The prodigal son returns
A dead mother is a good mother
Back on the island
Do I have something to say?
Battling the terracotta soldiers
Tasting the air of an arms factory
Recollections from “there”
Life is like an onion
The funny thing about predictions
An endlessly long night
To remember or to forget?
A hike back into a dream
It was good seeing you!
Post Scriptum
Отрывок из книги
For Marta, who wants to become an astronaut and fly to the moon.
In the beginning, my plan was simple and straightforward: to publish the book of travel features I had written for newspapers and magazines. I had worked as a journalist for over ten years and gathered quite a large catalogue of articles about different places around the world where I had been. All these pieces were just gathering dust in the library archives, and I felt that they deserved a fate better than that.
.....
“Hey, is Djellah alert?” I ask Harri once. I like the way my employer puts people in categories without hesitation. Sometimes, for example, we are taking the bus from one Gran Canarian market to another and chatting away loudly in Estonian: he’s diagnosing his fellow passengers, determining how alert each of them is.
“Well, let’s say that Djellah’s intuition is stronger than average,” Harri says, a bit flattered – of course, he likes it when I ask for his opinion on the ways of the world. “But your instincts are better than hers. And her rationality is very strong – but not as strong as yours. The only thing in which she is stronger than you, of course, is self-discipline! You’re really weak in that. Well, just take a look at your life, see for yourself!”
