Why a Booktrail?
2000s: Travel to New Zealand, England and the Arctic circle inspired by the need to travel solo and what this kind of journey offers the lone adventurer.
On Trying To Keep Still
What you need to know before your trail
Ever wondered what really being along feels like? Ever wanted to do nothing for an entire year to see what loneliness feels like? Well Jenny Diski travelled to the most remote parts of the world and the remote environments to see what she felt like and what loneliness meant to her. Inspired by Michel de Montaigne, French philosopher and writer who exiled himself to a tower in the Dordogne region.
But as both of them found, when things are quiet and still, the human mind wanders and races forcing a person to take charge of their state and start discovering the world around them.
Travel Guide
When you think about it, trying to keep still and mentally idle for a year is no mean feat and what happened to Jenny Diski as a result is surprising. She finds it hard to keep still but for the two months in a cottage where she experienced almost complete solitude.
Obviously loneliness does not a novel make, but this one is interspersed with thoughts and observations like when she visits the Sámi people of Lapland.
As Montaigne stayed in his tower, Jenny stays in her circle made up of New Zealand, england and the Arctic as she really goes in search of Montaigne himself and his teachings trying to make sense of them and trying to find a reason not to travel. What happens when nothing happens? she asks herself. An usual travel memoir but a unique one at that!
The book is divided in three parts, covering three different journeys. In the first, Diski uses a writers’ festival in Wellington (2014.festival.co.nz/writers-week) as the jumping-off point for a New Zealand journey. this theatre is one of the venues –
Where Next?
