cities captured in Literature

[cacian]

what is according to you the most beautifully captured city in a book?

[kev67]

I thought George Gissing did a pretty good job with late C19th London in New Grub Street, The Odd Women and The Netherworld. I particularly liked the horse drawn omnibuses and the thick pea-souper fogs. London does not have thick fogs any more since the Clean Air Act, but there is a chapter in The Odd Women where a character can hardly see his hand in front of his face.

[Pompey Bum]

If you are speaking metaphorically, Lawrence Durell's Alexandria (Egypt) was beautifully captured, although I've been to Alexandria and it's nothing like that. And Dickens' London is an unforgettable place, but I'm not sure I'd call it a beautiful one. Bleak House probably captured it most powerfully.

But if you are speaking literally--if you mean the actual capture of a city--Tolstoy's comparison of the abandoned Moscow to a dying beehive (in which the metaphor is extended for the entire chapter) is a real tour de force. And Anthony Doerr's description of the allied destruction of Saint-Malo in All the Light We Cannot See is certainly horrific--but beautifully written, I suppose.

[prendrelemick]

Allowing that a city is not just streets and buildings, but the bustle, the noise, the smells and the people, without any doubt George Eliot's depiction of Florence in Romola is the best I have read. The city itself is the main character of that book.

Of course This 15 Century Florence is a work of her imagination, she was there 350 years later.

[mona amon]

I've never been there, but James Joyce once said that if Dublin “one day suddenly disappeared from the Earth it could be reconstructed out of my book [Ulysses]”.

[Emil Miller]

Paris has been my favourite city since I first visited it about two thousand years ago. It features in many of the books I've read, but Hemingway's 'A Moveable Feast' gets as close to the 'spirit of place' that I recall during my perambulations around the city.
Although the book concerns the author's meetings with various writers living in Paris, his description of the city brings a palpable sense of déjà vu for readers who have been there. He ends the book with a brief eulogy of the city and this sentence: 'But such was the Paris of our youth, when we were very poor and very happy.'