Customer Reviews

Hav : Comprising Last Letters from Hav and Hav of the Myrmidons

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I read as much as I can. I particularly love to scout out books that are unusual and perhaps a little neglected. Once a year I settle on a favorite - and then I irritate my friends (and anyone who will listen) begging them to read it.

In the past I've chosen books by Halldor Laxness or Gyula Krudy, by Bruno Schulz or Robert Walser or Clarice Lispector. Writers well-known in certain circles - but not nearly so celebrated, it seems to me, as their brilliance warrants. I call these books my "holy books" - they sustain me as I try to live and write and think in my own way.

Jan Morris' Hav is the best book I read all year. Here is your chance to tour Hav - a country which does not exist, though Jan Morris knows it intimately and, indeed, has friends there.

This book actually contains two books. The first, "Last Letters from Hav", was written in 1985. Morris' account of Hav is jam-packed with wonderment and peculiarity - and meticulous as a guide to the Louvre. Hav returned me to the mystery of places I knew when I was young, places I loved without ever quite comprehending - to Delhi and Kathmandu and Hyderabad most especially.

Twenty years later, the New York Review of Books asked Morris to write a kind of sequel. I am grateful to NYRB for many reasons (such as making available GV Desani, Nirad Chaudhuri and Robert Walser) but this was a stroke of brilliance. Unwilling to settle for nostalgia, the second book, "Hav of the Myrmidons", is remarkably different from the first.

Given the chance to return to Hav, Jan Morris did the bravest and most honest thing to the tangled old city. She destroyed it. Hav rebuilt is convenient and comfortable - the resort is world-class. However, the bears however are extinct. And the troglodytes live in apartments. The famous snow raspberries are genetically modified. And canned. Also, the history of Hav has been rewritten - and any visitor with a sense of self-preservation would do well to keep that fact in mind.

Jan Morris claims her story is an allegory, even claims to not fully understand it herself. Yet she has somehow managed to capture, better than anyone else, what has become of the world. Fiction gets to the truth better than the facts can. What has become of Hyderabad since 1991? Read Hav. Shanghai? Hong Kong? Lhasa? You must read Hav. (I was unsurprised to learn that some of the plans and funds to rebuild Hav originated in China.)

When people ask why I had to leave Tokyo despite its convenience and comfort - I'll tell them to read Hav. When people want to know what's become of the family farm - I won't try to explain, I'll hand them a copy of Hav. I'm telling you, you must read Hav -- it's the best book I read all year.

Having spent a lifetime determined to visit and then write about all the cities she considered the great capitals of the world (a task she felt she accomplished in 1983 by finally going to Beijing), the great Welsh travel writer decided in 1985 to write for the first time about an imaginary city in her fictional work "Last Letters from Hav." Like Trieste, her favorite of cities, and Beirut and Alexandria, Hav is a Mediterranean city that has always been at the crossroads of empire: unlike anywhere else it is also like many other places simultaneously, and is a place of paradox and contradiction. Many of its greatest attractions and most famous wonders may suggest those of other celebrated cities (its dawn fanfare suggests Krakow, while its most ancient civic object, The Iron Dog, suggests both the Lupercal of Rome and the ancient sculptured creatures on the columns of the Piazetta di San Marco in Venice). Its citizens are cosmopolitans in the best Mediterranean sense: they seem to remember the days of occupation by the Russians, the French, the British, the Arabs, the Venetians, and even the Chinese (for whom Hav was the Westernmost outpost, just as it formed the Northernmost satellite for the ancient Caliphate). "Morris" (as character) is treated with graciousness throughout, but always she senses the mysteries suggested by the decorative labyrinth markings that stand as the city's symbol, and a deep-seated unease that finds its culmination when black airplanes cross the city's skies as she leaves... the beginning of a civil catastrophe which will later be called "The Intervention."

Twenty years later, after she had formally signaled she would never write a full-length travel book again, Morris imaginatively returned in her 2005 sequel "Hav of the Myrmidons" to this fantastic Mediterranean city, which she now finds enormously physically altered. The great eleven-story pagoda-like folly the House of the Ancient Chinese Master (briefly inhabited by Freud, and described in repugnance by D. H. Lawrence) has been burned up in The Intervention, and many of the city's other landmarks have been removed or unrecognizable; the new ruling regime has put in their place a two thousand-foot tall tower (clearly meant to echo such recent skyscrapers as the Petronas Towers, Taipei 101, and the Burj Khalifa) to commemorate its own grandiosity. (The new regime actually claims its origins lie in the Myrmidons of Achilles... supposedly the first people to settle the Havian peninsula). All is changed, yet Morris (invited back by the city's intellectuals) finds much remains the same; great cities, she suggests, have a way of surviving catastrophe and the end of the old ways, much like Alexandria after the collapse of the Farouk regime, Beirut after the Lebanese Civil War or Dubrovnik after the Serbo-Croatian War.

Like the House of the Ancient Chinese Master (whose burning is somehow miraculously depicted in photorealistic detail on this beautiful new NYRB edition's cover), Morris's collection of both pieces (published under the joint title HAV) is a kind of wondrous folly, unlike almost any other piece of fiction. Yet for all its almost hallucinatory descriptive specificity, Morris's Hav serves a higher purpose: it stands as a commentary on the shifts of historical change, on the ways in which cities seize the imagination and house the self as well as empires. It stands as a kind of magnificent (if contained) monument for one of the most unusual and cosmopolitan of the twentieth-century's authors.

Shakespeare, The Comedy of Errors

The City-State of Hav is something of a mystical place. Nestled in critical cross-roads of the Mediterranean, Hav's history as a trading nation goes back to the ancient Greeks and in fact is rumored amongst some scholars to be the site of Troy. St. Paul's little-known Epistle to the Havians speaks of the inhabitants rather mercurial habits. Hav marked the furthest most expansion of olden Chinese trading settlements and that presence is still seen in some quarters. Hav's Russian, Italian, French, Chinese, Greek and Arabic neighborhoods all retain the ethnic and architectural flavors of the resident's ancestors. Hav's charms attracted, through the early years of the 20th-century some of the world's great celebrities all of whom feasted on Hav's rare snow raspberries.

Jan Morris, one of the world's great travel writers (amongst her other writing talents) has turned her keen eye for detail and her sharp prose to capture fully the flavor of the nation she first visited for six months in 1985. From her arrival in a train that courses down a mountainside through a dark, twisting tunnel custom built by the Russian's during their years in control of Hav to the haunting and beautiful Call to Prayer played by the great Hav musician, Missakian, on her first morning, Morris makes Hav come to life. You feel as if you are wandering the streets with her. You can sense the excitement as she watches Hav's annual Roof Race which course includes scaling buildings and leaping from roof to roof across the city. You can sense the danger on the day of her departure (the end of the first part of these memoirs) when you read about the fighter pilots screaming overhead as the infamous "Intervention" begins.

There's only one little point to keep in mind as you wander through Hav with Ms. Morris: Hav does not exist. Indeed, Hav is a fictional city created by Morris but treated by Morris throughout as a real place. When I picked up this book I was amused by Ursula Le Guin's brief but well-written introduction. I arched my eyebrows when I read that after the initial release of this book in the U.K. in 1985, travel agents received hundreds of requests, actually demands, for tours to Hav. I didn't really think of this as any more than exaggerated praise for a good writer. But, after reading both parts of Hav ("Last Letters from Hav" written in 1985 and "Hav of the Myrmidons", written in 2006) and despite knowing that Hav was no more real than Oz, I still wanted to go on line to book a trip to see this historic place. That is the power of the world that Morris has created.

Ms. Morris is the narrator and she takes us through her original six-month visit. At the risk of sounding a bit foolish I could not help thinking of Sim City when I read Hav. Sim City was/is a unique game in which you build and design your own city. Depending on the choice you make in housing, development, geography and so on the simulated city responds and grows in different ways. Morris has taken this one step further (the pen is mightier than a micro-chip apparently) and created not only her own city but also created a millennium of history for it. She has taken a two-dimensional simulation and added the dimension of a people and their characteristics and the dimension of time. The result is a remarkable four-dimensional look at a world that does not exist but which seems like it should exist.

There is no plot to speak of. However, the inclusion of "Hav of the Myrmidons" serves to put a bittersweet grace note to the end of the story of a nation and its peoples that put Last Letters from Hav in a contemporary context. Although there is no plot to spoil, I think it best for the reader to experience his/her journey through Hav with no additional details from me. In her Epilogue, Morris asks herself if there is one essential allegory to be found in her story of Hav. She responds that she does not know herself and "[j]ust as I wrote into the narrative my own meanings, bred by experience out of instinct, so I can only leave it to my readers, apologetically, to decide for themselves what it's all about." All I can suggest is that you will be well-served if you pick up this book and make your own journey. I am confident you will be glad you booked passage.

Highly recommended. Leonard Fleisig

A travel book about a fictional city-state: what a fabulous conceit. Jan Morris handles it well, filling the book with details of the city -- its odd mishmash of cultural influences, its people, its architecture -- that made me wish I could visit. The pretense at many famous figures' involvement with Hav adds to the entertainment. And then the tragic changes, a city becoming more uniform and false, tourists remaining on one glitzy island away from the remains of the real city. I mourned for the destroyed Arab buildings and Chinese tower, though it pleased me to know that other people fear homogeneity. Overall, Hav is a fascinating book and well worth a read: a marvellous combination of fiction and travel narrative.