Customer Reviews

A Mapmaker's Dream: The Meditations of Fra Mauro, Cartographer to the Court of Venice

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

I beg to differ with several who have reviewed this book before me. The premise of the book - a monk trying to draw a perfect map of the world - frames the story in a worldview very different than our own. Understanding the prefect map to require knowledge of the flora, fauna and culture of the place is far from our concern with projections and satellite accuracy.

Once one has understood the fundamental world view of the monk, the story becomes an interesting unfolding of stories from a variety of travelers - some true, some fanciful - that slowly brings Fra Mauro to question the presuppositions of his world view.

As such, the book helps us to understand something of the strain on European culture as it opened out to the rest of the world in the age of exploration.

This novel, the story of a Renaissance monk, Fra Mauro, who was a cartographer living in Venice, was delightful. I was hooked from the introduction on. The way the introduction was written it sounded like Fra Mauro really existed, but that could be part of the story. The story is about this monk, living in a monestary in Venice, who's dream is to create a perfect world map. He does this in spite of the fact that he has never traveled. He is visited by sea captains and travelers of all sorts who tell him what they have seen. The real story is in what the travelers tell him and how he makes those tales his own. This book was a pleasure to read. I have recommended it to several friends and will continue to do so. This is not a difficult book to read. It can be read on many different levels. I hope you enjoy it.

I truly enjoyed this book and put it on my "Read Again Shelf" (there aren't many there). Fra Mauro is a great character - I wanted to be a fly on the wall to actually see him at his work.

I think several of the reviewers took this book too seriously. I spread out the reading of this over a couple of weeks rather than reading it straight through.

Inevitably a book that confirms or conforms to our own conceits has a particular appeal. So it is entirely possible that other readers will not enjoy this slender but potent novel of ideas as much as I did. But, because I agree with so many of the concepts contained within and with the central premise on which it is based, I really thought it was extraordinary.

The narrative structure of the book is deceptively simple. James Cowan claims to have found the journal of the 15th century Venetian cartographer Fra Mauro. Within the pages of the journal, Mauro describes his work on what he hopes will be his masterpiece, a great mappa mundi (world map) that will contain everything that he knows about the geography of the world (the map pictured above is actually not the map described in the book, but instead the only known surviving Mauro map). The irony, of course, is that Mauro lived in the monastery of San Michele di Murano and was not himself a traveler or explorer. His definitive map was to be based on knowledge acquired by and from others. The journal describes visits he received from individuals who had actually traveled abroad and were interested in sharing their knowledge with him.

Now I spend a lot of time in these reviews unabashedly arguing for the supremacy of Western Civilization--its Culture: music, literature and the plastic arts; Political and Social Institutions; Economic System; Scientific advances; etc.. And it seems to me that there is one great achievement that is really central to all of the achievements or, at the very least, has facilitated all of them; that is the development of means to systematize, retrieve and pass on knowledge. It should be obvious on its face that no culture that failed to produce a written language can lay any claim to even being a true Civilization. Even those which developed languages, but failed to develop knowledge or failed to accumulate and preserve knowledge, can hardly claim to be great Civilizations. And those which made developed some capacity to further knowledge and to safeguard the results for the use of subsequent generations, but failed to disseminate such knowledge widely, must pale by comparison too. For what we in the West achieved was a set of systems for accumulating knowledge, experimenting in order to increase that knowledge, storing and sharing that knowledge widely and a series of religious and political theories to induce citizens to strive to further all of these achievements.

So it is that an early map maker like Fra Mauro, cloistered within his cell, can take on such a heroic aura and his story can be so exciting. And here are some of the passages where Cowan develops some of these same ideas:

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Mauro is visited by an elderly Jew of Rhodes, who tells him:
It is in us all, this desire to experience the kinship that exists between our innermost being and the
will that created such a kinship in the first place. As such a desire is realized, we become
preoccupied with strange and uncanny aspects in Nature herself. We are almost tempted to regard
them as our own moods, our own creations. For my part, I know that the boundary between
myself and Nature sometimes wavers and melts away, so that I can no longer be sure whether what
I see with my own eyes springs from outward or inner impressions. An experience such as this is
one sure way of discovering how creative we are, and how deeply our soil participates in the
perpetual creation of the world. The same invisible divinity is at work in us as it is in Nature. If the
outside world were perchance to perish, I know that any one of us would be capable of rebuilding
it. I say these things because I believe that mountain and stream, leaf and tree, root and flower,
everything that has ever been formed in Nature lies preformed within us and springs from the soul,
whose essence is eternity. Of course, this essence is beyond all our conceivable knowledge, but we
can feel it nevertheless.

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And just in passing you come across such gem like sentences and ideas as this one: "Quitting the place that we love means that we are condemned to inhabit our loss forever."

I urge everyone to read and enjoy this book. The journal entry style makes it particularly susceptible to reading in separate nightly installments. It is a book that you can easily pick up and put down, as indeed you may wish to in order to savor the rich stew of ideas.

GRADE: A+

Cowan is a talented wordsmith and has fascinating trivia to explore. Having chosen a Renaissance monk as his voice, however, he should have made some effort to identify, authenticate, justify that personality and worldview. The reader needn't be an antiquarian nor a theologian to be irritated by this supposedly dedicated Christian scholar being so entirely self-referencing and self-absorbed. So much Asian mysticism and 20th century psychobabble are anachronistic. This author needs a good editor and a better thread or theme on which to exercise his talent.

Not really a novel, more a collection thoughts that are all too often repetitive. How often can we read this monk berate himself for being afraid to travel? Cut out all the redundancies and you end up with a pleasant, quirky short story. It does not live up to its promise because it is never more than superficial about the knowledge it purports and the philosophy it would have the reader believe it is pondering.

The text of this pretty little book is so dense and the points so obscure that it takes four times as long to read as its size would indicate. That might be acceptable if a close reading yielded insight into the character or exposed an intriguing philosophical view. But the separate musings in each chapter do not hang together to create a coherent whole. Some of them do not even make sense, either in a 15th century context or 20th century context. The author also undermines his own work. The dust jacket summary of the book's main point eliminates whatever interest the reader might have gotten from watching the unfolding of Fra Mauro's thinking. The end of the book further obscures the point -- the character concludes that his project is pointless, but then finishes it anyway. The book does have its virtues. The introduction is a wonderfully evocative description of a modern author's trip through ancient archives. The descriptions of Fra Mauro's encounters with his informants offer an interesting insight into the difference between adventurers and chroniclers. I also had a major quibble. Fra Mauro died in 1490, yet the author refers several times to places in "America," which the Europeans had not discovered while the character was alive, and which was not called America until ten years after his death. There are many better books available. Don't waste time with this one.

The world is more than just a collection of continents and nations, as map maker Fra Mauro discovers in "A Mapmaker's Dream: The Meditations of Fra Mauro, Cartographer to the Court of Venice". Desiring to create the first map of the entire Earth, he sends out a call for information about the strange and far corners of the world. What he gets is more than objective words of what is at every bit of longitude and latitude. Highly recommended for historical fiction enthusiasts and deserving of a place on every community library fiction shelf.

A Mapmaker's Dream is a dream within a dream. Cowan's words work like magic on the pages giving the reader an interesting look into the meditations of Fra Mauro. The reader feels like an observer in all the stories of voyagers that traveler's brings to Mauro's cell. The revelations that he discovers speaks to the reader with the magic that surrounds such a work.

Fra Mauro once lived in an Italian monastery as remote to us as the Antipodes were to him. Yet his journey is timeless and transcends all modern notions of reality for it was a journey of imagination and a journey of redemption. This was not a mere cartographer naive to the ways of the world. Fra Mauro was a man who looked deep inside his soul as he sought to create his map. This map which has to many obscured the true content of his message was only incidental. We can only admire his thought processes, his zest for life and his sense of mission. It was Sun Ssu-mo alone who discerned the true endeavour upon which Fra Mauro was engaged, "...I deem you a friend and a fellow student of the Way." Although Fra Mauro himself dismissed the words of Sun Ssu-mo as irrelevant one cannot help but feel that he did indeed rise on wings like eagles. An inspirational read for the sceptic and the student alike.