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

~ (Author) "FOR SOME TIME I have wanted to relate a circumstance that has been happening to me in recent years..." (more)
Key Phrases: white jade, good friar, Prester John, Fra Campeggio, Hadji Ahmed (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

James Cowan's fantasy of a Venetian cartographer owes a large and obvious debt to Borges, with its speculations on geography as a construct of the human consciousness, its erudite references, and its tales of explorations into an imaginary world. Through the purported journals of Fra Mauro, a cloistered monk who actually lived during the 15th century and who, in Cowan's novel, has resolved to create a map of the world without ever leaving his cell, we learn of a race of men with one foot the size of an umbrella, about the Vatican emissary to the Mongol court,and about the devil worshippers of the land called Mosul. Over the course of the book, Fra Mauro creates a world of his own, composed less of geographical knowledge than of meditation, folklore, and books. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

This accomplished bit of armchair traveling from Australian novelist Cowan (Letters from a Wild State) takes the form of a 16th-century Venetian monk's journal. Fra Mauro, a cartographer, is working on a map of the world based on the oral reports of merchants, travelers and ambassadors who visit him in his cell. Oscillating between a dogmatic medieval mindset and a modern tolerance for?and interest in?diverse cultures and races, Fra Mauro hears stories about the far-flung world in the age of exploration. Among the wonders he hears about are a heretical sect of devil-worshipers, an Egyptian priestess's mummy, jungle people in Borneo whose religion is built around deciphering the calls of seven sacred birds, Christian missionaries in China and Genghis Khan's fabled capital of Karakorum. The travelers' impressions lead him to formulate conflicting, strikingly modern theories of cognition, politics and metaphysics: the world is pure thought, constantly changing as humanity's consciousness evolves; knowledge involves emotion as much as observation; the planet is a global community. The conception is reminiscent of Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities?with a twist: Calvino made his traveler, Marco Polo, both tale-teller and interpreter, while his audience, Kublai Khan, was mute; Cowan gives full voice to his audience, Fra Mauro, making him, not the travelers, the interpreter of the world. Full of startling leaps of imagination and thought, this small gem of a book proves that the mind's desire can be as seaworthy a vessel as a schooner for exploring new worlds.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 176 pages
• Publisher: Grand Central Publishing (December 1, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0446673382
• ISBN-13: 978-0446673389
• Product Dimensions: 6.8 x 5 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,519,017 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Well worth the reading, May 6, 2000

By	M. J. Smith (Seattle, WA USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This is an excellent book, December 5, 1996

By A Customer

This review is from: A Mapmaker's Dream (Hardcover)

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.

8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars rich stew of ideas, November 4, 2001

By	Orrin C. Judd "brothersjudddotcom" (Hanover, NH USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This review is from: A Mapmaker's Dream (Hardcover)

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.

------

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+