Hav (New York Review Books Classics)

Everybody has lived in Hav. The Greeks, the Arabs, Turks, Russians, Italians, French, Germans. Even the Chinese still operate a fishing pier left over from their furthest Western expansion. The English maintain an Agent, who naturally assumes that all information is classified. A secretive medieval heresy called the Cathars meet in underground quarters resembling catacombs. We don't understand why -- until English travel writer Jan Morris added a brief sequel, 20 years after the brilliant fiction "Last Letters from Hav" first published in 1985, depicting life in the sterile, colorless, dystopic "new" Hav. The place's indigenous people live in caves, though some of the men work at the harbor, and protect the bears. In the misty past, the legends of this hard to locate somewhere that is both east and west, Europe and Asia, present and past go back to the Myrmidons, the Ancient Greek warriors who fought with Achilles in the Trojan War. Does this mean that Hav is the successor to Troy? Greeks founded this place, one of her informants tell the novel's narrator, a travel writer who appears to be a stand-in for author Jan Morris, who is herself an astute, highly respected travel writer. But when she tracks down a surviving Greek community, its members are polite and colorless. "We're not Greeks any more," they confess to her. Arabs built this place, another local informant tells her in the confiding, but ultimately elusive manner of the city's troop of amateur historians. But then Crusaders took it over and built a castle. An Armenian trumpeter still climbs to its highest point each dawn to play a lament for its knights who fell defending the city from invaders, which suggested to me a reprise of the fall of Constantinople. The twentieth century left its heavy fingerprints as well. Oh, there were Fascists in Hav, some say, and the local Germans opposed them. Mussolini however was welcomed by the Italian consulate. Others say, 'Communists were here' and White Russians. And every early 20th century figure you can think of, royalty, decadent rich, politician or intellectual put in an appearance. Freud visited Hav, as did T.E. Lawrence and Hemingway. Claims and counter-claims dispute an incognito visit by Hitler. The city-state of Hav is governed by a tripartite commission established by the League of Nations, which made the German Weimar Republic one of its protectors. Other survivors from the city's "old Europe," Ottoman and Middle Eastern zeitgeist include a pretender caliph, heir to the 1,300-year religious office at the head of Islam abolished by the Turks when Attaturk overthrew the Ottomans and established the modern Turkish state. The caliph is an urbane man careful about his dealings with the outside world because, he hints, he has enemies. Telephones and a little radio get through to this place that time forgot, but Hav presents as the last place on earth untouched by instantaneous communication, mass media, and modern transportation (also, interestingly, by American interests). No airports. You reach the city only by a train that travels a tunnel cut through mountain. My lasting impression, months after reading the book, is that Hav is the place where representatives of various versions of the Mediterranean past take Morris's narrator aside and say "Let me tell you what Hav was like when we were really the place to be..." Things were so much more -- interesting, provocative, promising, elegant, urbane, baroque -- back then. Hav is the objective correlative for the nostalgia that the earth's deeply rooted communities feel for more vital days. The narrator's informants tell her about the city's brilliant occasions, the parties thrown by celebrities of the Belle Epoque, the pre and post World War I periods (a time recently mocked up by West Anderson's "The Grand Budapest Hotel"), but also its unique bizarre traditions such as, the annual race over the city's rooftops and castle walls in which all hale young men must participate, even though some lose their lives. In the brief sequel ("Hav of the Myrmidons"), published in 2005, Morris's narrator returns to the new Hav created after a mysterious military "Intervention" placed the mysterious Cathars in charge. Everything old and charming has been destroyed and been replaced by a super-modern, sterile efficiency of gleaming towers and resort life for the 1 percent. The new people she meets are exemplified by the English tourists who love the new, sterile city because "it's exactly what we're used to" -- a devastating critique of the whole tourism project. The new Hav still has mysteries and hints of conspiracy but like -- I suspect most of the book's readers -- I so much preferred the older one.

Hav - What to say of this marvellous, labyrinthine city dreamt up by travel writer Jan Morris? The first party of this NYRB edition - Last Letters From Hav - is so splendid, bewildering and intoxicating that any reviewer is likely to find himself/herself more than a bit bemused in a sort of Lethean enchantment. What was that wondrous place of which I just read?Luckily - or who knows? Perhaps not. - one recovers to bring back to the prospective reader certain memories, as from Ms Jan's first morning in the city when, "I was awoken in the morning by two marvellous sounds as the first light showed through my shutters: the frail quavering line of a call to prayer; from some far minaret across the city, and the note of a trumpet close at hand, greeting the day not with a bold reveille, but more in wistful threnody." And the wistful threnody, we learn, as with everything in wondrous Hav, has a fabled and intricate history. Indeed, every person and place possesses such a textured, layered history that one becomes ensorcelled in all these histories, caught up in an ornate, rich tapestry of meaning. It's a bit like reading Patrick Leigh Fermor whilst smoking a narghile of opium. Yes, it's all very reminiscent of Southern Europe before the Twentieth Century wars, though, mind you, these last letters are from 1984-1985 where Hav stands alone, somewhere in Europe, a forgotten Shangri-la, where these histories and fables and, to the 21st Century reader, exotica, of persons and places and general mishmash of architectural styles and cultures all spiral together into shades of yore brought to life on the page. But, let's not attempt too much to describe the indescribable or become too particular in our measuring of the unmeasurable, lest we become a bit too much like Mahmoud and his chums in Hav's Athenaeum: "We are intellectuals you see...There is no subject that we cannot discuss, and all subjects make us angry."The second part of the book - Hav Of The Myrmidons - is all to prosaically real...Or is it? It has become a parody of the old Hav before what is euphemistically termed herein the "Intervention" by the new bureaucracy. It is a familiar, to us, mixture of the plutocratic and the theocratic, with all its histories and cultural waymarks and customs either obliterated or turned into inauthentic, chintzy versions of themselves, with hordes of American tourists holing up in ever so safe and sanitised enclaves, Chinese with tonnes of lucre calling the shots and what have you. This Hav of 2005, is in many ways, like Europe of 2005. But, again, let's not be so fast. Or, more to the point, let's contemplate where this new Hav, with its vulgar glitter, fast cars, faster aeroplanes and historical evasiveness may lead. The new Hav is but a patina over centuries of brushwork. Things have indeed changed swiftly, seeming to have razed and obliterated much that was meaningful or dear. But new Hav, after all, will seem little more than another cultural stratum in 2085, for the next Jan Morris to find, perhaps, some once famous but long-forgotten poet stumbling from a taverna mumbling about some long forgotten tower with a cryptic "M" set atop its soaring heights.Considered in toto rococo, the book is "like one of those threadbare exhausting dreams that have you groping through an impenetrable tangle of time, space and meaning, looking for your car keys."

Com localização incerta no lado oriental do Mediterrâneo, Hav era uma cidade pouco conhecida. Uma torre de babel de línguas e culturas, suas origens estão em Aquiles e os Mirmidões. Sua história ao longo dos séculos é conturbada, mas também também chegou a se tornar um point para celebridades – de Freud a James Joyce, passando por Hitler (segundo rumores), Chopin e Goerge Sand.Em HAV, um guia de viagens e memórias escrito por Jan Morris (uma das maiores autoras desse tipo de livros), acompanhamos a história e peculiaridades da cidade pelos olhos da autora. Dotada de uma visão aguçada e perspicaz para a particularidades locais, Morris constrói um relato apaixonado e apaixonante sobre um lugar misterioso que se tornou muito procurado desde a publicação do livro em1985.A edição da New York Review of Books, de 2006, traz o primeiro livro – Last Letters from Hav – e a continuação – Hav of the Myrmidons – que acompanha a segunda viagem da autora ao lugar, e descobre, entre outras coisas, que seu livro havia sino banido. A Hav de 2005 não é mais a mesma. Continua um lugar, no entanto, difícil de se descrever. Tendo sido vista por poucos (e escolhidos), era quase uma utopia.A Hav do século XXI, conforme Morris a descreve, foi destruída por algo chamado a Intervention, e reconstruída em concreto. A autora acha-a irreconhecível, especialmente pelo regime político obscuro que governa a cidade. A questão que o livro propõe é, então, ainda vale a pena visitar Hav? Para um guia de viagem, o livro não é tão elucidativo: há ainda pontos de interesse que justifiquem a empreitada e o gasto?Hav fascina e não é de se espantar que muita gente queira conhecer. Só há um problema. Hav não existe. É fruto da imaginação da autora – que num epílogo chama o lugar de alegoria. Ursula K. Le Guin, que é fã do livro discorda, e dá a percepção mais correta: “uma encruzilhada entre o ocidente e oriente das duas eras recentes [...] um bom guia de viagem do início do século XXI.”

I read the roof face years ago in a magazine and now, through Morris's book on Trieste, I returned to Hav. A wonderful book to revisit a wonderful place.

Ho voluto affrontare questo libro di Jan Morris che, come lei stessa dice, è completamente diverso dai suoi precedenti. Ha scritto di viaggi più o meno avventurosi e di grandi e piccole città, invece in questo libro lascia spazio alla fantasia e racconta di una città immaginaria, appunto Hav, situata tra Asia ed Europa, che dei due continenti ha assorbito vizi e virtù. Non esiste un'edizione italiana, perciò lo uso anche come ripasso della lingua inglese

A bit of a disappointment. Good service though

Thank you for excellent service, delivery, and price! I shall certainly order from you again and can recommend you, too.