Around the World in 80 Books

Around the World in 80 Books

by David Damrosch

Penguin Press, 2021

432 pages

This literary tour in 80 books, modeled after Verne’s Phileas Fogg’s route, proves to be exotically global and yet also personal.

Author Damrosch — Professor of Comparative Literature and director of Harvard’s Institute for World Literature, and author of dozens of books — draws from personal memories to draw a literary map with a vast array of books from all latitudes and excels at not focusing on the already much written-about novels. And while his selection of books at times is linked to personal experiences, let’s remind the reader that this is not a memoir and Damrosch’s choice to mention a relative who met so-and-so in such and such place is not arbitrary but that by doing so shows that all books and authors are linked to one another in different ways. For example: a renown author translates another; or one book proves to be successful in the other side of the globe wherein another soon-to-be known author emerges reading that same book; or that several authors met before they became famous, all the while Damrosch documents several of these moments through distant — and not so distant — relatives. While some famous works appear throughout — In Search of Lost Time, Mrs. Dalloway, Candide — Damrosch main achievement here is reintroducing to western readers some of the not always talked about books from remote regions —Czeslaw Milosz, Naguib Mahfouz, Georges Ngal, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. The books discussed are given its proper locale background as well as its author’s, a brief synopsis and a brief commentary by the author about why such books mattered in the past and why they continue to matter since they continue to influence new and coming authors in the contemporary world.

While author Damrosch shies away from calling his book a new canon, it sure can work as another attempt to the idea of a global canon that so few authors in the past have dared to venture into.~