The Art of Writing Standing up
Eight chronicles on the idea of the great life journey and the different typologies of the postmodern traveller.
As Stendhal or Vila-Matas did. A urban Wanderer, a walking thinker.
CANDAYA, 2023, 160 p. NON FICTION, Travel chronicle, Spanish
The Art of Writing Standing up is a travel book that, through eight chronicles with a clear guiding thread, traces a personal history of the travelling illness, from the Rome of the Grand Tour, at the dawn of modernity, to the current Benidorm as a paradigm of post-modern travel and low-cost tourism, passing through as many destinations that represent different pathologies of this strange restless condition. Aitor Romero takes us through places such as Lisbon, Tangiers, Madrid, Northern Ireland, the iconic America of cinema or Barcelona through pieces that begin as chronicles to later mutate into cultural essays, non-fiction stories or even painfully autobiographical texts that, from so much looking outwards, end up looking inwards, and dig into his traumas as a frustrated traveller and failed sedentary traveller.
Starting from classics of the chronicle of place such as Stendhal or Sterne, to those contemporary authors who have dynamited it from within such as Vila-Matas, Solnit or Foster Wallace, this is also an enquiry into the hybrid genres of prose – the chronicle and the autobiographical essay – which seem to merge with each other and with others constantly, as if their only possibility were to expand, breaking down all borders until they constitute a single transversal writing.
Through disciplines as diverse as cinema, literature, music, urban planning and history, Aitor Romero speaks to us of the need to leave home and go astray as a formula for attaining some kind of knowledge.
Original Title
El arte de ecribir de pie
Territory of representation
World Wide
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