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He's kind of crusty and angry. And, you know, you can tell he wants to move faster than he's going in a lot of ways.
Eric Lundgren:He is speaking to an older tradition of a masculinist outward travel writing that, you know, we probably haven't seen since Hemingway, really. Hello, and, welcome to the University of Minnesota Press podcast. I'm Eric Lundgren. I'm the outreach and development manager at the University of Minnesota Press, and it's a pleasure to be here today with Daniel Hornsby. Dan is the author of Via Negativa and the forthcoming book, Sucker, coming out from Anchor.
Eric Lundgren:Is that right? Twenty twenty three.
Daniel Hornsby:Yep. Exactly.
Eric Lundgren:And you teach at, Macalester teaching fiction at Macalester.
Daniel Hornsby:Thank you for having me. I'm I'm really excited to talk about the book.
Eric Lundgren:We're here today to discuss the, English publication of On the Wandering Paths by Sylvain Tasson. This book is sort of a travelogue. Takes place I believe the walk was taken in 2014 through the late summer and fall. And, the author, Tasson, had recently, gone through some some pretty harrowing stuff, which we'll sort of hear about in his preface a little later on. His mother had passed away, and he also had taken a fall from the roof of a chalet.
Eric Lundgren:He had sort of made his career as an adventurer undertaking these adventurous journeys. One of the things he was known for was climbing, but he, unfortunately, had this had this really terrible accident, which left him with, you know, some pretty significant health issues to deal with. So, in the aftermath of this, he, undertook this journey traversing really the the whole of France, starting out in Paris, heading Northwest all the way to sort of the the beaches of Normandy at the end of the book. There was a sense of wandering, of exploring these hidden pathways in the rural regions of France. And, Dan, this, this sort of put me in mind of Via Negativa, one of my favorite, not just debut novels, but one of the favorite novels, of of recent years for me.
Daniel Hornsby:Oh, thanks, man. That's so that's so kind.
Eric Lundgren:I I I I thought it you know, it's it has that, Calvino, talked about lightness, right, as one of the virtues of of literature, not in a sense of, like, being insignificant, but being sort of fleet, right, that it has this buoyancy to it. Despite the fact that your book sort of deals with, you know, really profound spiritual issues, there is also this this sense of lightness throughout it, and that's one of the things I I really appreciate about it. Maybe just to start us off, since you were so kind to write the foreword for this book, I was wondering if you wouldn't mind just, sort of reading it for us as a way to get into this discussion.
Daniel Hornsby:Yeah. I would be happy to. And and just, you know, thank you so much for having me. I'm I'm really looking forward to talking about the book, and it really, you know, touches me that you enjoyed my book. So thank you, buddy.
Daniel Hornsby:I I really appreciate that. I'm really moved by that. So, okay. So I will just dive into this. This is the foreword that I put together for On the Wandering Paths.
Daniel Hornsby:When I was in my early twenties, my friends and I drove to the middle of Kansas, and by extension the geographic center of the country, to play a concert for the richest man in town. We were idiots. We scraped money together for a tour by promising to play a house show for anyone who gave us a hundred dollars. We'd done the tour, and now it was time to pay up. The five of us packed our minivan with all our equipment in Manhattan, Kansas, where we went to school at the Big Agricultural University and drove three hours west to Lorraine where our patron lived.
Daniel Hornsby:There, our host thinks something between old Keith Richards and the human incarnation of divorce, greeted us and explained his scheme for the show. His goons would raise us on two parallel forklifts so that once we started playing, we'd emerge from behind the wall and closing his Jimmy Buffett style saltwater pool. It was a terrible idea, but we were young and stupid and agreed to it. We hoisted up our equipment and climbed on the yoga mat sized piece of metal borrowed from the cattle gates that made our patrons' fortune. When the time came to play, the two forklifts didn't quite sink, creating a kind of metal hiccup.
Daniel Hornsby:We survived and played the show, which did turn out to be fun despite our teetering 30 feet above an artificial waterfall. I spent the rest of the weekend bouncing between my friends' childhood homes. Driving through the country, I realized how far from each other people lived out there. Two of my best friends, who grew up together and attended the same tiny high school, lived almost a half an hour away from one another, and that is driving at college student speeds. And as Sylvain Tassin will soon reveal in the book you're about to read or hopefully you, you know, at home will pick up and buy, one of the ironies of the countryside is that the bucolic art of national myth making is entirely reliant on machines.
Daniel Hornsby:The grain elevators looked like castles on Venus, the only things crossing the barrier between the ground and sky. At night, you could see every star along with their usually hidden understudies. I grew up in exurban Indiana. My home and high school were surrounded by corn and soy monoculture in every sense. I was no stranger to the concept of the field.
Daniel Hornsby:But in Kansas, this was a different scale. Even with this hyper compression, the enormity of time is palpable. You feel about as big as a fruit fly with the same longevity. These rural eternities at much lower speeds are the subject of Sylvain Toussaint's On the Wandering Paths. One year after falling off a roof and seriously injuring himself, Toussaint walks through the French countryside, meditating on the world around him that has also fallen and maimed itself too.
Daniel Hornsby:This, I think, helped dredge up my memory of teetering on the forklift. Toussaint's concept of self and and, man, that feels a little callous now, but, I mean, he really did hurt himself. I don't mean to make light of that, but, I mean, it it was dangerous, I I will say, up there. Tassan's concept of self and country grinds against a less than picturesque reality. You are getting old.
Daniel Hornsby:Your world is in sad decline too. Tassan is rightly, pleasantly cranky. Like many of you probably, I feel as if I've been duped. In exchange for a little convenience, we've destroyed the world and alienated ourselves from everyone. For us, Tassan offers a delightfully bitter Jeremiah on globalism and decay while keeping a toe in eternity, born from a vision of a new map of the landscape.
Daniel Hornsby:To find your own original path of thought, Tassan suggests you walk a new path through the world. And here's a quote. I now dreamt of a movement I would baptize as the guild of the invisible paths. Not satisfied with simply mapping a cartographic network of physical geographical space, the invisible paths could also define the mental cartographies we would use to carve out another mode of seeking exile and withdrawal from our current frenetic age. Sketching out our cartographic movements on newly formed maps and cutting our physical movements through the serpentine pathways in the landscape, we would also simultaneously be sketching mental cartographies.
Daniel Hornsby:Tassan isn't romantic. This isn't a necklogue with tipsy shepherds singing to their girlfriends. Rural life is exactly where ancient cycles of growth and death meet industrialized farming and property development. Tassan gives a clear eyed account of his walk through the contemporary industrialized countryside. He's something of a nineteenth century man, a thorough in motion, and explorers come back from distant regions.
Daniel Hornsby:He once made a much longer walk, a 5,000 kilometer trek through the Himalayas. A Jack London type, I guess. In keeping with this, Drew Birx translation pleasantly oscillates between more rigid nineteenth century syntax and bright colloquial bursts. Despite this high stakes and dark picture, there are a lot of small joys here. This one Tessa fondly describes birds as retired masters of the planet.
Daniel Hornsby:With their aloof way of carrying themselves, their disquieting appearance, fierce eyes, and dragon like features, It's as if they have almost retained some memory of that former age. Sitting on their corner carpets, they must say to themselves, ah, those were the days when we govern the world, sixty five million years ago. Will we meet the same fate as theirs? On the wandering paths places Sylvain Tassan and a long tradition of riders fleeing civilization to find something older than empire. The holy men and women of Lower Egypt, Basho, Thoreau, and the anonymous narrator of the way of the pilgrim.
Daniel Hornsby:It can be seen in the larger tradition of French walking literature, the works of Jean Jionot, a philosophy of walking by Frederic Grosz, but it also pairs nicely with Jenny Odell's How to Do Nothing as part of a fresh syllabus for rejecting the world we've inherited. By the end of the book, Tassan reminds us that the invisible paths are still out there, even in a world that seems thoroughly mapped. We had learned at least one thing. We could still depart straight ahead in front of ourselves and struggle with nature. There were still valleys where we could fill entire days without laying our eyes on another single person to tell us which direction to take.
Daniel Hornsby:All we had to do was seek them out.
Eric Lundgren:Thank you so much, Dan. Really enjoyed hearing that, read out loud. And I should, tell our listeners upfront just so that they don't elevate their expectations too much that we are amateur enthusiasts of of French literature, not experts on French geography, and that we may butcher one or two French place names in the course of this recording. And that's just out of ignorance. It's not contempt or anything like that.
Eric Lundgren:I think I wanna talk a little bit about your book via Negativa, you know, with Tassan on the side. We have a book called on the wandering paths, so I think we can wander a little bit sort of have Tassan as our guide. I feel feel semantically justified in doing that. So in your book, we have a priest by the name of of father Dan who's making a sort of westward journey by car. He's in a he's in a Camry, Toyota Camry, and he's got a, a wounded coyote in the back seat, which is kinda picked up, you know, on page one.
Eric Lundgren:Right? It's almost right away. And that coyote stays with him throughout much of the journey. So you have this sort of wildness there that's contained in the back seat. But we also have the title of the book, which I think, you you know, is a really beautiful title.
Eric Lundgren:Also a sort of organizing principle for the book in some way. And put me in mind of the book because, in the original French, I think it's called something more like on the dark paths or on the black roads even. So you have that kind of similarity in how the two of you have kind of framed your books. But I was just wondering if you could talk a little bit about the Via Negativa and and what that means to you and and and maybe how you used it to to write this book.
Daniel Hornsby:Yeah. So the Via Negativa, you know, it's one of those, like, kind of took a risk maybe giving my novel an unwieldy Latin title, but it refers to a kind of theological tradition or theological branch, also known kind of as, like, apophaticism, which has to do with, like, avoiding language, avoiding positive language or images when referring to the divine. And so the biggest thinker, the the kind of father of this lineage is Pseudo Dionysius the Areopagite, who is like, you know, an early Christian thinker, who kind of sets this up to be picked up by the anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing. Aquinas is really influenced by him. And it's just this way, I think, you know, it it becomes marginalized because it's not really, like, useful in a political sense to say, oh, we can't really define what God is or we can't, you know, capture God in images.
Daniel Hornsby:Yeah. And some people call it, you know, the way of denial. And so I think, you know, with the book, I'm kind of playing with that tradition, but then also thinking about, you know, an actual via, you know, a road, a kind of pilgrimage, and also thinking about denial more generally since my narrator, you know, he's a a retired priest, and he's very much in denial of just kind of the heinous acts committed by other priests and the ways in which he's complicit with that. And so I tried to, you know, make that the key to the book in a way. And, you know, like, I think like all of us, you know, we take on these world views that don't only intellectually resonate.
Daniel Hornsby:Right? Like, more often, they're going to emotionally resonate and sometimes do something for us. And I think for him, you know, not having to define what matters most to him with language, resisting talking about what's in his heart, it makes a lot of sense to him. You know?
Eric Lundgren:Yeah. Yeah. Because you also have that sense with, you know, even some of his friendships that he's sort of fallen short. He's chosen to remain hidden to sort of, like, remain unavailable to these people even though they're close to him and that he loves them. But there's something in him that hasn't allowed him to be sort of fully present, for those people maybe.
Daniel Hornsby:Yeah. Oh, yeah. I think that's dead on.
Eric Lundgren:And the way the book sort of operates, I should say, it sort of toggles between this road trip that the priest is on and also sort of memories of his spiritual life, I would say. It's a sort of spiritual autobiography. And these memories that he has, though, are not necessarily of, you know, fulfilling his pastoral duties or, you know, the kind of day to day work of the priesthood. They're sort of marginal or, like, liminal sort of experiences that he has that are often very playful. You know, drugs are involved in a few of them.
Eric Lundgren:And, you know, they're they're kind of these experiences that that almost happen on the margins of his life. So in that in that sense too, I I I felt like it was a kind of via negativa that we were getting to know him through these sort of shadowy experiences from the corners of his life in a way. But there also seemed to be, you know, perhaps some kinda injury there for him. So that might be another place of connection with with Tosan.
Daniel Hornsby:I can see that for sure. Yeah. It's actually making me think. You know? There's a kind of irony, I think, to what did they call it?
Daniel Hornsby:Like, pulling it geographical. Right? Like, people have a breakup, and then they drive across the country, and they're just like, okay. I live in California now. Right?
Daniel Hornsby:Like, that's kind of a thing. Right? And there's there's this kind of irony there that I think it's maybe true for my book and definitely maybe true for on the wandering paths too where, like, you're trying to escape something. And it's not just that, like, you're bringing the thing you're trying to escape from with you, that cliche, but also that, like, just the act of traveling a great distance to escape a thing means that you have all of this time to think about that thing. Right?
Daniel Hornsby:Like, you're in the car. I mean, I think about this. Like, when when you drive I don't know. Does this happen to you, Eric, where you're dry you know, you make a long drive, and memories will just kind of, like, bubble up as you're staring into space. And it's true for walking too, but I think we, like, distract ourselves a lot with music and things like that.
Daniel Hornsby:Things will just kind of come out of nowhere, and I'll have, like, strange memories from decades ago that will just kind of hit me in ways that they just won't in my apartment or in my neighborhood.
Eric Lundgren:Yeah. There is absolutely something about traversing those vast spaces that brings things back. And you do go into this sort of, like, meditative state or maybe you're permeable to those memories in a way that you usually aren't. It does bring up, and I think, you know, your forward brings this up too about, you know, just the sheer vastness of the country. I mean, America, you know, that undertaking something like what Tassan did in France, you would have to do it by car.
Eric Lundgren:Right? I mean, it's just, I don't know. I was thinking of that one guy who is sort of an environmentalist. He did a lot of walking, to sort of like, as a protest on climate change. Right?
Eric Lundgren:And I don't know. I think he may have done some hitchhiking along the way, but, you know, he was he was largely on foot, I believe.
Daniel Hornsby:I feel like that guy died. Did he die?
Eric Lundgren:He died. He also died. So, you know, probably not a model that anyone should
Daniel Hornsby:my partner and I, we went to the we were, like, just at went down to the river a couple days ago, and, you know, I'd moved from Memphis to Minneapolis maybe six months ago. The two of us have. It's weird to think, this is the same river. You know, we are, like, so far away from Memphis, but this is the same river. And it would be crazy to just kinda walk alongside it Yeah.
Daniel Hornsby:To Memphis. You could. And she was like, you would get killed.
Eric Lundgren:That's right.
Daniel Hornsby:Like, just, like it just seems too dangerous. Do you know what I mean? Like, whether it's a car or something, but, like, it just I don't know. In America, it just seems like, no. You're you're gonna get murdered if you do that.
Eric Lundgren:Yeah. The the landscape is not set up for it. In fact, it's it's often, like, actively, like, adversarial to someone, like, trying to walk. Right. Yeah.
Eric Lundgren:I mean, I've lived, like, I lived in Baton Rouge, for a while and Saint Louis as well. So it's like the river has always been there. And, I had a similar experience a couple days just enjoying this lovely weather we've been having in Minneapolis of walking to to the Mississippi and seeing kind of its power and feeling that. You know? And I just had like, I left my phone at home and just had the keys in the pocket.
Eric Lundgren:And, like, it started raining a bit, and I was like, I don't even care, you know, because it doesn't matter.
Daniel Hornsby:That's lovely. Yeah. I love that. Just like a music video moment.
Eric Lundgren:Yeah. Yeah. And, like, I think that's what Jenny Odell, you know, gets at so well. And I think what the pandemic has kind of brought to the fore for me a lot is just how important that that connection is with the forest, with trees, with nature. I I felt it in a more kind of urgent way in the last few years.
Eric Lundgren:You know? And when that's not available, which is sometimes the case, you know, in in Minnesota in the winter, it's It's really hard to get through. We've just gotten through a pretty a pretty rough winter. So that's sort of the the context of feeling like, you know, along with Tassan, you know, going out into the forest in the woods at this time feels like a really kind of restorative process. So I thought I might read a little bit of Toussaint's preface because I think it's just just to give everyone a sense of kind of his voice, and, I'm not gonna read the whole thing.
Eric Lundgren:I don't think we quite have time for that, but, we'll get it started. This is also some of his more personal writing that he does in the book. So for that reason, I'd like to read it as well. The past year had been rough. For a long time now, the gods had blessed the family, and we had been fortunate to bask in their sweet embrace.
Eric Lundgren:Perhaps some of them propped themselves up against us like fairy tales, and then suddenly their smiles turned into grimaces. We didn't really have much of an idea about how any of this worked, but we would politely partake in this fate with an energetic ambivalence. A subtle force made its way through us with hardly the least bit of gratitude, but nevertheless left us burdened with the lightest of fatigues. Life had begun to resemble one of those beautiful paintings by Bonar. A sun drenched yellow permeated the white jackets and tablecloths laden with fruit cups, and a bounty of fresh air gently passed through the open windows from the adjacent orchard where one could see children playing.
Eric Lundgren:Outside, the apple trees were whistling in the wind. In the end, it was perhaps the ideal decor for a good smack in the face, and it didn't wait long to arrive. My sisters, nephews, and pretty much everyone else seemed to have been snared by one of those misfortunes that moves through the ramparts of the city like some medieval tale. A shadow slowly saunters through the narrow cobbled streets reaching the heart of the city, and finally, the gates of the dungeon, one thing seemed clear. The plague was progressing.
Eric Lundgren:My mother had died the way she had lived standing me up. And there I was taken to drink, having completely wrecked myself and busted up my face while playing the fool on some rooftop. That evening, I had fallen from a ledge and landed back on Earth. All it took was eight meters for me to break my ribs, fracture my skull, and vertebrae. Come down from the heavens, I'd fallen back to earth in a pile of bones.
Eric Lundgren:I deeply regretted this fall because for a long time, I had been well equipped with a physical machinery that it allowed me had allowed me to live a rather high octane sort of life, always plowing full speed ahead toward the next adventure. From my perspective, the noble existence resembled something like the Siberian long haul truck checkpoints. All the warning signs are in red, but the machine keeps on slicing its own pathway through the landscape, and the slightest Cassandra resembling a character from the idiot on the side of the road waving their hands frantically to indicate a catastrophe ahead was simply turned into roadkill. Robust health in just eight meters, I had aged 50 years. So they picked me off up off the ground, and I would come back to life, comatose and dead.
Eric Lundgren:I wasn't even able to attend my mother's funeral or catch a glimpse of her well in heaven. A hundred billion humans have been born on this earth since the time homo sapiens became became what we have become. Do you really think you'll end up finding a close friend within the chaos of some eternal anthill teeming with cherubs? We'll leave it at that. Although, he goes on to discuss his sort of stay in the hospital and looking out at this tree that's outside his window.
Eric Lundgren:So that seems to be, you know, maybe even sort of the seed of this journey through France that he undertakes dealing with a lot of physical pain as well as a partial kind of facial paralysis that he's dealing with. I think at one point, he's in a church, and this woman hands him a, you know, €20 note and says, you know, say say a mass for whoever you want, you know, that people are taking pity on him. So, I mean, what do you make of of the figure in this book or or Tassan as as he presents himself in this sort of, like, journey of recovery? Is it something that you can kind of relate to, or does it feel strange or other?
Daniel Hornsby:Yeah. I found myself really taken by his crankiness. I think that when I kind of was like, okay. I'm gonna read this book, write this intro. I was thinking, okay.
Daniel Hornsby:There would be a kind of sentimentality. Like, it just seemed like that was gonna be there. Right? That there'd be some kind of inward journey of discovery, and it would be kind of not syrupy, but, you know, like, bad French movie that gets, like, an Oscar nomination.
Eric Lundgren:Yeah.
Daniel Hornsby:You know what I mean? Where it's like, it would have and and I like that he was he's kind of crusty and angry. And, you know, you can tell he wants to move faster than he's going in a lot of ways. And I I I don't even with the animals, like, he I I think he's most sympathetic to, you know, like, the wolves that he describes being kind of chased with the sound of engines or birds. He they're beautiful passages about birds.
Daniel Hornsby:I read one a little bit earlier. And but he likes them because they're, like, not soft, that they're that they they have hard edges and that they're kind of bitter. It kind of projects that onto them. I thought that was incredibly refreshing. I mean, he's very forthcoming with the pain and tragedy early on, but then that, I think, moves backward.
Daniel Hornsby:Or it moves back in I think, into the background. Isn't that a little surprising? There isn't a moment where he's, like, really thinking about his mother in some kind of sentimental way later. Like, you would imagine, oh, I was at in the mountains, and I thought about her and or even some you know, the way that maybe the way a a novelist might make a character do that. You know?
Eric Lundgren:Sure. Yeah. For sure. I I was thinking about this a little bit in terms of Cheryl Strayed's book, Wild.
Daniel Hornsby:Oh, yeah.
Eric Lundgren:And not to disparage, like, either of the books in any way. Like, I think what Cheryl Stray does, she does, like, extremely well. You know, it has some similarities. Her mother dies. She's going through a divorce.
Eric Lundgren:She takes on this journey of, you know, walking the entire Pacific Crest Trail, but it's so different in that, you know, you're completely inside her emotional experiences as you go along. You know, there are these mini dramas about, you know, her hiking boots have worn down to the point where they're completely useless, scraping her ankles raw, and there's this drama of, is she gonna get the money she needs to get more, you know, get new hiking boots? And she takes you inside all of that. Yeah. To Sun, it's it seems with the possible exception of this preface.
Eric Lundgren:I think you're you're absolutely right, really, keeps all that at a distance. Looking at the history of the land, trying to be present with the natural life that's there to have those encounters with yeah. You know, whether it's arachnids or, you know, you have vultures. It's kind of a creepy form of wildlife that he seems to gravitate towards.
Daniel Hornsby:Right. He has a a kind of resentment towards herbivores. Right? Like, you you kinda see that. You know?
Daniel Hornsby:Like, genetically modified herbivores, I think he says at one point, and, like, uses their genetic modification as a symptom of heart decay. You know? Where he like, oh, I like these wolves because they're vicious and,
Eric Lundgren:you
Daniel Hornsby:know, they work against that. But he's always, like, tracing the spirals of birds of prey in the air and things like I think you're you're so right. Those are the animals he's fond of. He doesn't really wanna, like, look at some pigs or talk to a cow or anything like that.
Eric Lundgren:Well yeah. And even even some of his encounters with the shepherds and the the farmers and and people that he meets. You know? There's a great encounter early on, see if I can find it here, where he's talking to a shepherd, asking him questions. Hi.
Eric Lundgren:Are you making your way down to the city? I asked. No, he said. Is your flock somewhere up there in the hills? No.
Eric Lundgren:Are you heading down to take a break for a bit? No. No. So it's just kind of answers in the negative and and, seems to, like, foreclose really any of the sense of possibly, you know, communing with these people or getting some some wisdom or something like that as you might in one of those kinda sentimental French films that gets the Oscar.
Daniel Hornsby:You know, like, the French countryside is a kind of product that is sold around the world. There is an industry around it, and it is a significant part of the French economy. You go to the pantheon, and there are a lot of writers there. They're another seed of this kind of nationalism. Don't you think I mean, I I would say filmmakers maybe more, but, like, just nowadays.
Daniel Hornsby:But, like, when you think of kind of French culture, like, you know, Flaubert and Hugo or whoever, like, it goes on and on. And I was wondering if, like, there's an interesting pairing there. You know? And he does seem to be cast in a kind of older mold of a kind of I don't even know if it's a kind of masculinity, but a certain kind of macho writer.
Eric Lundgren:Yeah. I I I think that's that's really smart, Dan. I think that for me, really, is the same sense that I get that he is sort of speaking to an older tradition of, yeah, a masculinist kind of outward travel writing that, you know, we probably haven't seen since since Hemingway, really. I mean, you know, maybe the beats to some extent, you maybe look at travel writers like Peter Matheson, who also now both Tassan and Peter Matheson wrote these books about the snow leopard and and going to Tibet. But, it kind of, you know, with the mountaineering and all that stuff kind of takes me back to to Hemingway.
Eric Lundgren:And, you know, I I I gotta say that's a tradition that I'm a little bit wary
Daniel Hornsby:of. Me too.
Eric Lundgren:I should say too just to give a little bit more sort of context on to Son because I don't feel like he's known that well. Have have you ever, like, heard him come up in in conversation or anything like that?
Daniel Hornsby:The first I heard of him was with his snow leopard book. I think I read, a review of it in the New Yorker or something like that.
Eric Lundgren:That's right. Catherine Schultz wrote a really good piece about that book, which was retitled the art of patience, for the American edition.
Daniel Hornsby:Sure. Of course.
Eric Lundgren:In the French, I think it was originally just called the snow leopard. I think here, you know, they had to deal with the, you know, the Mathison book.
Daniel Hornsby:I I wish they would have kept it. It could have been like the replacements let it be. You know what I mean? Just like
Eric Lundgren:Absolutely. Just go with it.
Daniel Hornsby:Because if you're gonna do a snow leopard book, I mean, you might as well just, if one of us were to write a book about whales, let's just call it Moby Dick too.
Eric Lundgren:Absolutely.
Daniel Hornsby:You know? Like, let's just commit.
Eric Lundgren:Absolutely. He's pretty close to a celebrity in France, if not a celebrity. He's sold I think the snow leopard book sold in excess of of 500,000 copies in France. His other book, which is about he also went to Lake Baikal in Siberia. It's the the world's largest freshwater lake.
Eric Lundgren:I always remember hearing that as a kid because, you know, Lake Superior is kind of like my first experience of that kind of vastness, you know, as as as close as I got to the ocean as a kid as a young kid. And, you know, that was always the second, you know, the second largest freshwater lake. And then we heard about that, you know, the Siberian Lake. But the Tassan went and lived there for, you know, I think about six months through the winter. You know?
Eric Lundgren:He's out chiseling through the ice in the morning to, to get to the water so he could fill his water bucket and chopping wood. And he's out there in the cabin, you know, smoking smoking cigarillos and, you know, drinking whiskey and reading. I think he brought, like, Nietzsche and, you you know, like, Schopenhauer out there. Of course. Right.
Eric Lundgren:Right.
Daniel Hornsby:I love it. You you just see him with, like, a big knife and a gun, you know, and drinking by himself and Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's easy to picture this.
Daniel Hornsby:And, like, you know exactly what kinda hat
Eric Lundgren:he wears.
Daniel Hornsby:You know what I mean?
Eric Lundgren:He's got he's got the pipe too in in some of the author photos. Yeah. See, he seems to be sort of consciously taking up this mantle of, I don't wanna say, in a national literature of some kind almost. He mentions at one point in this book and on the wandering paths that he, you know, he was obsessed with the French empire and that he he even wore a bicorn helmet in the in the tub. Do you remember that?
Daniel Hornsby:It's so funny.
Eric Lundgren:Yeah. I was just like
Daniel Hornsby:Yeah. Napoleon comes up a few times. Yeah.
Eric Lundgren:That's one of the other books too, that has made it into English. He he followed the it's called from Moscow to Paris following Napoleon's epic fail. So, yeah, Europa put that out a couple of years ago. He's been, you know, pretty well translated, into English, but, you know, probably hasn't saturated to the point that he has in France. I was trying to read a little bit of the French sort of coverage on him, and there was at least one article that was sort of, like, accusing him of being kind of a reactionary, which I can kind of understand where that's that's coming from.
Eric Lundgren:I mean, you know, the crankiness, yeah, absolutely. I'm on board with that and a certain amount of of misanthropy. You know? I've no trouble with that either usually. But there's a sense of, you know, when he's writing about globalization, when he's writing about the encroachment of digital surveillance, sort of the digital world screens into our lives.
Eric Lundgren:I think he says that a couple points, like, I arrived here, you know, a thousand years too late. Right? He he's he's looking at these ruins and seeing another form of life that is, if not completely vanished, sort of on the verge of doing so. Right? I feel like there are moments in the book too where he's kind of more critical of his nostalgia.
Eric Lundgren:How how do you make sense of that?
Daniel Hornsby:I do like when he kind of spins out cosmically without sentimentality, and I find that endearing for the most part. But, yeah, you do get this sense that he would like the I guess the thing I wonder is, like, when would he like to live? I imagine that he he kind of wants typewriters to exist, but not computers. You know, maybe I think he would like to be a late nineteenth century person. Because, like, I just can't imagine I mean, I think what we we tend to especially with the Romans, we either think, like, oh, they had really clean water and everything was great, or we think it was like a complete it was completely dire.
Daniel Hornsby:But, like, I can't imagine he would actually wanna live under Roman rule. There are moments where that does seem like maybe something he would be into, but you're like, dude, you're you're gonna have, like, parasites you don't know about. You know what I mean?
Eric Lundgren:Yeah. There are moments, though, you know, where he when he's writing about what the day to day life of, you know, a farmer in the country would be like, where it seems like he's not really romanticizing that, that he understands.
Daniel Hornsby:And I I I appreciated that. He actually seems to have, like, contempt for people who, like like, sometimes. You know what I mean? Where especially, at least for industrial farming, which is totally understandable. But yeah.
Daniel Hornsby:Yeah. And I wonder about this too because it's like the oldest literary tradition. It's like Theocritus and then Virgil, like, just the the bucolic mode. And it seems like you kind of need a city to produce that kind of text. Like, you need people to be pulled out of the country for you to have nostalgia about that kind of work.
Daniel Hornsby:And, like, Virgil was not chilling on a farm. Right? He was working in a poetic tradition that allowed him to kind of play with these modes and ideas. And I wonder with him, like, I like that he doesn't surrender to this tiny house vision of life in the country, that it would be this, I don't know, cure for whatever the national ill is, that the country is where there's more destruction in a lot of in a lot of ways. I mean and that's especially true here.
Daniel Hornsby:Right? Like, if you just drive through rural Minnesota, you can see, like, okay. There's there's been some serious deforestation. This is an artificial landscape as much as a city. And I think he makes it kind of clear, which I I appreciated that, and it helped me kind of reorient my thinking around the ways in which we, especially in America, use the country, use rural people as a way to kind of uphold what we think America is, and, obviously, that has disastrous effects.
Eric Lundgren:Right. The idea that whenever anything goes down, kind of the the New York Times is gonna send a reporter to this this same truck stop in Iowa and and get get the takes of yeah. There's a sort of authenticity or realness that's conferred, like, on the rural.
Daniel Hornsby:Yeah. As if those people don't have, like, flat screen TVs and the Internet. They're not buying stuff on Amazon or something. Like, no. They are.
Eric Lundgren:Yeah. And we certainly get that sense throughout this book that the rural the countryside, this sort of old world on the wandering, the hidden, the dark paths is being manipulated, is being kind of messed with, is being, like, encroached on by cities and big box stores and this sort of architecture of modernity, which, like, Tucson is pretty harsh on for the most part. Although at the same time, I mean, it's just interesting that as almost a map for his journey, he takes this sort of French bureaucratic report about the, what is it, the hyper rural districts of France, right, that need to be modernized, and they don't have sufficient, you know, high speed Internet, and they need to be kind of brought up to speed. And he takes this as almost his itinerary. These are the places that I I wanna go to.
Eric Lundgren:So, yeah, I think there's absolutely that tension at work between the urban and, I mean, Toussaint's coming from the background of, I think, being the son of, you know, prominent French intelligentsia. He's very much a part of the Parisian literary world, but he seems to be strongly drawn by this idea of retreat, right, or, like, being able to withdraw from the world in some way.
Daniel Hornsby:I always think of that as, like, a very American thing. Right? I heard a little clip from the Grateful Dead's road manager, tour manager, and he's like, oh, yeah. Americans, they're always like, British people, they don't get in their car and look for Britain. Right?
Daniel Hornsby:But Americans are all like, they're gonna drive out there and discover America. What is America? How do I fit in? And, I mean, I feel like that's true, right, because of the sheer mass of our country. You always wonder, like, did I get the thing?
Daniel Hornsby:Is this the American thing? Right? And, of course, it's not monolithic, and you can never get all of it.
Eric Lundgren:That's right.
Daniel Hornsby:But what's interesting to me is that he has that same desire. Like, he is doing that with France. Like, he is kind of looking for For readers like you or me, this is a history of France in a kind of pointillistic way.
Eric Lundgren:Yeah. It maybe still seems possible in a way that the sort of discovering America thing seems, you know, just completely beyond the scope of what any one person could do. But it does seem like he has that sort of ambition here to some extent. Actually, since we're on the the subject of Americans, I'll read one of my personal favorite passages from this book, which is the the arrival of some touring American cyclists is a nice little passage. At times like these, I would slowly slink down into a bit of depression with my eyes half closed, surrounded by a large group of American cyclists.
Eric Lundgren:They were around 60 years old with a tanned and taut beauty of tennis players, their cycling jerseys drenched in sweat. The English language brought them great joy, and they laughed a great deal displaying their bleached teeth. They yelled at each other from one table across to another and drank cold glasses of rose, drops of which could be seen falling from the lips of the women among them. They knew how to live, and they had no qualms about showing it. There were entire tourist agencies in Provence that organized such cycling trips, providing the routes and bicycles so that hundreds of cyclists could make their way around Ventu before returning to spend their evenings in a welcoming jeet.
Eric Lundgren:In Tibet, pilgrims also made their way around stupas and sacred mountains in tatters, sporting hallucinated dazes and faces darkened by charcoal smears. In the end, a beggar's pilgrimage and an American's hiking trip were pretty much the same thing, a way to evade boredom. My current neighbors did a much better job at fighting off neurasthenia than the dandies from Normandy. They partook in a technicolor Provence, a postcard landscape with tiny villages flanked by ochre colored mountains. There was way too much class under this arbor.
Eric Lundgren:Suddenly, I was overcome by the creeping feeling that I was not dressed in the proper attire. When an American arrives somewhere nearby, the French always seem to feel as if they resemble some sort of country bumpkin from Normandy in 1944. I got up and quietly departed so as not to disturb these beautiful print pink creatures. I had no ill feelings toward them. I didn't think to myself that behind every perfectly manicured smile resided the mask of an ogre.
Eric Lundgren:No. Nothing. No sarcasm. Truth be told, I envy their expressions of happiness.
Daniel Hornsby:I love that passage because he gets to have it both ways. He gets to put them down. He gets to put himself down, but he also gets to it's very funny. These pink creatures, their bleached teeth. It's great.
Eric Lundgren:Yeah. Yeah. I I I feel we have to, say say that here that this is just often a really funny book and that, his his sense of humor really is such a joy, throughout it and sort of brings the proceedings down to earth too, not seeming quite as self serious as they might otherwise.
Daniel Hornsby:Yeah. For sure. I actually have a question for you, Eric. It's it's something that you have to ask yourself reading this book. Right?
Daniel Hornsby:Like, how do you kind of conceive of the invisible paths, the wandering paths of the the English title? And, like, how do you make sense of that?
Eric Lundgren:Yeah. It's a really good question. My experience that could be somewhat analogous to this was walking through, like, the Lake District in England, where, like, Wordsworth and Keats, and they all had their cottages and whatnot. And you're kinda just, like, be walking along a fence for a while, and it was pretty clear that these paths are just sort of like I think of a phrase from Updike that has always stuck in my head, a rubbed consensus, you know, rather than, like, a a formal official pathway. So, I mean, there's that very literal sense of it.
Daniel Hornsby:Yeah. I'm trying to find okay. Have you ever seen anything with Timothy Speed Levich?
Eric Lundgren:No. I don't think I have.
Daniel Hornsby:He was, like, a tour guide in New York, and he there's a really good documentary about him. I think it's called yeah. It's called The Cruise. And he thinks there are kind of two modes of moving through the world. And one is, like, the commute, which is, like, getting somewhere.
Daniel Hornsby:And the cruise is kind of, like, just wandering. But it's like paying attention to things. Right? Like, letting the cruise kind of move through you. You know?
Daniel Hornsby:He's a really weird guy. He talks kind of like this, and he he has a really high words per minute count, but he is incredibly charming. And what he does is he gives these hyper tours of New York where he'll be like, okay. That is where this writer lived. And five years later, this actress was coming back from the actor's studio when she you know, like, and everything kind of converges in this space.
Daniel Hornsby:And you can see that, like, you're participating in this movement. You know? I don't mean movement like an artistic movement, but this unfolding of things. And it's like by being aware of that, maybe you can actually get to some other place. You know?
Daniel Hornsby:I mean, like, maybe that this path that is kind of off road might give you some other train of thought that can get you somewhere else that can maybe get us out of this, like, global funk is maybe too light forward, but you know what I mean? Just to not just to not, like, pour on the despair.
Eric Lundgren:Yeah. It feels like a melancholy path in some way, but also one that sort of opens possibility. And I think part of what makes it full of possibilities is that you're sort of, like, shedding off part of yourself to walk these paths. Right? I think of, there's this great essay by Virginia Woolf, Street Haunting, where it's sort of like you step down sort of out of the bourgeois house and you go kind of into the square and you become an anonymous person among other people.
Eric Lundgren:And I feel like, you know, maybe Tassan, even though this is obviously not an urban chronicle, he's out there trying to avoid people, but there's that similar sense of sloughing off part of your identity, right, that you step out into the forest, like, beyond the context of the rest of your life. And you become this kind of anonymous figure. And we were talking earlier about even driving through space, but these kind of interstitial moments in our lives where we're kind of untraceable. I I I feel like that's something that I like, something I really am seeking out and, like, hungering for are those moments where, like, I can't be traced, where I'm not leaving some kind of trail.
Daniel Hornsby:Right. You kind of step out of the American casino and get the cameras off you and the pit bosses or whatever, and you're like, oh, like, you're off the grid. Yeah.
Eric Lundgren:Right. I did wanna ask you about that. You know, that fantasy is there too about, well, if, you know, if I could go buy a plot of land somewhere, cheap plot of land, right, and get a generator and
Daniel Hornsby:And just grow a paranoid Ted Kaczynski beard.
Eric Lundgren:Just go from there. I mean, what's, like, your comfort level with nature? Like, I had a childhood where I was often taken to, like, national parks in the woods and was made to camp for long periods and did a lot of hiking through, you know, scenic mountain ranges and gorges and whatnot. And it kind of it somewhat turned me against, sort of the outdoors experience. You know?
Eric Lundgren:I I'm just sort of overdosed at it, as a kid, but, I I'm curious about would you go backpacking? Is that something you would do?
Daniel Hornsby:I would do. I've never done it, though, so maybe, you know, maybe that tells you all you need to know. I love, like, every animal. Mosquitoes, I'm kind of cool with. If they don't bite me, I can love them.
Daniel Hornsby:And so it's like I'm always on the lookout for weird animals and birds and, you know, like, rabbits in the yard even. So, yeah, I do have, like like, I have a lot of, like, climate anxiety, and, I don't know, hope that we can, you know, renegotiate our relationship, obviously, with, like, nonhuman life on this planet. But, you know, I think also it's like as far as, like, as a writer, I really do feel like when I'm around people and I can listen in on their conversations and just kind of watch them, I do feel, like, very energized. I think I could go to a cabin and, like, work on some writing and have a really nice time, yet record a seminal, you know, indie folk album and whatever. But I do feel like language does just, like, happen between people.
Daniel Hornsby:You know what I mean? And I'm always kind of interested in little snippets of talk and stuff like that. So I guess I could, like, bounce between those polls.
Eric Lundgren:Probably not, you know, Lake Lake Baikal in Siberia for six months.
Daniel Hornsby:Yeah. Oh, and I maybe I could, but I would just be interested in the people I would the one person I could see. I would probably really get into the animal life or whatever. Something interesting could happen, and I would try it if someone's like, oh, we have a new residency. You can go to Siberia.
Daniel Hornsby:I'm wary of that fantasy sometimes. I just see the flannel shirt. You know what I mean? I can see the Sure. I can see the French press coffee maker, and I don't wanna I don't know if I should lean into it.
Daniel Hornsby:You know, I already have enough jazz records. I just don't I don't know if I could be a jazz dad like Boney Barrett up in the cabin. I just don't know. You know? I don't wanna lean too hard into my own demographic of white guy.
Eric Lundgren:Sure. I I understand. There is this remarkable moment in the, on the wandering paths. It's sort of a quick, you know, Tassan doesn't linger on it too long, but he's at this little forest chapel, and there's a hermit living there. And the hermit is is reading Tassan.
Eric Lundgren:And, yeah, I think his name's Lucian. He's hanging out. His hermit is is reading. I mean, that's kind of the dream, isn't it?
Daniel Hornsby:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Because, like, the normal writer thing is, like, you're on airplane and, like, you're, like, behind somebody and they have your book. Like, that's, like, the the fantasy that happens for some people.
Daniel Hornsby:But the idea that, like, one guy who has sworn off humanity has your book. He's like, I've got this, and I've got the Bible. I just kinda that's that's insane.
Eric Lundgren:Yeah. It's it it's kinda just dropped in there. You know? It feels like a little bit of a humble brag onto San's part. But you understand.
Eric Lundgren:If that really happened, you would have to put it in. Right?
Daniel Hornsby:You would have to. It's too funny because it's like he's confronted with himself that he is a product that has also been sold to somebody.
Eric Lundgren:That's right. Yeah. And he does speak to kind of a level of cultural saturation that Tassan seems to have in France. I wanted to mention too that there are some films relating to Tassan if people are interested. There is actually one being made out of on the wandering past, which I don't believe it's been released yet, but it's in the works.
Eric Lundgren:It'll be interesting to see. I mean, it doesn't, like, scream out that, you know, this is something that should be made into a movie, but, I'll be interested to see what they do with it.
Daniel Hornsby:Yeah. Me too. It seems tricky to pull that off.
Eric Lundgren:Yeah. It's so interior and and philosophical in all of the the history that that he deals with of of France in the twentieth century. I'm not sure how you would render all that. There's also, his snow leopard book, has been made into just a beautiful documentary called the Velvet Queen, which is some of the just most gorgeous wildlife photography that I've ever seen. It's all shot in the Himalayas and Tibet.
Eric Lundgren:And, some of the wildlife that you get to see from, you know, yaks to bears in the mountains to all of these wild birds of prey that look, you know, about a million years old. Kinda like these these in the in in this book too, the ones he sees in France. And it has a great score by, Nick Cave and Warren Ellis.
Daniel Hornsby:Oh, nice. Okay. I'm gonna watch this.
Eric Lundgren:And, yeah, it's just stunning. And it's also sort of a meditation on, you know, this idea of the blind, like, what a wildlife photographer does to kind of get their shots Yeah. Which is to try to camouflage oneself. I think as Tassan puts it
Daniel Hornsby:I mean, they're they're like snipers. Right? I mean, essentially. Right?
Eric Lundgren:Yeah. They're just hanging out trying to blend into the landscape. And I think says it's, you know, you're hiding there waiting for an animal that may or may not arrive, you know, doing it for for days on end sometime. And just the level of commitment, I mean, especially something like the snow leopard, obviously, that's so, reclusive, but other animals as well. You know, this idea of sort of the art of patience sort of takes us back to Jenny Odell, what we were talking about, which you bring up in your forward, and you're talking out about a little bit at the beginning.
Eric Lundgren:But just the idea that at this point where we are kind of in the capitalist experiments such as it is, that it's just taking such a toll on people. It seems that everybody's kinda working out that economy of, like, how much can I take before I have to sort of, like, step away? I don't know. It's just like the amount of burnout that I'm encountering that people are really thinking a lot about kind of these ecologies of of mind in a sense.
Daniel Hornsby:I mean, things are gonna change. They they just cannot keep going the way they're going. Whether that's just how people work or that's, like, our relationship with stuff that isn't, you know, humans, I just think it's gonna happen. Like, this it can't go on like this. It's kind of a bleak thing to think about in some ways because there's shit will hit the fan.
Daniel Hornsby:But I also think, you know, a book like this or a book like how to do nothing makes me think, like, there are these opportunities for us to reimagine what life looks like and what our lives could look like together.
Eric Lundgren:Yes. That's that's a really good note to end on, I think, and comes back to your syllabus for rejecting the world we've inherited, which we had at the beginning. So it all comes nicely full circle. We had hoped to be here today with the translator of the book, Drew Burke, and just wanted to give a shout out to Drew for his outstanding work on this book and really bringing it to the University of Minnesota Press in the first place. He's a consulting editor for the press, and he works with a lot of French publishers, other publishers throughout Europe to help find books for us and really kind of turned us on to this project.
Eric Lundgren:Well, thank you so much, Dan, for being here and for having this discussion with us today.
Daniel Hornsby:It was my pleasure. And, you know, I this series you guys are doing, the books are so beautiful. I just think I'm really lucky to be a part of it. And, yeah, thanks for talking with me. It's wonderful.
Eric Lundgren:Thank you, Dan. We've got, On the Wandering Path by Sylvain Tasson is out now in the Univocal series from University of Minnesota Press. And, thanks for everyone who made it through this and listened to this today.