In the late 80s, indefatigable traveler and author Bill Bryson, determined to tell us everything we know about the world and what we are and what we do in it, even wrote a journey into the center of our own body! With a delicious and addictive sense of humor, he decided it was time to return home. Oh, I wasn’t going to do this forever. All he wanted was to travel around the country he had left ten years ago, the country he had exchanged for England, the country to which he felt he belonged as soon as he set foot. The country was, of course, the United States. Their intentions? Traveling from one end to the other, stopping in small towns or small cities, and starting from where he was born and raised, the boring, peaceful, predictable place of Des Moines.
It’s in Des Moines, Iowa, somewhere deep in the American midwest, the place we imagine from here on out to be full of diners – charming cafes with kiosks – more or less lonely gas stations and towns with a single commercial street in them. There is no way for businesses to compete with each other because there is barely one of each. And if you decide to accompany Bryson on this trip — a trip reliving the road trips he took as a child with his family, during the summer months, in the car of his father, a sportscaster who didn’t like to pay for anything — you end up visiting nearly every one of them. To do this, you must first read that the book in question, The Lost Continent, was published in Spain on ¡Menuda América! You should obtain a copy titled . It was published by Mondadori in 1994.
In addition to the waiters and motels – the motels are in fact the real hero of the story, they and Bryson’s background, the idea of travel as a fundamental element of North American culture – in The Lost Continent there are also writers’ museums. More precisely, the cities were handed over entirely to the writers who were born or grew up there. It happens with Mark Twain in Hartford (New York) and William Faulkner in Oxford (Mississippi). Although the museum that catches the most attention from everyone Bryson visits is the Henry Ford House Museum. The Henry Ford Museum not only contains houses, but also includes Thomas Edison’s last breath and the limousine in which John Fitzgerald Kennedy was assassinated.
Henry Ford Museum
Impressed, Bryson walks among eight houses that Ford has moved to the huge garden of his museum – he had them dismantled piece by piece, original houses, not replicas – among them the aforementioned Edison’s – along with him Tire manufacturer Harvey Firestone and the first of the United States President George Washington was particularly obsessed, and the reader does so with him, wondering what the places we live in or pass through are like. , forever a part of our story and how that story can be shared. The brilliant Austro-Hungarian writer Ludwig Bemelmans was clear on this. There’s nothing like making them the protagonist of a book.
New York before the Great Depression
At the magnificent Hotel Splendide (Gatopardo Ediciones), Bemelmans relives his adventures as a waiter at New York’s luxurious Ritz, and he does so in the time before the ’29 crash, when everything was glitz and opulence. and so, of course, not only among all sorts of sophisticated and sometimes monstrous customers – short, fat marquises who smell like candy boxes and wear heels; A rich couple and their employees who look like two old frogs perching on a different lily pad each time. There are waiters, magicians, extremely patient waiters, musicians, cartoonists and ambitious dishwashers who can retire if they play their cards right.
More than a good artist
Like Nathanael West, author of The Day of the Locust, which he began writing while tending the counter at Kenmore Hall’s reception desk, Bemelmans was born in 1898 and died in 1962; After all, his character in the fictional Hotel Splendide is what he is: a good cartoonist. And although he is best remembered for his children’s books—particularly a series starring a girl named after his wife, Madeline—he also wrote a handful of memoirs—Little Beer, At Your Service, Hotel Bemelmans—also illustrated by: It. In these books he described in detail not only himself, but also everyone who overlapped with him in that container of overlapping stories: the hotel, any hotel, or better yet, a hotel where only fun and absurdity fit.