- Jubilee offer: spend £10 or more on any product sold by Amazon.co.uk on or before June 6 and you can buy The Diamond Jubilee A Classical Celebration Album for just £2.50 Here's how (terms and conditions apply)
| ||||||||||||
 Trade In this Item for up to £0.25
Get an extra £5 when you trade in books worth £10 or more until June 30, 2012. Trade in Just As Well I'm Leaving: To the Orient With Hans Christian Andersen for an Amazon.co.uk gift card of up to £0.25, which you can then spend on millions of items across the site. Trade-in values may vary (terms apply). Find more products eligible for trade-in.
|
Special Offers and Product Promotions
Frequently Bought Together
Product details
|
More About the Author
Product Description
Book Description
A funny, moving travelogue following in the footsteps of Hans Christian Andersen.
Product Description
Without Hans Christian Andersen there would be no Alice in Wonderland, no Roald Dahl and maybe even no Harry Potter (and he has outsold them all), but few realise that the man who invented children's literature was also a pioneering travel writer.
Having been dragged against his will to live in Denmark, Michael Booth discovered one of the great secrets of travel literature - Andersen's A Poet's Bazaar - a fascinating travelogue through a Europe on the cusp of revolution, by an author who, though a genius, was clearly a towering neurotic and proto-drama queen. He discovered, too, his chance to escape Denmark.
In 1840 Andersen was also desperate to flee, writing as he sailed: 'It is just as well I am leaving, my soul is unwell!' In Germany he was enraptured both by steam travel and the fiery Franz Liszt. In sultry Naples this latent bisexual wrestled with his erotic demons before travelling to Athens (little more than a village), seeing the dervishes dance in Istanbul, and sailing home up the Danube, a journey fraught with danger, not least due to some inattentive leech salesmen. Booth follows him every step of the way, reflecting on Andersen's life, work and pathological self-obsession, encountering his own cast of characters, from an accommodating Hamburg prostitute to a bemused Danish Ambassador to the first ever female dervish, who whisks him off to meet her guru.
In 2005 literature fans around the world will celebrate the 200th anniversary of Andersen's birth, making this funny, and occasionally moving, but mostly funny, book even more timely.
Suggested Tags from Similar Products(What's this?)Be the first one to add a relevant tag (keyword that's strongly related to this product)
|
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store.
Learn more
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
9 of 9 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Being a native Dane living in Copenhagen, the year 2005 had me fed up with celebrations of the bicentenary of H.C. Andersen. You would think that an event like that would have you discover a few things about the man you didn't know, but sadly everyone was cycling through the same old stories over and over again. I therefore turned abroad to find literature on Andersen with a fresh angle. Luckily I discovered "Just as Well I'm Leaving". This is by no means your typical academic biography, and for a change the author isn't shy to deal with HCA's sexuality in an open and straightforward way. Mind you that this is an issue the danes always have been rather coy about.
This is by no means a scientific book, and it wouldn't be the first choice for the literary students. I would estimate that about a third of the book has absolutely nothing to do with HCA whatsoever, and throughout the book you do not at any point feel like you're being lectured on the life and time of HCA. In fact you find yourself cracking up with laughter every five minutes. This book is simply hilarious (maybe even over the top for the conservative reader) - and even though the jokes don't necessarily contribute much to conveying the substance, they make the book very entertaining and readable. I realize this sounds like the author didn't have much to offer on the subject, and therefore had to wrap everything in humor, but the amazing thing is that you're left with what feels like an exhaustive insight in exactly how and why HCA became what he did. Booth is like that teacher in school you loved for making lessons fun instead of consistently trying to cram hard facts into your head all day. I have grown up with the stories of HCA, but I never felt I knew him as well as after reading this.
So if you only plan on reading one book on HCA - and aren't studying fairy-tales at Oxford - read this.
This is by no means a scientific book, and it wouldn't be the first choice for the literary students. I would estimate that about a third of the book has absolutely nothing to do with HCA whatsoever, and throughout the book you do not at any point feel like you're being lectured on the life and time of HCA. In fact you find yourself cracking up with laughter every five minutes. This book is simply hilarious (maybe even over the top for the conservative reader) - and even though the jokes don't necessarily contribute much to conveying the substance, they make the book very entertaining and readable. I realize this sounds like the author didn't have much to offer on the subject, and therefore had to wrap everything in humor, but the amazing thing is that you're left with what feels like an exhaustive insight in exactly how and why HCA became what he did. Booth is like that teacher in school you loved for making lessons fun instead of consistently trying to cram hard facts into your head all day. I have grown up with the stories of HCA, but I never felt I knew him as well as after reading this.
So if you only plan on reading one book on HCA - and aren't studying fairy-tales at Oxford - read this.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This book is first and foremost a really good read. Michael Booth has a very easy style, full of entertaining comments and anecdotes, which had been laughing out loud. You don't have to be a Hans Christian Andersen fan to enjoy this book - there is far more too it. If you have any knowledge of Denmark, you will love it even more!
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
Listmania!
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
|
