James A. Michener · 1968 · road

James Michener's 1968 book about Spain, written after thirty years of going back. It is not a guidebook but a set of long essays fixed to particular places - Badajoz, Toledo, Cordoba, Seville, Madrid, Pamplona, Santiago - taking in the bulls, the Civil War, the cathedrals and a country he loved without ever quite forgiving.

1. 1
   Badajoz

   Michener enters Spain by the Portuguese frontier at Badajoz, where he first crossed as a young man - and begins with the massacre in the bullring in 1936, because he refuses to write about Spain as though the war had not happened.

2. 2
   Toledo

   At Toledo the three religions of medieval Spain are still legible in the streets - synagogue, mosque and cathedral within a few hundred yards - and El Greco's city becomes his way into what the country lost in 1492.

3. 3
   Cordoba

   The mosque at Cordoba, with a cathedral built inside it, is the book's central image of Spain arguing with its own past - a forest of arches interrupted by a nave that the emperor who allowed it later regretted.

4. 4
   Seville

   Seville gets Holy Week, the April fair and the bulls, and Michener writes about the corrida at length and without apology - as a ritual he considers indefensible and finds himself unable to stop attending.

5. 5
   Madrid

   Madrid is the Prado, and days spent in front of Velazquez and Goya - and the politics of a capital under Franco, described carefully by a writer who wanted to be allowed back in.

6. 6
   Pamplona

   At Pamplona in July the encierro runs every morning for a week, and Michener joins the crowd Hemingway made famous - and is honest about how much of the festival is now people who have read about it.

7. 7
   Santiago

   The book ends at Santiago de Compostela, the end of the pilgrim road across northern Spain - a place made entirely by people walking to it for a thousand years, which is as good a summary of the country as he can manage.