Crime and Punishment, and my sense of all three has radically altered. In my mind the streets of Paris now ring with carriages ferrying
le beau monde between glittering salons; Venice is a palimpsest of maps and fables; and St Petersburg is sweating in claustrophobic self-recrimination. In many ways the worlds of these books have become more vivid than my own fading memories. Conversely, I had read Kafka’s The Castle and Steinbeck’s
East of Eden before I visited Prague and the Salinas valley in California, so from the start both locations were deeply coloured by my experience of those books. Prague was mysterious and impenetrable, with streets and cemeteries huddled around the castle on the hill, whereas Salinas was epic and open, a great canvas on which archetypal narratives might play out.