“The City and the World” - Gregor Hens (translated from German by Jen Callejo)
My thanks to @netgalley and @fitzcarraldoeditions for my copy of this book in exchange for a review.

A mix of travelogue, philosophical essay and photography, “The City and the World” is Gregor Hens’s analysis of the modern city and our interactions with it. Covering numerous cities and subjects, with clear nods to various sources and authors such as Sebald, Bernhard and Perec (acknowledged as much by the author), the book offers quite a few stimulating thoughts and ideas that I had not personally encountered before. However, did it provide much more?
This is going to be quite a bit shorter than my usual reviews, as I don’t really know what to say about this book. I simultaneously enjoyed reading it and didn’t really understand it, and I came away without any strong memories or thoughts on any arguments it contained. I suppose that suggests that its travelogue elements are stronger than its philosophical side, and there could be an audience for this, but it’s not me.

DNF at about 60%.

I knew it was time to give up on this book when I made it to page 100 and realised that I could not summarise its main arguments. The City and the World is a very Continental European intellectual long essay, one of those long-winded texts where the author jumps from subject to subject without any clearly stated arguments or evidence to support them and quotes generously from similar Continental European intellectuals who came before him (gendering very intentional here). The subject matter is fascinating - I love cities and I love reading about cities. And, despite myself, I was drawn by the random references and snippets in this book, and I would have continued it if the ARC had been provided in Kindle format (as is, I can only read it on a laptop). Having to focus on a text reading it on a device not designed for optimising reading long texts for pleasure highlights all the issues (get on with it! get to the bloody point, if I wanted to be reading Walter Benjamin, I would have been reading him without your mediation!) and obscures its strengths - relaxing, almost lulling observations, messiness, deliberate unproductiveness.

I think I vastly prefer British/Anglophone non-fiction essay structure, but I can appreciate other ways of writing when the circumstances are right. They were not this time around.

Splendid, meandering, flaneuring text wandering through the modern city - Berlin, Paris, London - and the figure of the city itself. Insightful and eccentric. Recommended.

A brilliant essay exploring our relationship to cities all over the world. From how we live and inhabit the space to how the space is designed for this.

The arguments can be long and complex but the book is clear enough that you can easily find your way back in when you loose the chain.

Love the added touch of discussions “with” and about authors who have lived in these cities.

A fascinating exploration of cities across the world. Taking in Berlin, Las Vegas, Paris, and Santiago - an intriguing narrative on how we inhabit cities. I loved the references to libraries and the sense that this was a continuing conversation with writers (Virginia Woolf and ohers) that have gone before.

The City and the World is an essay translated by Jen Calleja from the original Die Stadt und der Erdkreis: Erkundungen by Gregor Hens.

The essay is focused around our experience of the modern metropolis and draws on various thinkers and writers - Hens himself particularly acknowledges his debt to Stephen Graham (Vertical), Robert Macfarlane (Underland, The Wild Places), Esther Kinsky (River), Darran Anderson (Imaginary Cities), Lauren Elkin (Flâneuse), Matthew Beaumont (Night Walking), Rebecca Solnit (A Field Guide to Getting Lost) and Rem Koolhaas (Delirious New York, S,M,L,XL), and other key references points include Sebald (photographs feature in the text although more specific/deliberate than Sebald's 'found' photos), Will Self (a walking companion of the author) and, of course, Thomas Bernhard:

"During a walk along the Graben in Vienna (a trench that was filled in centuries ago), a distance of barely 200 metres, the nameless narrator of Thomas Bernhard's novella Walking, published in 1971, listens to a report by his friend Oehler about another walk along the Graben, which Oehler had taken - in the opposite direction - with a friend named Karrer. Karrer goes mad when he visits a men's outfitter who he believes is trying to sell him inferior goods. Karrer is the brain within the brain; the reader understands intuitively that this can't go well, especially not when the inner brain projects onto the outer one.

The nesting component of the narrative's construction is also a commentary on the subject of the city: all it takes is a single path, the most predictable and exposed of all walking routes from a Viennese perspective, in order to wind the spool of thought structures that comprise our intellectual existence in conversation, and then unravel it again through a mental breakdown. In fact, the Graben is a kind of coiled core or coil bobbin around which the urban magnetic field of Vienna builds. Perhaps psychologically it's something like the dog bone of Austria, the already postulated double dead-end - the black hole of a galactic metropolis that lost its spiral arms in 1918. No wonder that walking this short distance - and its corresponding synchronized thinking - ultimately leads to madness (Thomas Bernhard was effectively the author of ultimates)."

This from Gehen, Walking in Kenneth Northcott's translation, and for me the ur-Bernhard novel, his first work where he really found his voice.

Perec is another reference not least - and I assume this is true - the author claims that the “in the distance, two boys in red anoraks” who makes a cameo appearance in Perec's, At Attempt At Exhausting A Place in Paris (based on his observations over 3 days in October 1974) were, in fact, the author and his brother on a visit to the city.

A comment on the male-domination of the profession of flâneur - which Hens corrects by including writers such as Woolf, Elkin, Solnit, Calle and Kinsky.

"More than any other mode of transport or form of movement available to us in the city, walking seems to provide an opportunity to develop a feel for topographical conditions and distances and to sense and reflect on the urban environment, which is why the history of (psycho-geographic) urban exploration is primarily a history of strolling and urban wandering. In its early days, leisurely promenading was primarily practiced by middle-class white men - who had the means and opportunity to while away entire days and nights, and who also didn't need to fear attacks, particularly after sunset, from the opposite sex. The story of the flâneur, as it has been told for a long time, is therefore also the story of a certain gaze."

At times I rather lost the thread of Hens argument, and sometimes he felt he tried to pack too much in, but as the text spirals like Robert Smithson’s Jetty, which inevitably makes an appearance, it was usually possible to pick up the line of reasoning again a few pages later. And if not 100% successful for me, certainly a read with many stimulating points.