‘Stories do not occur; they are told. All seventy episodes of this Atlas are exclusively about places I have lived in, visited or travelled through, and exclusively about people I have met, people who helped, protected, threatened, rescued or loved me.’ Thus begins Christoph Ransmayr’s Atlas of an Anxious Man, a unique account that guides the reader through continents, eras and landscapes of the soul. ‘I saw,’ the narrator begins again and again after catching his breath and takes his audience to the farthest and the nearest corners of this earth: from the shadow of Java’s volcanoes to the rapids of the Mekong and Danube Rivers, from the drift ice of the Arctic Circle, over the passes of the Himalayas to the disenchanted islands of the South Pacific. Like maps, the episodes come together to become a book of the world, which charts the life and death, the happiness and fate of people in images of breath-taking beauty.
