Thinking View

I am naturally intrigued by where writers sit and think. Walter Benjamin used to hang out in the Victoria Café in Berlin’s Potsdamer Platz, amidst the noise and traffic of the street, not such a surprise for an author who wrote such detailed observations of everyday life in the modern city. Destroyed in the second world war, the site is now occupied by the Sony centre and the café only survives in haunting photographs. The legendary Café de Flor in Paris still stands and is a great place to stop for a drink under the photographic gaze of some of its more well-known clients that includes Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, George Bataille and Picasso.  Intriguingly for someone who wrote State and Revolution, Lenin favoured peace and quiet and when the opportunity arose liked to sit in front of French windows that overlooked a garden. As for his revolutionary mentor Marx, he famously occupied a table in the British library, but actually drafted The Communist Manifesto in the Swan Café in La Grand Place, Brussels. I was determined to have lunch at the same table and in front of the same window, and it all made perfect sense, for it looks out over the Town Hall and ornate guild houses, the administrative and institutional birthplace of ‘Belgian’ capitalism. This idea of a literary tour of writing places was explored  by Mateo Pericoli in his wonderful book Windows on the World. Artist and founder of the Laboratory for Literary Architecture, he invited novelists from around the globe to send a photo of their favourite writing spot that he then transformed into a collection of captioned line drawings.[i] Of the many places I have been lucky enough to sit, think, and try to write, this is one of my current spots, lying in bed, pen and paper at my side, high up on the hill overlooking the city of Belo Horizonte. In truth it is far too distracting, for it is a panorama that like an oceanic horizon is constantly shifting. It is, however, an excellent vantage point to ponder the velocity of Latin American superurbanisation.

[i] For a great summary see The Laboratory of Literary Architecture: The joy of cardboard, glue, and storytelling: a cross disciplinary exploration of literature as architecture, in Charley (ed), Routledge Companion to Architecture, Literature and the City, 2019,