A nature writer explores our fascination with Greek myths and their contemporary relevance in this sun-drenched adventure-cum-guide The Oulipo movement, a group of mostly French writers in the second half of the 20th century, believed that imposing constraints on the writing process was a spur to creativity. Georges Perec famously wrote a novel without the letter “e”, while Jean Lescure’s N+7 approach produced new work by replacing every noun in an existing text with the noun seven places after it in the dictionary. It feels as if there will be a number of inadvertently Oulipean works that emerge from the chaos of the past few years, books that, were it not for Covid, might have been something very different. Peter Fiennes’s sun-drenched hymn to Greece, _A Thing of Beauty: Travels in Mythical and Modern Greece_, feels like just this sort of book. A project that started out as a fairly straightforward travelogue has become something stranger and more interesting under the heightened pressure applied by the constraints of the pandemic. When Fiennes, a celebrated nature writer and former publisher at _Time Out_, begins his quest to get to the heart of Greece, international travel is impossible. He finds himself sitting by a lake at Byron’s home, Newstead Abbey in Nottinghamshire, dreaming of Missolonghi, Apollo and nereids. Then, in the second chapter, when the travel ban (briefly) lifts and Fiennes is able to hightail it to Athens, his voyage is given added zest by the enforced delay, a sense of the miraculous imbuing everything. Continue reading...
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