Introduction

CHRISTOPH RANSMAYR's FIRST-PERSON NARRATIVE Atlas eines ängstlichen Mannes (2012; Atlas of an Anxious Man, 2016) is an intriguing travelogue featuring an unusual, even paradoxical, title. The text consists of seventy unrelated travel accounts, which take place in more than three dozen countries, and includes nine stories set in Austria. Each episode has a short title, followed by the story's location, and each begins with the exact same two words, “Ich sah” (I saw). The first-person narrator describes fellow travelers or locals, landscapes, monuments, the night sky, and animals, and he often ends with a summary reflection linking the distinctive encounter to topics such as transience, death, memory, and home. Key to each episode is something out of the ordinary, and novelty is derived not only from the plot itself but also from the author's extraordinary perception and narration. The prominence of the gaze and the novella-like “unerhorte Begebenheit” (unprecedented event) at the center of each story create a unique narrative structure that is simultaneously supple and taut, rendering traveling both unique and habitual.

Atlas is based, as Ransmayr informs us in the short, untitled foreword, on his own extensive travels of the past decades, but the text does not depict specific journeys or address the traveler's individual circumstances or his motivation to visit a particular country. There is no discernable chronological order, and while historical events such as the assassination of Indira Gandhi are referenced, dates are never provided. Instead, Atlas distills exceptional moments collected over a long period of time and a wide range of locations, an approach that makes it resemble a kind of narrative photo album.

The first dozen stories alone depict sojourns in Chile, China, Brazil, the United States, Morocco, Spain, Iceland, Greece, New Zealand, India, Nepal, and Austria, which even in an era of global tourism is an exceptional record. Ransmayr narrates world travels, as announced in the title reference to Atlas, but why is it linked to the man's most salient emotion, anxiousness? An anxious man appears ill-equipped for any journey, yet the narrator voyages to some of the most isolated corners of the globe: islands in the Pacific, remote deserts, and mountain ranges, many of which can be reached only after long, arduous treks.