Going Out the Door One Day and Never Coming Back

Thank you to the New Escapologist reader who put me onto Tramp (2006) by Thomas Espedal. It’s an excellent book. Not quite a novel, not quite a travellogue, it flies by like poetry.

Espedal doesn’t want to settle down:

I’d never been fond of houses, they were too large and unaccomodating. A house is demanding, difficult. One must learn to master a house. One must learn to dwell.

… superfluous rooms, the hostile furniture, this semi-temperate interior that speaks to us of our wasted work, our misused moneys, our dull lives.

He just wants to escape:

The Dream of Vanishing. Disappearing. Going out the door one day and never coming back.

He wants to keep on walking:

The wanderer is, according to Rousseau, a plain, peaceful man. He is free. He has left the city, he has left his family and obligations. He has said farewell work. Farewell to responsibility. Farewell to money. He has said goodbye to his friends and his love, to ambition and future. He is really a rebel, but now he has bidden farewell to his rebellion as well. He wanders alone in the forest, a vagrant.

Or gliding along by rail:

I like sitting on a train looking out of the window; seeing the landscape roll past while I tentatively read a novel: Vaksdal, Trengereid, Dale, Evanger, Voss, and the first snow, the first frost, the first kiss in the snow on the frozen stone wall down by the lake shore at Vangsvatnet; winter, summer, spring, and the train rolls past.

These are just some choice quotes that reflect our (or maybe just my) tendencies here at New Escapologist. Espedal likes other things too, such as mountaineering and driving fast cars. He’s just a guy who loves life. This comes over on the page, but quietly and elegantly so. What a great book.

Also noteworthy: Espedal walks (and climbs mountains) not in sportswear… but in a suit!

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Sympathy with the vagrant? Issue 16: Footloose and Fancy-Free is your companion. Prefer to stay put? Issue 17: All the Way Home is yours. Open minded? Get both!