The story of my East Prussian roots. Part II

Curonian Spit and
 Curonian Lagoon

Where in the world is Memel? Why can’t I find it in a world map? Hold on: if it’s a German city, why do my searches keep redirecting me to Klaipeda, a city within Lithuanian borders? So many unanswered questions. This place is so geographically far away from Germany! I must have mixed the names up. What an interesting and unique topography, though! A 100-kilometer long strip of land, so slender and yet so stout, menaced by a threatening Baltic Sea and preventing it to absorb an apparently defenseless lagoon. I definitely had to go check this place out, even regardless my ancestral ties to it.

When planning this quest for traces from the past, the first natural question that arose was how to get there; what are the nearest airports? Riga? Kaunas? Sure enough there must be flights from Germany. And yet, the charm of that place is its bond to the sea. There had to be a way to get there by water. Plus, a ship trip on the Baltic Sea has to be a magnificent experience. So I started to check out possible embarking ports. Kiel, Copenhagen, Malmö, Karlshamn, Danzig, Stockholm.

All very attractive alternatives for the travel enthusiast I am. By and by the Baltic Sea became a major interest for me. And being Memel so connected to it, I decided to take the journey to the next level and explore as much as I could from that region. The travel route I came out with can be seen in this map:

Red: Journeys by train. Green: Journeys by ship. Blue: Journeys by bus. 

I started by flying from Stuttgart to Copenhagen and I spent a couple of days in this lovely city. An immaculately clean city with a seaport flair: neat parks, fancy yachts, and fresh fish. Then, off to Malmö by train: a train that first goes over a bridge over the sea and then sinks underneath it only to reemerge on the other shore, in Malmö, Sweden. A magic trick. An impressive feat of engineering. I doubted whether or not my grandfather had been to these Scandinavian places, but realizing I was in the vicinity of territories so familiar to him and so alien to me, gave me the chills; as much as I was enjoying these Swedish landscapes, I couldn’t wait to get to Memel. From Malmö off to Karlshamn by another train, the ride on which was a real bliss. I have heard complaints about Swedes and their trains, but hardly have I felt more delighted in any other train journeys. Now Karlshamn is a cozy and charming little town, worth a separate blog entry for itself. I will proceed to describe the Memel part of this trip though, and get back to Karlshamn in another occasion.

My Review to The Centaur by John Updike

The Centaur is written in such a way that it results pleasant and easy to progress through its pages. It's an interesting story that revolts around a series of events throughout 3 or 4 days. And yet, the author manages to introduce so many perspectives, both through the eyes of different characters or from different times; sometimes retrospectively, sometimes right from after the events took place. In the novel there is steadily an aura of mysticism by which the reader gets baffled and hesitates as to whether the author was simply narrating the events or there is indeed an intrinsic, transcendental or metaphoric meaning. Especially due to the several parallelisms between the novel and classical Greek mythology.
Given my restricted knowledge of said mythology, I believe I may have failed to understand much of the exquisiteness of this book. And I must confess I couldn't quite explain why the book is called The Centaur. In my humble opinion, that's a much to large name for this Updike's novel. Nonetheless, I enjoyed the book altogether. I don't know why but I specially liked the scene where father and son struggle through a rough winter storm to make it back home to their family. I admire how the moral values of both parents prevail in spite of their personality flaws. Although many passages are melancholic, many of them are, at the same time, narrated in a hilarious way. This reveals the talent of the author.

Funnily enough, there is one interesting connection between this book and another one I recently read: The Goldfinch. Peter Caldwell, the kid in this story, is a huge fan of Johannes Vermeer: a pupil of Carel Fabritius, the painter of The Goldfinch.