White Sands. Geoff Dyer

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      Published in Great Britain in 2016 by Canongate Books Ltd,

      14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE

       www.canongate.tv

      This digital edition first published in 2016 by Canongate Books

      Copyright © 2016 by Geoff Dyer

      The moral rights of the author has been asserted

      First published in the United States of America by Pantheon Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

      Grateful acknowledgement is made to Alfred Music for permission to reprint an excerpt from ‘Riders on the Storm’, words and music by The Doors, copyright © 1971 and renewed by Doors Music Co.

      Reprinted by permission of Alfred Music. All rights reserved.

      The acknowledgements for previous publications can be found following the text.

      British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library

      ISBN 978 1 78211 740 7

      Export ISBN 978 1 78211 809 1

      eISBN 978 1 78211 741 4

      For Rebecca

      The point of going somewhere like the Napo River in Ecuador is not to see the most spectacular anything. It is simply to see what is there. We are here on the planet only once, and might as well get a feel for the place.

      —Annie Dillard

      There remained the inexplicable mass of rock. The legend tried to explain the inexplicable. As it came out of a substratum of truth it had in turn to end in the inexplicable.

      —Franz Kafka

      Contents

       Note

       1

       Where? What? Where?

       2

       Forbidden City

       3

       Space in Time

       4

       Time in Space

       5

       Northern Dark

       6

       White Sands

       7

       Pilgrimage

       8

       The Ballad of Jimmy Garrison

       9

       Beginning

       10

       Notes

       List of Illustrations

       Acknowledgements

      Note

      Like my earlier blockbuster, Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered To Do It, this book is a mixture of fiction and non-fiction. What’s the difference? Well, in fiction stuff can be made up or altered. My wife, for example, is called Rebecca whereas in these pages the narrator’s wife is called Jessica. So that’s it really. You call yourself the narrator and change the names. But Jessica is there in the non-fiction too. The main point is that the book does not demand to be read according to how far from a presumed dividing line—a line separating certain forms and the expectations they engender—it is assumed to stand. In this regard ‘White Sands’ is both the figure at the centre of the carpet and a blank space on the map.

      —GD, California, September 2015

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