Andorra Revealed

Despite a history of book club and book challenge failures, I started Reading Around the World early in 2020. It turned out to be a good year for it – for obvious staying-at-home, wishing-one-could-travel reasons. But for most of the year, I was stymied in my progress because the libraries were closed. As soon as the libraries reopened, I got started again. I read a book from Algeria and finally finished writing the post about Albania. This brought me to Albania, a country I was very excited to read.

Andorra

Andorra has fascinated me since I was a little kid spinning the globe in my parents’ house and dreaming of all the places I would visit when I got big enough. The tiny pink dot between France and Spain caught my eye. My grandmother was interested in all things Basque. On top of that, I’m pretty sure my childish brain relocated Neuschwanstein Castle (discovered via a tv documentary) to Andorra, forever fixing it in my mind as a fairy tale sort of place. I’ve always wanted to go there, but it’s kind of out of the way, and the one time I traveled around Europe, I couldn’t fit it in.

So, even though Andorra doesn’t quite count as a country in the minds of many of the few people who have even heard of it, I was really looking forward to reaching it in my Reading the World challenge.

Choosing the Book

It turned out that selecting a book from Andorra was almost as hard as getting to the country in person. The population of Andorra barely tops 75,000. Catalan is the dominant language. There are only 4 million native speakers of Catalan. So that means very few books in Catalan, and even fewer published by residents of Andorra. Of those very few, literally none have been translated. Choosing from a selection of zero available books, I didn’t even have to think about my usual preference that the book be a novel and the author a woman.

Many Around the World readers just skip Andorra. Everyone else who has blogged about reading Andorra chose Albert Salvadó’s The Teacher of Cheops. Salvadó is Andorran, and The Teacher of Cheops is a novel. Reviews indicate it is even a good novel. But it’s historical fiction set in ancient Egypt, and my purpose in reading around the world is to get a taste of the culture in lieu of (or in preparation for) actually visiting.

After much searching online, I discovered The Road to Andorra by Shirley Dean. It’s a 1961 memoir about the author’s time spent in Andorra “because her son’s eye was caught by a minute and unlettered spot on a map?” It seemed perfect to me, until I tried to find the long out-of-print book. My library, unsurprisingly, didn’t have it. Amazon did, but the book cost $20 and with some 190+ countries to read in the world, that’s not a good precedent to set.

Finally I ended up reading two books.

Report From Practically Nowhere

John Sack’s Report from Practically Nowhere is even older than Dean’s book, but my library did have it. It chronicles Sack’s visits to more than a dozen micronations, including Andorra. The adventure started when he was flying to Europe with a more traditional trip in mind, and the captain pointed out the independent island of Lundy. The chapter where he visits Lundy was charming, full of the adventurous spirit of a trip that has gone its own way and the excitement of discovering a place most people have never heard of.

But I think he got bored with the game before he collected enough material for a book. Subsequent chapters were marked by a sort of condescending humor that managed to belittle both the places he visited and himself. (That smirking tone just isn’t funny, especially when describing “quaint” customs like murdering wives or kidnapping girls). Pretty much all I got from the chapter on Andorra was that they smuggle a lot of cheap cigarettes.

Andorra Revealed

Andorra Revealed is a fairly recent collection of essays and short fiction written by foreign-born residents of Andorra. My library also had this book, and I was obviously the first person to ever turn its pages. I read it very gingerly to keep the copy pristine.

As you’d expect from that type of project, the topics covered and the quality of the writing varied a lot. A few of the essays had the annoying, chipper tone of a travel brochure, while others were straightforward guides to various sites or activities in the country. There were several personal essays, with either a travel or an expat-life focus. Some of my favorite contributions include an account of a massive avalanche in the 1990s, a story about building a house with “virgin” wood, and a fiction piece about a little boy at a funeral that gave me some Red Pony vibes.

Conclusion

Despite – or maybe because of – the mixed bag nature of Andorra Revealed, it accomplished exactly what I wanted from the challenge. I got a sense for many of the practical aspects of life in Andorra: twisty mountain roads, low crime, and bits of French and Spanish culture. It gave me a bit of a feeling for Andorra as a Catholic, agricultural community taken over by international tourism and banking since Sack visited. I got some historical context on the smuggling issue. (It is real, but Sack left out important historical elements, including the fact that Andorrans smuggled a great many people out of Germany-occupied France in WWII). I now know that Andorra has a specific cake for every special occasion. And I really want to go there and try some of those cakes.

Details

Andorra Revealed
Clare Allcard; Judith Wood; Iain Woolward; Alexandra Grebennikova; Ursula Ure Simpson; Valerie Rymarenko
English
WoolyAllWood
282 pages