Saunterings — Story, Setting & Ideas

Misapprehensions as Method

The catalog subjects list six countries, but Warner’s text is less a systematic tour than a series of corrected illusions. He begins with the Atlantic itself: “Columbus rises in my estimation.” The same deflation applies to lodgings, food, and local customs. In Munich, he describes hunting for rooms with the help of advertisements that promise “German without rooms or board”—a joke that turns on the absurdity of language study as a commodity. The search ends not through efficiency but by chance, opposite the Glass Palace and next to Professor Liebig’s laboratory, where Warner quips that his feelings can be analyzed “whenever it is desirable.” The humor undercuts any pretense of mastery; the traveler is at the mercy of circumstance.

The Stomach as a Lens

Warner devotes sustained attention to German cuisine, using it as a measure of cultural difference. He describes a “fathomless depth of sauerkraut” supporting coils of boiled sausage, and a dish that looks like terrapin soup but yields “a junk of unmistakable pork,” what seemed to be the neck of a goose, and “what I am quite willing to take my oath was a bit of Astrachan fur.” The catalogue of improbable ingredients is comic, but it also reveals a method: Warner treats the unfamiliar as a puzzle to be described rather than explained. His despair at caraway seeds invading even the potatoes is a recurring motif—the traveler’s attempt to find a stable point of reference in a world that refuses to conform to expectation.

The Unconquerable Ocean and the Unstable Self

Despite the book’s title, Warner’s sauntering is repeatedly interrupted by reminders of scale and resistance. The Atlantic is “the roughest and windiest of oceans,” and its three thousand miles remain “all there” despite technological progress. This sense of the unconquerable extends to the social landscape: in Munich, the German stove is a “tall white porcelain family monument,” and the feather-beds are “thick enough to roast the half of the body, and short enough to let the other half freeze.” The traveler is never fully at home. Warner’s prose balances precise observation with a wry awareness that understanding is partial, and that the journey’s value lies in the misapprehensions themselves.

Readers approaching Saunterings as a source of geographical information will be disappointed; those who enjoy a companionable, skeptical voice will find Warner’s company rewarding. The book rewards attention to its digressions—on food, on lodgings, on the persistence of the Atlantic—rather than to any itinerary. Warner’s Europe is a place where the expected never quite arrives, and where the pleasure of travel lies in the gap between map and experience.

I finished that Warner book feeling like I’d been let in on a secret—how travel is really just wandering through your own misreadings. It made me think of Canal Reminiscences Recollections of Travel in the Old Days on the James River & Kanawha Canal — A Reader’s Guide and its quieter pace. Both leave you with the odd comfort of not needing to arrive anywhere, just remembering the water.