A novel like Darwin’s Wink is necessarily the result of a mixture of experience, research, and imagination. The seed of the novel was planted during my first trip to the island of Mauritius in 1995: I was there at the invitation of my older sister and her son, whose wife is from Mauritius. For weeks before the trip—which takes 24 hours by plane from San Francisco, as it is on the opposite side of the globe—I felt an immense excitement at the idea of visiting a real “exotic” “tropical” island; in fact while Mauritius is both of those things, it is also a country in its own right, with a multi-ethnic population of two million, a rich Hindu and colonial Franco-British legacy, and a thriving textile and tourist industry.
Among the regular guests at my nephew’s restaurant were two young British naturalists; they invited me to visit the small island where they were doing restoration and conservation work, Île aux Aigrettes. I instantly saw the romantic potential of the place: the old colonial warden’s house where they lived; the rich abundance of nature, with the added interest of the endangered bird species they were there to foster: kestrels, pink pigeons, echo parakeets. I took a few notes, on the off chance that the visit would yield a novel.
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That wild beast, which lives in man and does not dare to show itself until the barriers of law and custom have been removed, was now set free.

- Ivo Andric, Bridge on the Drina

Borders: what they are, what they represent. Not the same to all people, depending on your nationality. And then there are internal borders, the ones that no visa can get you across. For the traveller, borders are an integral and often inconvenient part of the journey, but they offer a kind of magic, too, a sense of transcendence, of going beyond what is familiar, of testing oneself against the barriers of the exotic.

Europe’s borders are dwindling. Scandinavia lost its border charm long ago: the only way you knew you had left Norway behind and entered Sweden was the sudden cluster of sex shops, and a flag. Now in the European Union you can enter the Schengen territory and travel through much of Western Europe without showing a passport.

And there was the Iron Curtain: the border between Greece and Bulgaria, for example, where in 1986 surly officials emptied the entire contents of my car onto surgical trolleys; or the Danube, that same year, between Bulgarian and Romania where, after waiting for an hour in an unmoving line, I was dissuaded by the East Germans’ gruesome tales of travel through Romania (”They’ll take the veels from your car!”) and gave up, left the line, turned around and drove back to Sofia: to my everlasting regret.

So over the years as the borders of countries have been changing or vanishing, some of my borders have moved within—passages of time, transitions in life, the invisible lines to cross which require no visas but a certain faith, or curiosity, or, some have told me, courage. (more…)