Climbing the Walls, a Matchbook Psychogeography

 I'd never picked up a book by Schuiten or Peeters until today, but my excellent sister gave me Samaris for my birthday back in November, and finally reading it has felt a lot like nostalgia. These are the dreams I'd had as a nineteen-year-old, of being assigned to investigate a city and finding only scenery, something to climb or climb into, whose passages and ledges might take you to a roof from where you could finally see it all. Kafkaish adventures where the twist was that nothing will happen, that the city is ultimately unvisitable, these were fairy tales of tourism, and although I may have forgetten how big a part they played in my adolescence, I still find it hard to know how to engage with a place beyond just heading to its highest point.