By the Width of a Street

Christopher Prendergast

• An Atlas of the European Novel 1800-1900 by Franco Moretti
  Verso, 206 pp, £16.00, August 1998, ISBN 1 85984 883 4

Somewhere around the middle of An Atlas of the European Novel, in a discussion of images of London in the 19th-century novel, Franco Moretti throws in a parenthetical aside on the whereabouts of his publisher (‘in a rather bleak part of Soho’). It’s a sort of joke, consistent with the laidback tone that Moretti seems able to combine effortlessly with high intellectual endeavour. It’s not often that one can speak of the charm of an academic book: Moretti’s oozes it. Although he says that his principal aim is to be ‘useful’, he also furnishes many pleasures, as he wanders through the landscapes of (mostly) 19th-century Europe like some Bolognese equivalent of Gil Bias or the good soldier Schweik, sustaining a conversation with his reader that is endlessly informative and entertaining.