September weekends in London

It may feel as if autumn is at the door, but September holds plenty of great outdoor events in the capital. The Thames Festival is just past, but free film screenings start at the Scoop from tomorrow until 1 October, this weekend is Open House and then, on 25 September, is the Great River Race. The atmosphere around midday in Ham (nearest tube: Richmond, then wander along the river) is always fun while, thanks to the staggered start, the finish presents a particularly dramatic sight in Docklands.

Maigret's Paris: a walk

Georges Simenon's books, as I've noted before, are so thick with atmosphere they almost serve in their own right as guides to the cities in which they're set. He's best on Paris, most notably in the novels dedicated to Chief Inspector Maigret. It would be the work of a lifetime to plot the locations from his books - and many are long gone, of course - but a few obvious sites stand out.

Start at 36 Quai des Orfèvres, the headquarters of the Police Judiciare and Maigret's base, on the Île de la Cité. (This wonderful Life article includes a photo of Simenon climbing the stairs there, in the mould of his hero - and what great ads.) Behind it, on the Place Dauphine, is the setting for the fictional Chez Paul, the bar to which Maigret used to send for beers and sandwiches in the midst of one of his night-long interrogations.

Heading north-east is the Place des Vosges, where both Simenon (from 1924, with wife Tigy) and Maigret lived for a time, and then there's 132 Boulevard Richard Lenoir, as iconic to fans of the French detective as London's 221b Baker Street to admirers of Sherlock Holmes. A market on Thursday and Sunday mornings makes for a characteristic diversion but film-lovers may be tempted to travel a bit further, up to the Canal St Martin, setting for a scene in Jean-Pierre Jeunet's whimsical Amelie (2001), and home to Hôtel du Nord, immortalised by Marcel Carné in 1938. You'll need lunch by now, and one of the many lovely cafés round here should serve just fine.

Austerlitz and the power of memory

When I was studying in Liège, southern Belgium, for a year, my younger sister came to visit and a friend suggested we drive up to Maastricht, Holland, for the day. What I didn't realise was that he intended to stop at the site of a former concentration camp on the way. I'm not sure if my sister has ever forgiven me, she probably still has nightmares about the trip.

WG Sebald's remarkable Austerlitz, which was published in 2001, begins with the German emigré to East Anglia adrift in Belgium. I've written before about English-language writers' view of the Low Country but Austerlitz features many landmarks that locals and visitors will recognise: Antwerp's magnificent Centraal Station, from which Sebald draws a compelling line to Belgium's dark colonial past, and the hideous, massive block that is the Palais de Justice overlooking Brussels, 'the largest accumulation of stone blocks anywhere in Europe'.

The opening narrative includes a visit to Fort Breendonk, a Nazi penal camp that has been preserved as a memorial. It is near where my grandfather lives. 'The passenger train I boarded… took a good half-hour to travel the short distance to Mechelen, where a bus runs from the station to the small town of Willebroek.' I've taken this same bus, but never to Fort Breendonk as I have little wish to repeat the experience of that afternoon in Holland.

The fort's shape and the formation of battlements is a theme of Austerlitz; as the narrator descends further, a darkness spreads over him: 'When I look back at the crab-like plan of Breendonk… the darkness does not lift but becomes yet heavier as I think how little we can hold in mind, how everything is constantly lapsing into oblivion with every extinguished life, how the world is, as it were, draining itself, in that the history of countless places and objects which themselves have no power of memory is never heard, never described or passed.' It is for this reason we preserve, and visit, these places: when imagination fails us.

If you like this

... you may be interested in my new, sexy films blog. The plan is to post an entry each Monday until December, or so, about the films that currently shape what we see on our screens. Each movie is available on DVD, from Anatomy of Hell to Y tu mamá también - for a brief intro, see here.

Norman no mates

Overlooked seemingly everywhere bar his native USA (including Canada, where much of his work is set), I must recommend the latest novel by Howard Norman, author of The Bird Artist and The Museum Guard. What Is Left the Daughter shares many of Norman's favourite themes, including a boy left orphaned (Wyatt Hillyer's mother and father kill themselves on the same evening by jumping off different bridges after having affairs with the same woman), radios (a neighbour agrees to look after Wyatt's home if he can turn on his late mother's collection of 58 sets simultaneously one evening), and living in hotels. Oh, and murder, love and regret. It may be Norman's most successful work; the idea of characters scripting their own obituaries before their deaths tickled me, though I would have liked an appendix where they were printed out in full.

Brick by Brick Lane

If you walk up Fashion Street, E1, by Brick Lane, you'll find these beautiful buildings, whose restoration was finally unveiled earlier this year. What I love about them is that they seem to be a cultural, geographical and, now, temporal crossover, as they look very much like the Victorian edifices you might see in Karachi, Pakistan, (the grander ones are referred to as Venetian Gothic, such as Frere Hall) except in this case the vernacular has been brought back to Britain. Also on Brick Lane, I enjoyed this latest piece by Stik:

City lit: travel books with a difference

When I travel abroad I'll often try and take a novel with me set in the place I'm visiting, or by someone from that country. Living in London, we're fairly used to seeing our city represented in print (the same goes for the USA, especially in terms of cinema). It's so commonplace, it's rare to get a true feeling of identification; more usually, we'll notice when a glaring infelicity grates, or when we don't agree with a characterisation of our city.

In his novel The Family Arsenal, Paul Theroux notes that London always looks better in the rain. From the vantage point of a rather lovely summer I don't agree, and this observation has always slightly rankled. Perhaps it was of its time; and what about London in snow? Beautiful.

Travelling to Edinburgh and North Berwick recently I enjoyed Maggie O'Farrell's After You'd Gone on the recommendation of a friend. I'm about to reread Howard Norman's The Museum Guard having been to Amsterdam for the first time earlier this year and hope it captures something of that very fun city.

A trip to Prague was a lovely time to revisit Kafka, and seek out some of his sites in the city. There's a host of great Czech authors out there to enjoy and, I noted in a recent post, Penguin has just reissued some other notable Eastern European books to enjoy (fiction and non). Meanwhile, Arthur Phillips' Prague is a perfect fit for Budapest.

It need not necessarily be the work of a national: David Mitchell would seem a good fit for Japan if ever I manage to get there (I wouldn't want to visit the Tokyo of Ryu Murakami); I've written elsewhere about fictional depictions of Belgium by English-speaking writers. Heading to Denmark, I cheated and read a work by Icelander Halldor Laxness , but I couldn't see any other time when I'll read him. I was heartily recommended Aksel Sandemose while in Copenhagen and have yet to get round to him, perhaps another trip is in order.

As we know, it can work another way: I don't think I'll ever get to Australia, but I've read the marvellous Tim Winton so don't really feel I need to. And there are times when you might want to be a little circumspect about what you take with you: I wouldn't rush to Saudi Arabia with Rajaa Alsanea's Girls of Riyadh in your hand luggage. If you're off on your hols: happy reading!