Viva la Google earth

Fiona Maazel's new novel, Woke Up Lonely, is not only on North Korea, but takes you inside North Korea.

Did Maazel ever visit North Korea? In a recent essay, the writer says, she has never set foot on the soil of this famous, isolation-embodying-one-of-a-kind nation state, yet her novel is filled with vivid descriptions of Pyongyang's topography.

Maazel confesses that she took it all in via Google earth's excellent maps. She even got the street names right!

If you can’t get to a place yourself, spy on it.

But why not write about places you've been to or are familiar with?

That's where Maazel's philosophy comes in: She'd rather write about the unknown, unfamiliar and unknowable, than about the deeply familiar. Maazel defines her subject matter in terms of what interests her, not in terms of what she is most in the know of.

There have been representations of places and people of the unfamiliar world by the "espying" eyes since time immemorial. Pliny the Elder's (ancient Greece) entire geography of what is now considered to be the Americas, was concocted or borrowed from what Pliny had read in others' books or in fantastical maps. 

I remember, the heroine in Out of Africa saying she's been a "mental traveler" all her life and could reproduce an authentic story based in China, without ever having visited China.

However, in earlier eras there was no technological interface between the visitor and the place visited. Google earth maps provide such an interface.

The maps can take you inside as is evidenced by Maazel's "interactive" visit to Pyongyang here:

So there I was at 3 a.m. on a cold December in 2004, on the banks of the Tumen River, on the Chinese side of the border with North Korea, with ambitions to cross over. The sun would be up in less than five hours, but for how dark it was, I’d lost all hope the sun would rise again. It was freezing, and I felt as if I couldn’t see past my own body. As if the hubris and ego of my life were as cornerstones of a dungeon to myself. And yet, being miles from what I knew, in a place where the forlorn would inherit the earth, I had the horrible thought that maybe I belonged there. The sun rose at 7:54. There was an arrangement of stars pretzeled above the southern horizon. I crossed the river untested, but it was just one trial among many.

Feels like she's there doesn't it?