The Long Landscape - by Peter Delpeut (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

A filmmaker cycling across the United States reflects upon his connection to other passionate cyclists from 20th-century surrealism, adventuresome high-wheelers, science fiction, and philosophy in this charming and artful travel book.

For readers of Rebecca Lowe (The Slow Road to Tehran), Robert Pirsig (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance), and Sara Dykman (Bicycling with Butterflies).

The challenge: to cycle from Disney's Epcot Center toward San Francisco -- a 4350 mile journey -- on the cusp of summer. In search of the mythological American West seamlessly represented in movies and literature, Delpeut and his beloved cycling companion instead discover a landscape rarely felt in its actual punishing weather and expanse. On their way through the South, Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona, the couple encounter a blistering and varied cast of characters. A philosophy emerges as they bicycle their way across America that unites the challenge, wonderment, discovery, and naiveté that brought them along these roads. Woven into their journey is the history of long-distance cycling in America, the 19th-century high-wheeler adventures, H.G. Wells's Wheels of Chance, the sublime paintings of Mark Rothko, and Alfred Jarry's parody Supermale about the erotics of the machine age. On the day the author turns forty, the adventure culminates in Las Vegas, the ridiculous exaggeration of Manifest Destiny. But instead of becoming discouraged, he writes in a new introduction that this trip was the seed of a passion that has taken him and his still-beloved all over the world for decades since.

"Peter Delpeut's Long Landscape is a rollicking ride across the United States. The book is a celebration of the nourishing potential of long distance cycling. Delpeut moves seamlessly between travel, film and cycling history, paying homage to the diary form. Imagine David Lynch's Wild at Heart conversing with Bruce Chatwin's In Patagonia and you get some sense of the vitality of this wonderful edition." --Dara Waldron, New York Times bestselling author of A Sheepdog Named Oscar

Review Quotes

"Delpeut has written a fantastic story, which in its charming combination of style, color, content and depth, can hardly be compared to the average world of the average cyclist." --The World Cyclist

"Much more than just another travelogue." --De Volkskrant

"You get a feeling for space."--NRC Handelsblad

"A thoughtful, quietly ambitious travel memoir that uses cycling as a lens to explore memory, perception, and the changing nature of experience. Rather than focusing on action or adventure, The Long Landscape leans into reflection, asking what it really means to move through the world--especially in an age where even 'self-powered' travel is no longer entirely independent. Its strongest quality is the central idea that, despite technological evolution, the essence of cycling remains unchanged. The notion that riding a bicycle today can evoke the same sense of wonder felt by early cyclists--and even be compared to the astonishment of the first cinema audiences--is both original and convincing. It gives the narrative a philosophical backbone." --Cycloscope

Praise for past works

For The Forgotten Season

"An exceptionally mature novel."
--Groene Amsterdammer

"Wonderful novel."
--NRC Handelsblad

"A mysteriously beautiful book that trips us and surprises us."
--Literary Netherlands

For In the Black of the Mirror:

"Delpeut is a careful and visual writer and knows how to awaken life with his descriptions of the wanderings through landscape paintings. [...] Not a book that you read in one go, but that in small fragments you take in."
--het Parool

"A compelling masterpiece. [...] Literature at its best: obsessive, detailed, curious and full of tantalizing reflections and encounters." --Groene Amsterdammer

"The book is thicker than my fist because Peter Delpeut elaborates. A detail from a [painting] can take many pages, [...] Delpeut writes in a meandering, micro-detailed way, but also with fascinating mindfulness; he forces you to look far from our present hectic existence. [...] Delpeut does not impose anything. He leads the way. And the road is fascinating all the way to the end."
--Esquire, Netherlands

Praise for Delpeut the filmmaker

"Discussions about the work of Peter Delpeut are dominated by ...time. This unstoppable force, which hovers in the background of our daily lives exerting its endless influence on all things, could be considered Delpeut's professional forte." --Matthew Cole Levine, Found Footage Magazine

"Fastidious and probing.... Delpeut is a filmmaker of merit, considered a pioneer of the found footage turn in contemporary cinema and art." --Millennium Film Journal

About the Author

Peter Delpeut (b.1956) is a Dutch author and filmmaker. He has written four novels, several essay books on art and film, and two lyrical books about long distance cycling. For his debut novel in 2007 he was nominated for the Gerard Walschap Prize and awarded the Halewijn Prize. He makes films in many genres: found footage, documentary and features. Many of them are critically acclaimed and prizewinning films, including Lyrical Nitrate; Felice, Felice...; andThe Forbidden Quest. Delpeut is represented by Film Secession, an FWA-award winning online film museum. He studied philosophy and film theory, graduating from the Dutch Film Academy in 1984. He served as editor for film magazines Skrien and Versus. From 1988 to 1995 he worked as curator and deputy-director for the Netherlands Filmmuseum (now Eye), famous at the time for its revolutionary color preservations of films from the silent era. In 2005 a retrospective of his film work was presented in Washington D.C., New York and Berkeley. He currently lives in Amsterdam.