Spanish Lessons: How one family found their place in the sun - Softcover

Lambert, Derek

3.37

362 ratings by Goodreads

9780091912505: Spanish Lessons: How one family found their place in the sun

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0091912504 ISBN 13: 9780091912505

Publisher: Ebury Press, 2006

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Tired of his life as a globe-trotting journalist, and desperate to finish his latest novel, writer Derek Lambert decides to settle with his new wife and young son in a mouldering casita nestled among citrus groves inland of the Costa Blanca.

As he sets about restoring his house and learning to live the ordinary life of a Spanish villager, Lambert introduces us to a Spain far removed from the tourist traps and thumping discos of the Costas, and soon discovers that adapting to this new life is not as easy as he imagined. He employs a roofer who's afraid of heights, a plumber confounded by a blocked pipe and bumbles through Spanish lessons with a mocking classmate who challenges him to a public arm-wresting contest. Then just when it seems that nothing more could go wrong, the Lamberts face Spain's first snowstorm in many years.

Written in the jaunty, anecdotal style of Peter Mayle and Bill Bryson, this is a warm, affectionate and often hilarious portrait of life as a foreigner in rural Spain.

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Review:

Anyone yearning for a house in the country--another country--will be reassured it can be done with Derek Lambert's engaging tale of his new life in Spain. Reassured, yet likely unconvinced that a rundown property with no running water, access or much of a roof is anybody's idea of a holiday home. That's just the point of Lambert's book: his goal was a life, not a get-away. "In the fading light, the house looked more apologetic than prepossessing. And yet it beckoned as though it contained small mysteries that might one day become familiar to us", he says as he scrambles over a stone fence to peer into the window of the house in a remote region of Andalusia. Indeed, the mysteries of plumbing, builders and a river with no bridge--and how one pays for such things--unfold slowly and then pick up speed and character as the story progresses.

This book has more of a sense of plot than many of this genre, leading to the decision whether to stay or leave, one familiar to anyone who has decided to live abroad. Lambert does not have the writing style that Frances Mayes brings to Under the Tuscan Sun nor the consistent humour of his Andalusia neighbour Chris Stewart in Driving over Lemons. However, he offers an important sense that he and his family are willing parties to the plot he weaves. That combined with Spanish lessons on the building trades and the ability to shear sheep makes Lambert's book a pleasant guide for setting up not just a house, but a home, in rural Spain. --Kathleen Buckley

Review:

"An entertaining read in the vein of Mayle or Bryson... truly gripping" (The Times)

"A great insight into his first year on the Costa Blanca and the traumas that crop up" (The Mirror)

"The comic, anecdotal style of Peter Mayle with the shrewd observation of Bill Bryson...just the thing to take on holiday" (The Lady)

"Delightful" (Mail on Sunday)

"At last a cracking good book by a foreigner who went native in Spain! There are a million homes owned by foreigners in Spain and Spanish Lessons should be in every one" (Lookout)

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