A Year in Provence

PETER MAYLE

ISBN 10: 0241133610 / ISBN 13: 9780241133613

Published by HAMISH HAMILTON LTD, 1993

About this Item

Item in good condition. Textbooks may not include supplemental items i.e. CDs, access codes etc.

Seller Inventory # 00068448736

Bibliographic Details

• Title: A Year in Provence
• Publisher: HAMISH HAMILTON LTD
• Publication Date: 1993
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0241133610
• ISBN 13: 9780241133613
• Binding: Hardcover
• Condition: Good

About this title

Synopsis

Peter Mayle's account of his escape from the grey skies of London to the infinitely more appealing prospect of Menerbes in Provence. It has now been made into a BBC TV series starting early 1993 with John Thaw and Lyndsay Duncan.

Review

Who hasn't dreamed, on a mundane Monday or frustratingFriday, of chucking it all in and packing off to the south of France? Provençal cookbooks and guidebooks entice with provocatively fresh salads and azure skies, but is it really all Côtes-du-Rhône and fleur-de-lis? Author Peter Mayle answers that question with wit, warmth, and wicked candor in A Year in Provence, the chronicle of his own foray into Provençal domesticity.

Beginning, appropriately enough, on New Year's Day with a divine luncheon in a quaint restaurant, Mayle sets the scene and pits his British sensibilities against it. "We had talked about it during the long gray winters and the damp green summers," he writes, "looked with an addict's longing at photographs of village markets and vineyards, dreamed of being woken up by the sun slanting through the bedroom window." He describes in loving detail the charming, 200-year-old farmhouse at the base of the Lubéron Mountains, its thick stone walls and well-tended vines, its wine cave and wells, its shade trees and swimming pool--its lack of central heating. Indeed, not 10 pages into the book, reality comes crashing into conflict with the idyll when the Mistral, that frigid wind that ravages the Rhône valley in winter, cracks the pipes, rips tiles from the roof, and tears a window from its hinges. And that's just January.

In prose that skips along lightly, Mayle records the highlights of each month, from the aberration of snow in February and the algae-filled swimming pool of March through the tourist invasions and unpredictable renovations of the summer months to a quiet Christmas alone. Throughout the book, he paints colorful portraits of his neighbors, the Provençaux grocers and butchers and farmers who amuse, confuse, and befuddle him at every turn. A Year in Provence is part memoir, part homeowner's manual, part travelogue, and all charming fun. --L.A. Smith