A YEAR IN PROVENCE [Signed]

Mayle, Peter

ISBN 10: 0394572300 / ISBN 13: 9780394572307

Published by Alfred A. Knopf, New York, NY, 1990

About this Item

Octavo, 207 pages. In Very Good condition with a Very Good minus condition dust jacket. White spine with brown lettering. Dust jacket is wrapped in a mylar covering, price clipped, closed tears along the head edges, light stains, mild creasing along the spine head egde, and light chipping along the fore corners. Boards have mild bending along the fore corners and spine head and tail edges, and a light smudge along the front tail end. Textblock has mild wear along the edges. Signed flat by Peter Mayle on the title page. DL consignment. Shelved in Room C. 1391727. Special Collections. Seller Inventory # 1391727

Bibliographic Details

Title: A YEAR IN PROVENCE [Signed]

Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf, New York, NY

Publication Date: 1990

Binding: Hardcover

Illustrator: Judith Clancy

Dust Jacket Condition: Dust Jacket Included

Signed: Signed by Author(s)

Edition: First American Edition, First Printing.

About this title

Synopsis:

The author describes his experiences when he and his wife moved to a two-hundred-year-old French farmhouse, and shares his observations on the people and culture of Provence

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