Tag Archives: memoir

Book review: Hungry for the World: A Memoir

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Hungry for the World: A Memoir by Kim Barnes. New York: Anchor Books. 2001. 256 pages.

It takes a certain amount of ego to write a memoir, especially if your life hasn’t been influential or extraordinary. Kim Barnes may have been counting on her life appearing to be the latter when she wrote Hungry for the World, which focuses on her serial relationships with men — from the father of childhood to the lovers of youth to the husband of maturity, circling back to her father, now a grandfather. Throughout, she obsesses over the girl she was and the woman she must be. Her journey is set in Idaho and the Pacific Northwest, in a wilderness penetrated by wanton hunters, felled by loggers, and drowned and despoiled by industry, and in cities and towns filled with more drugs and vice than jobs.

Barnes is a woman in man’s world, even more so after her parents convert to the Pentecostal faith. As he turns further inward, her father seeks self-denial and self-punishment by moving his family from the forest they love into town, where, when he isn’t driving his truck route, he’s sitting around in front of the TV, smoking and apparently contemplating his relationship with God. The more Barnes struggles to understand her father, the more distant he seems. He’s less parent than mythical figure. He’s wise in the woods, taciturn, unrevealing, and unforgiving in town. Barnes is torn between her natural desire to live like a man — free, unencumbered, and in control — and her duty to follow in the path of women like her mother — subservient to God and man. But she is “hungry for the world,” although “world” here goes no farther than the localized experiences of school, work, lovers, alcohol, drugs, and the demands of David, the older man who craves her “trust” while demonstrating with every action his unworthiness of it.

Barnes seems to think her youth was exceptionally tawdry, but there’s nothing here that would surprise or shock anyone who came of age in the 1960s or 70s, not even her relationship with David, the controlling, damaged Vietnam veteran whose thrills depend on his ability to subdue and obliterate Barnes’s personality, preferences, and will — not unlike her father and his church with its patriarchal beliefs.

Many women may find the author’s story and its resolution inspiring, or, as a cover blurb gushes, “refreshing . . . a moving story of human regeneration.” For me, the telling of her story is so self-consciously literary that there’s nothing moving about it. For all the flowery musings and metaphors, Barnes conveys few emotions, only a stated sense of shame about the past and a sense of wonder, albeit detached, about the present.

Kim Barnes is a talented writer, and Hungry for the World abounds with passages whose wording transcends the ugliness of the not-so-extraordinary subject matter and limited, self-aware, and self-important perspective. The problem is that Hungry for the World is more a self-conscious literary exercise than a genuine, heartfelt attempt at memoir. All the pretty phrasings and all the reflective section endings don’t lend this memoir the emotional power and substance it might have had if Barnes had been able to let go of the one thing she, like the men in her life, seems hungry for — control.

8 July 2012
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: The Collected Stories of Colette

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The Collected Stories of Colette by Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette, ed., and with an introduction by, Robert Phelps. Highly recommended.

According to the introduction, this collection represents 100 stories taken from a dozen volumes published during Colette’s lifetime. They are categorised as “Early Stories,” “Backstage at the Music Hall,” “Varieties of Human Nature,” and “Love.” Some, like the Clouk/Chéri stories, appear to be fiction, while many, like “The Rainy Moon” and “Bella-Vista,” seem to be taken straight from Colette’s varied life and acquaintances.

Whether writing fiction or chronicling fact, whether writing in the third-person omniscient or in the first person, Colette herself is always a character — rarely as an influencer, that is, one whose actions or choices drive the plot. Colette’s preferred role is as observer — and it is one for which she is well suited.

An inveterate sensualist and a former music-hall performer, Colette integrates her characters (real and fictional) with everything around them — their clothes (costumes); their abodes, dressing rooms, and haunts (sets); and their neighborhoods and towns (theatres). Much of Colette’s writing, no matter how mundane the surface subject, is about art — the art of living and, notably, the art of loving. In “My Goddaughter,” the subject tells her godmother how she injured herself with scissors and a curling iron and recounts her mother’s reaction. “She said that I had ruined her daughter for her! She said, ‘What have you done with my beautiful hair which I tended so patiently? . . . And that cheek, who gave you permission to spoil it! . . . I’ve taken years, I’ve spent my days and nights, trembling over this masterpiece. . . .'”

Colette is attuned to everything, every sense, every nuance. “A faint fragrance did indeed bring to my nostrils the memory of various scents which are at their strongest in autumn.” (“Gibriche”) “. . . set in a bracelet, which slithered between her fingers like a cold and supple snake.” (“The Bracelet”) ” . . . the supper of rare fruits, an orgy of ice water sparkling in the thin glasses, as intoxicating as champagne . . .” (“Florie”) “Peroxided hair, light-colored eyes, white teeth, something about her of an appetizing but slightly vulgar young washerwoman.” (“Gitanette”)

Colette does not pretend to be an objective observer of human behaviour; she does not hesitate to express to the reader her weariness with certain individuals or situations, and her stories of her vain, pretentious, overbearing friend Valentine reveal her jaded and waning affection. She knows this woman so well that she sees her almost as Valentine sees herself — a drama queen acting out stories, roles, and games without depth of feeling for them. “What Must We Look Like?” becomes Valentine’s driving philosophy, to which Colette responds with “a mild, a kindly pity.” In “The Hard Worker,” Colette says, “I can see she does not hate him, but I cannot see she loves him either.” What Colette sees — and does not see — is to be respected.

Some stories, such as “The Sick Child,” are vivid and imaginative and reveal Colette’s amazing ability to think and dream like a gifted child. “The Advice,” with its mundane beginning and premise and twisted, horrifying ending would enhance any collection of gothic or mystery tales. Other stories, like “Gibriche,” several of the other music-hall stories, and “Bella-Vista,” tackle topics that even today remain controversial. “Bella-Vista,” in which Colette’s moods seem to wane with every familiarity achieved with her hostesses, offers an ending that is heavily foreshadowed throughout but is surprising and gruesome nonetheless.

Most of the stories, whether fiction or nonfiction, seem to come from life in one way or another. The quantity of stories and the quality of the collection reveal the incredible scope of experience of Colette, the dry, often weary yet obsessive observer, interpreter, and chronicler of human nature. As Judith Thurman says in her introduction to Colette’s work, The Pure and the Impure, “This great ode to emptiness was written by a woman who felt full.” As well she should.

27 May 2003
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: The Pure and the Impure

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The Pure and the Impure by Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette with introduction by Judith Thurman. Recommended.

Colette believed The Pure and the Impure was her best work. I can’t judge, not having read anything of hers but a few short stories, but this collection of her observations about human attitudes toward relationships and sexuality is insightful and timeless. It is also difficult and obscure at times, perhaps because of the translation and because there is no real structure to such a collection.

Thanks to her milieu, her position in it, and her willingness to seek the story, Colette could draw upon the most interesting people of her time — the givers and the takers. From the older woman who publicly fakes an orgasm while self-pleasuring in an opium house to gladden the heart of her young, sickly lover to the roué who exclaims of women, “They allow us to be their master in the sex act, but never their equal. That is what I cannot forgive them” to the circle of prominent women who learn the ways of sex from servants, dress as men, and love horses (she calls the most notable of these women “La Chevalière”) to the “happy,” alcoholic, lesbian poet Renée Vivien to the gay men with whom she seems most comfortable, Colette covers a spectrum of sexuality and combinations — including those men and women who play their heterosexual and homosexual relations against one another.

“I’m devoted to that boy, with all my heart,” the older woman tells Colette, a stranger to her. “But what is the heart, madame? It’s worth less than people think. It’s quite accommodating. It accepts anything. You give it whatever you have, it’s not very particular. But the body . . . Ha! That’s something else, again.” Thurman believes this sums up Colette’s view precisely, the heart as a slave to the body.

Although Colette apparently wanted to remain an impartial observer, she cannot mask her own feelings and biases. One senses that she could not quite see a woman-woman partnership as “whole,” as passionate, as capable of being the source of tragedy in the same way as other types of relationships. (Anaïs Nin will also hint at something similar in her diaries, at the “incompleteness” of female/female love.) “What woman would not blush to seek out her amie only for sensual pleasure? In no way is it passion that fosters the devotion of two women, but rather a feeling of kinship.”

She is fascinated by the story of Lady Eleanor Butler and Miss Sarah Ponsonby, the “Ladies of Llangollen,” who elope and spend several decades living together. During this time, Butler will keep an extensive journal about her life with “My Beloved,” while, to Colette’s consternation and fascination, Ponsonby remains a silent partner. Colette so romanticizes the Ladies that she says they run off together as “young girls,” when in fact Butler was 39 and Ponsonby in her 20s. While there is all kind of detail about their living arrangements, from gardening, sewing, hosting an array of distinguished visitors, and sharing a bedroom and bed, there is nothing known of their emotional or sexual intimacies other than their obvious devotion to one another. They remain a happy, content enigma to Colette and to the present day.

The book concludes on a more personal note — about jealousy, “the only suffering that we endure without ever becoming used to it.” She maintains that “a man never belongs to us” and hints at the unique and not unfriendly relationship two female rivals may have — even rivals who wish to kill one another. When one rival tells Colette all the things that had prevented her from killing Colette in Rambouillet (missed train, stalled car, etc.), Colette says, “I was not in Rambouillet.” The relationship between her and her rival becomes more interesting, more revealing, more important, and more affectionate than with the man over whom they duel.

Colette suffered what many turn-of-the-century female intellectuals must have — a society’s fear of “masculine” women who are too intelligent, too outspoken, too knowing. When she offers to travel with the roué (apparently as a friend), he says in seriousness, “I only like to travel with women,” which, a moment later, is softened by, “You, a woman? Why, try as you will . . .” Even today, there are women who have experienced this.

“This is a sad book,” Colette said. “It doesn’t warm itself at the fire of love, because the flesh doesn’t cheer up its ardent servants.” Thurman adds, “This great ode to emptiness was written by a woman who felt full.”

The Pure and the Impure is a must read for anyone who enjoys Colette’s other writings; it is the most autobiographical of her works.

1 January 2002
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: Henry and June

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Henry and June (from A Journal of Love: The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin 1931–1932) by Anaïs Nin. Recommended.

Henry and June (from A Journal of Love: The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin 1931–1932) by Anaïs Nin is a portion of the writer’s famous journal from October 1931 until October 1932 — the year in which she met Henry and June Miller and fell for Henry’s sensuality and June’s mystery, a year of writing, lies, deceit, sexual awakening, introspection, psychoanalysis, and “love.”

Nin is an evocative, poetic writer, if not a particularly substantive one. Henry and June, edited from her journal to focus on Miller and his wife, is beautifully written but, in the end, is devoid of meaning to anyone other than the participants. She obscures the truth of how much she writes. If the journal is accurate, then Nin had mastered deception — she lies to her husband, to June, to Henry, to her psychoanalyst, to her lover/cousin Eduardo, to virtually everyone she knows, all seemingly in an attempt to hide herself from them, and perhaps from herself. She writes frequently of costumes, makeup, jewelry, nail polish and how one can put them on to create a new self. It quickly becomes clear that, despite the introspection of the journal, despite the psychoanalysis, despite her complete focus on herself and how she relates to those people in her life, Nin is no more self-aware by the end of the year than she was when she met Miller, and the reader can’t be too sure, either, of where Nin ends and where the self-deception begins. When the obvious is pointed out to her — that she is still trying to find the “love” that she didn’t get from her father — Nin accepts it at first, but denies it as she talks more and more to herself. And while she may grasp that her father’s abandonment was harmful to her, she finds it easy to mistreat her husband, whom she portrays as psychologically simple and refers to as a “child” without relating how he might feel to how she felt about her father. She seems incapable of grasping the importance of another person’s feelings, no matter who that other person might be.

Nin writes of spending entire days and nights with Miller, of going from him to Hugo, her banker husband, with no suspicion on Hugo’s part. Hugo is jealous of Miller, although she repeatedly tells her journal she doesn’t know why he would be. She writes of not wanting to hurt the soft, weak, emotional Eduardo, but continues her sexual relationship with him until he is bound to be crushed by her sudden decision to end it. She tells Eduardo about Henry, Henry about Hugo, and her psychoanalyst about all of them. She writes of having sex with three of them in one day, ending with “What does that make me?” She does not want to know the potential answer to that question. She wants “experience” at any cost. She does not want to be hurt, but she hurts others freely. She believes she has deep insight into others, but does not understand at more than a superficial level what their thoughts and feelings may be. Much of what she attributes to the elusive, mysterious June are the shifting sands of her own personality.

Not having read Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, the book he was writing during the year of his relationship with Nin, it’s difficult for me to say how accurate Nin’s portrayal of him is. At times, she feels pity for him, for his weak eyes, for the mind-numbing work he does to support himself. At others, she describes him as “monstrous.” The sketch of Miller is less one of the man himself than of Nin’s infatuation with her own perceptions. At one moment he is the ultimate sensualist; the next, he becomes a gentle romantic. She also enjoys him largely for his worship of her as a writer and as a lover. The relationship is less about the dynamics of their interactions than about her ego and her relationship with herself. Miller is never much more than a two-dimensional, ever-changing character — Henry Miller according to Anaïs Nin. While Nin’s journal is certainly more thoughtful than those of most people, ultimately, it lacks the insight and depth that another writer could have brought to such an intense relationship. At the end, Nin and Miller are still strangers to the reader who has spent hours over dinner and in bedrooms with them. Perhaps it is Nin’s amorality that gets in the way of any true intimacy.

Nin has somehow become a model of a woman’s sexual awakening and awareness, perhaps because of the perceived candor of her journal and her desires for the depths and heights of sexual experience. It is as though such desires for such experiences are what should define a woman — a notion that may work for some women, but certainly not all who are sexually awakened in their own ways.

Henry and June is self-indulgent and even occasionally adolescent in its focus, obssessions, and attitudes. Perhaps because I find so little to relate to in Nin, I found her cold, uninteresting, and annoying — perhaps because I don’t like to be deceived. On the other hand, this will be a fascinating read for anyone who is deeply interested in Nin or Miller or anyone, like me, who would like to free themselves to speak freely in their own journals.

9 June 2001
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf.

Book review: Angela’s Ashes

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Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt. Recommended as a good fiction.

Angela’s Ashes is the chronicle of author Frank McCourt’s childhood, first in America, then in Ireland, or purports to be. The sadness, tragedy, ugliness, and despair are laid on so thickly as to become improbable in combination. Bad things happen to good people, but in McCourt’s world, the worst always happens. When the family moves, it is to the worst house on the lane, next to the only outhouse. When it rains, their house is the one that floods. When he develops conjunctivitis, it is permanent (he still has it years later). When other kids’ alcoholic fathers go to England during the war to earn money, his is the only one who drinks his pay away and loses the job. Nothing is ever halfway for McCourt. If there is a tragedy to tell, it will be the most tragic conceivable.

There are inconsistencies, such as time frames that make no sense, as well as improbabilities, like his grandmother making several walking round trips of over a mile, all in one night, months before her death. There is also the issue of whether McCourt could possibly recall such detail (as his lengthy story about the IRA refusing to helping his father out and why) during his very early years without any context. It would be as though you were four years old and heard your father talking about the New Deal, and you remembered everything about it even though you had no idea at the time what all the acronyms represented. Oddly, while McCourt goes into great detail about his early childhood, his timeline becomes increasingly compressed as he approaches adolescence. There is much less detail, and whole months are passed by just at a time when a person would be more likely to remember more — and to be experiencing more. It almost feels like he grew tired of the tale (and fabricating it) and was in a rush to get to the end. Or perhaps, having gone through a sleazy conception, rats, fleas, sewage, open sores, tuberculosis, vomited blood, corporeal punishment, prolonged hunger, his mother’s prostitution, etc., etc., etc. (no horror goes untouched), he simply ran out of material.

So, from early on, I viewed Angela’s Ashes as a work of fiction in which none of the characters is likeable. While many would say the father is the worst, as he is a hard-core alcoholic who cannot and will not support his family, I found him to be far more sympathetic a person than his mother as portrayed. When sober, the father often shows his sons small signs of affection and empathy, but Angela herself is nearly always cold, distant, and unsympathetic toward her children. She is always more focused on herself than on them. I’m not sure how many people could write about their own mothers as dispassionately as McCourt does. If she had one good quality, McCourt is careful not to present it.

As a child, McCourt seems relatively balanced, likeable, and ethical, wanting to do the right thing, but adolescence seems to turn him into a different person. He lies, he steals, he takes advantage of people — and the only guilt he seems to feel is that imposed by the Catholic Church. There is never a sense, even when he achieves adulthood, that he has any deep thoughts about who he is, what he is doing, and how he affects others. Even his agonizing over his belief that he is responsible for a consumptive girl’s descent into Hell because he had sex with her is tainted by the selfishness of his focus.

In the end, I must concur with an author acquaintance who said, “Angela’s Ashes? ’tis as phony as the photo on the cover.”

But it is certainly well written and compelling, if you happen to have a large grain of salt handy.

18 March 2011
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: 365 Nights: A Memoir of Intimacy

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365 Nights: A Memoir of Intimacy by Charla Muller with Betsy Thorpe. New York: The Berkeley Publishing Group, 2008. 288 pages.

Charla Muller’s epigraph for 365 Nights: A Memoir of Intimacy is from dramatist Jean Anouilh: “To say yes, you have to sweat and roll up your sleeves and plunge both hands into life up to the elbows.” Out of its context, Anouilh’s quotation summarizes Charla Muller’s attitude toward marital sex: It’s a chore and a bore. That is why, on the occasion of her husband Brad’s 40th birthday, she, in the spirit of self-sacrifice, offers him what she calls “The Gift” — sex every day for the next year. After pages of overwrought mutual analysis about the implications, her husband accepts. In one short chapter, the reader is introduced to what seems to be the most passionless marriage on the planet.

The rest of 365 Nights (give or take a few — mustn’t have sex during menstruation, for example) rarely delves into sex or even intimacy, physical or emotional. Our most penetrating look into the couple’s sex life comes when Muller says, “Wow, that was really nice” (or “yummy”). Her husband replies, “Could you pretend you’re enjoying it?” Muller responds, “How ’bout you just close your eyes.”

Between these flashes of profound love, Muller tirelessly fills the reader in on her rather narrow view of relationships, marriage, parenting, being a working mother (she works two days a week), and how giving her husband what he wants (“The Gift”) has somehow made them stronger as a couple. It’s not the intimacy itself that seems to bring them closer together, but the sense of sacrifice and the willingness to work to overcome the obstacles — not only Muller’s dislike of sex (which she seems to believe she shares with every married mother), but logistics such as work, children, activities, and the need for private time.

Perhaps married women with children who see their husbands as “sperm donors” and “providers,” as Muller writes of some of her friends, will relate to her and her view of love, marriage, and life. Undoubtedly, many will find that she validates the sexual ennui that can set in during any long-term relationship. From my single, childless perspective, she offers no insights, not even as to the underlying reasons she makes every effort to avoid sex with the man she loves and why getting ready for sex means, “I just continue lying there” (prompting her husband to say, “Could you pretend you’re interested in this?”).

When the year of “The Gift” is over, her husband Brad seems happy because he will continue to get sex more frequently (although not every day), and Muller is happy because Brad is more content and her marriage is more solid — and, to me, as free of passion as ever. Muller writes about some of the benefits of sex — it provides exercise and offers improved communication for example (she likes to talk to Brad about the mundane during the act, we learn). She mentions greater emotional intimacy, but she doesn’t convey it or what it means. She touches on the surface of the issues, but is unable or is afraid to say anything meaningful beyond the obvious. While she lies back and gives “The Gift,” she cannot bring herself to mention that she finds any physical pleasure or emotional joy in the act itself (other than that it’s “nice”). She and her husband seem to be well suited to each other, but they could be brother and sister Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert from Anne of Green Gables for all the passion shown in their marriage — with or without sex.

Muller’s perky style is annoying, and her values, which she assumes we all share, are painfully shallow. She disdains ugly mini-vans (and her beloved children’s energy future) in favor of a “cool” SUV. A “polite feminist,” she believes that it’s a “rule” that women, and now men, must pluck their eyebrows (and any other hair that doesn’t meet her concept of perfect grooming and appearance). She is surprised to learn she is pregnant after just a couple of months, calling herself “very fertile” (what does this make her husband?) and making one wonder if she never learned the reasons that contraception became such a hot topic for 19th century women. She abhors the idea of aging naturally and fantasizes about “slight tweaking” through plastic surgery until her husband says, “What will she [daughter] think if she sees her mother conforming to these bizarre societal standards?” — standards to which Muller would have us all make every effort to conform.

Muller presents herself as someone you should want to chat with over coffee about the vicissitudes of married suburban life; indeed, that’s how this book came about. I couldn’t. It’s more than her overuse of words like “nice,” “gal,” and “girls” (this from a “polite feminist”) or the wearisome banality of her endless reflections. She’s one of those people — we all know at least one — who prattle nonstop without saying anything, leaving one feeling tired and empty — or energized, if that is your sort of thing.

365 Nights: A Memoir of Intimacy could have been a compelling story, but it would take a more interesting and thoughtful author than Charla Muller to grasp the topic and its nuances and to do it the justice it deserves.

29 August 2008
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: Encore Provence: New Adventures in the South of France

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Encore Provence: New Adventures in the South of France by Peter Mayle. New York: Random House, Inc., 2000. 240 pages.

For an unexplained reason, Peter Mayle and his unnamed wife (presumably the “Jennie” of the dedication) left paradise in Provence for Long Island. In Encore Provence, he returns to the south of France, where the food, wine, and slow pace of life again absorb his attention.

Even less structured than Toujours Provence, Encore Provence covers familiar territory from new angles. “The Unsolved Murder of the Handsome Butcher” and “Recipe for a Village” address both the insularity and charms of village life (“Recipe” much less successfully), while “How to Be a Nose,” “Discovering Oil,” and “Friday Morning in Carpentras” provide insights into the perfume, olive oil, and truffle industries, respectively. In one of the best chapters, “Restaurant Critic Makes Astonishing Discovery,” Mayle effectively and humorously discredits Ruth Reichl’s flippant dismissal of Provence. How could a serious critic, after only a month’s visit, write, “I had been dreaming of a Provence that never existed”? To help the reader find ripe tomatoes — which Reichl could not manage to do — and other products of Provence, Mayle provides the names and places for markets, vineyards, restaurants, bakeries, and producers of goods like olive oil and honey. It becomes clear that Reichl could not find Provence because she actively avoided it; perhaps she thought that deflating the expectations that Mayle helped to create was a better story than simply reinforcing them.

Several chapters, like “Curious Reasons for Liking Provence” and “Eight Ways to Spend a Summer’s Afternoon,” reveal one of the problems with Encore Provence — the lack of significant new material. More filler than substance, they are more like random personal essays than integral parts of a cohesive work, as though Mayle could not think of a better way to frame his random observations. These chapters are forced, splintered, and almost unnecessary.

Surprisingly, there is less of a sense of place. In the previous Provence books, Mayle’s stone house, with its location abutting public forest, its isolation from traffic, its drawn-out renovations, its pool that attracts thirsty sangliers, and its quirky neighbors like Faustin and Massot, gives the reader a strong sense of a place with personality. The house is at the heart of A Year in Provence. In Encore Provence, it is not clear that Mayle and his wife return to the same house or what their neighbors are like. Even the dogs are mostly absent. Without structure and intimacy, Encore Provence is nothing more than a series of disconnected travelogue stories. Perhaps weary of intrusions into his privacy, or perhaps unclear about the reasons for the first book’s success, Mayle distances himself from his reader.

There may not be much left for Mayle to say about Provence. He writes that, due to building restrictions, not much has changed. Yet he notes that “the garage and the geese are gone, and the farmhouse has sprouted wings and annexes . . . the vines have been groomed” and “the refugees’ urge for rapid [gardening] results has spawned an industry: instant gardens, shipped in and set up with astonishing speed.” These are only a couple of small changes, to be sure, but in time there will be more, and Provence will alter slowly and subtly. Mayle should know that that is the nature of change in the countryside and that, with enough demand, pressure, and money, change can accelerate, transforming a village into a resort town or farmland into suburbia.

Even if you cannot visit Provence, much of the lifestyle that Mayle describes — with food and drink of varying type and quality — is still available in many places outside France. The slow pace, the fatalistic viewpoint, the elderly gossips and moralists, the close-knit relationships, the helpfulness, and the beauty and quirks of the countryside are found in many regions. If you are as observant and open as Mayle, you may be able to find your version of Provence closer to home.

25 May 2008
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: Toujours Provence

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Toujours Provence by Peter Mayle. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991. 260 pages.

Having survived French bureaucracy, endless home improvement, goat races, hunters, Massot’s dogs, summer visitors, and other hazards during A Year in Provence, Peter Mayle brings us more of the same in Toujours Provence.

This time Mayle takes a more illustrative approach. Beginning with a pharmaceuticals marketing brochure that depicts a snail whose “horns drooped” and whose “eye was lackluster,” Mayle educates us about health concerns and approaches in Provence — including house calls. Anecdotes relate Mayle’s love of picnicking Provence style (with chef, wait staff, and linens); his quest for singing toads, truffles, and napoléons (the coins); his pursuit of Pavarotti and pastis; and, of course, his passion for the region’s fresh foods and fine vintages.

With a few exceptions, such as the history of pastis and the more sobering story of summer drought and forest fires, much of Toujours Provence will seem familiar territory to readers of the first book. For the most part, Mayle is in fine form, writing that Bennett, “looking like the reconnaissance scout from a Long Range Desert Group . . . had crossed enemy lines on the main N100 road, successfully invaded Ménerbes, and was now ready for the final push into the mountains.” Some anecdotes, like “No Spitting in the Châteauneuf-du-Pape,” end brilliantly, while others, such as “Napoléons at the Bottom of the Garden,” fall a little flat.

Judith Clancy’s delightful artwork is back, but what is missing from Toujours Provence are the quirky characters we came to love or at least wonder about. Most are mentioned or make a brief appearance, but mainly they are relegated to the background. Even Mayle’s neighbor Massot (“. . . it would be difficult to imagine a more untrustworthy old rogue this side of the bars of Marseille prison”), to whom half a chapter is devoted, is here more caricature than character. We know no more about him, or Faustin and Henriette or Monsieur Menicucci, than we did at the end of the first book. By now, Mayle’s circle has expanded , but no one he meets, from the toad choir director to the flic, is nearly as interesting as his neighbors or his builders from the first book.

Like an adequate movie sequel, Toujours Provence carries on in the same vein as its predecessor, with a slightly different or reduced cast and a little less originality and wit. Perhaps more appropriately, I should say it’s like a wine slightly past its peak — still worth drinking, but somehow not quite as enjoyable.

28 April 2008
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: A Year in Provence

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A Year in Provence by Peter Mayle. New York: Vintage Books, 1991. 224 pages.

A Year in Provence begins with New Year’s lunch and ends with Christmas lunch. Between the two meals is a memorable year full of characters (from eccentric neighbors and affable builders to aged chefs), forays into the countryside, unwelcome visitors, the Mistral, and, of course, gastronomic delights.

Without explanation, such as how they can afford it, Peter Mayle describes how he and his nameless wife buy an old farmhouse in the Lubéron, insulated from the greater world and from change by the public lands that surround them. With dry English detachment, Mayle settles into a life ruled not by the minutes of commerce (“time is money”) but by the seasons and the opportunities each brings, whether it’s goat races, boules, or fresh olive oil. Although puzzled at first by what the people do when the bitter winter Mistral blows, Mayle soon figures out that even this depressing and confining season has its products — babies.

To their credit, the Mayles seem willing to accept and adapt to the Provence pace of life rather than expecting to find the urban English experience to which they are accustomed. They accept that the builders will return tomorrow “normalement” and don’t fuss when “tomorrow” is weeks later. Rather than becoming demanding and ugly, which would achieve nothing, they come up with a plan that motivates the builders to complete the house by Christmas. They choose to live in Provence on its terms, not theirs.

Mayle expertly portrays the foibles of each person he meets. As a farmer, his neighbor Faustin is ever the pessimist, seeing future clouds on sunny days. “As if his life were not already filled with grief, Nature had put a further difficulty in his way” (that is, the table and wine grapes have to be picked at separate times, giving both crops the opportunity to go bad).

Another neighbor, Massot, could be the stereotype of the American mountain man, mistrustful and fiercely independent. Of his fierce Alsatians he says, “They wouldn’t be happy in a town. I’d have to shoot them.” Mayle adds, “He turned off the path to go into the forest and terrorize some birds, a brutal, greedy, and mendacious old scoundrel. I was becoming quite fond of him.” Mayle doesn’t pass up an opportunity for irony. Massot says, “Every summer they [Germans] come here and put up tents and make merde all over the forest” as he tosses an empty cigarette packet into the bushes. Later Mayle talks about, “The Belgians . . . to blame for the majority of accidents . . . forcing the famously prudent French driver into ditches.”

The author of A Year in Provencedoes not spare himself. Hearing shots and hoping that the local grocer had missed killing a sanglier, Mayle says of the French countryman, “Let him worship his stomach; I would maintain a civilized detachment from the blood lust that surrounded me . . . This noble smugness lasted until dinner [a wild rabbit] . . . The gravy, thickened with blood, was wonderful.”

When Mayle isn’t chatting with the neighbors, being advised by the local plumber-musician, despairing over how to move his heavy stone table, entertaining friends of friends and obnoxious advertising executives, or watching goat races, he is, of course, eating. He and his wife find culinary wonders in the “good, simple food” served inexpensively in the restaurants they visit. “. . . artichoke hearts, tiny sardines fried in batter, perfumed tabouleh, creamed salt cod, marinated mushrooms, baby calamari, tapenade, small onions in fresh tomato sauce, celery and chick peas, radishes and cherry tomatoes, cold mussels” — and those are just the hors d’oeuvres, served with “thick slices of pâté and gherkins, saucers of olives and cold peppers.”

When it comes to food, Mayle’s favorite adjective is “fresh,” which captures difference between life as most of us know it and the charm of Mayle’s life in the Lubéron. Pressed for the time by the pressures of suburban living, commuting, work in the city, and our consumerist culture, and detached from the land, we eat food that is packaged, preserved, and transported, and then sold to us at a time and distance from when and where it was produced. Most of us live and eat well, we believe, but at the price of stress and at the cost of the pure enjoyment Mayle finds every time he dines in Provence, where bread is launched “into a sea of fish soup” and “it was as if the sliced, wrapped, machine-made loaf had never been invented.”

I began A Year in Provence out of curiosity about its popularity and soon found myself living vicariously through Mayle, savoring not only the food and the beauty and rhythms of the countryside that produces it, but the companionship and consideration of each person they meet. As Maurice, the chef who finds a way to provide the powerless, desperate, and grateful Mayles with their Christmas meal “at a tiny table between the kitchen door and the open fire, next to a large and festive family,” says, “It’s not the day to be without an oven.” A Year in Provence shows how richly rewarding even a simple life can be when accepted on its own terms, without ego, assumptions, or demands.

23 March 2008
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: Tropic of Capricorn

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Tropic of Capricorn by Henry Miller. Recommended.

Like Tropic of Cancer, Tropic of Capricorn is part autobiography, part memoir, part polemic, part fiction, part fantasy, and part poetry, written in near stream of consciousness as Miller experiences one epiphany after another.

As with the prior book, Miller’s ramblings are the source and the result of his efforts to define himself as an artist. Other contemporary American writers, for example, F. Scott Fitzgerald, seem fascinated by their significance as artists and by the future importance of their art. In the Tropic books, Miller makes his consciousness of himself as an artist the subject of his art. In some ways, reading the Tropic books is like watching someone obsessively paint his self-portrait over and over, all with the title, Self-Portrait of the Artist.

According to Miller, “Life becomes a spectacle and, if you happen to be an artist, you record the passing show . . . The surface of your being is constantly crumbling; within, however, you grow hard as a diamond.” He says he “was perhaps the first Dadaist in America, and I didn’t know it. Nobody understood what I was writing about or why I wrote that way. I was so lucid that they said I was daffy.” The focus is not on the art (what he is writing about) but on himself as the artist, with an anonymous readership (“nobody,” “they”) who doesn’t understand him. As if his own belief in himself as an artist were not enough to convince us, he quotes a series of friends who insist that he should become a writer.

While Miller lacks objectivity and security, he has moments of insight into the current human condition. “Now we are eating of the same bread, but without benefit of communion, without grace. We are eating to fill our bellies and our hearts are cold and empty. We are separate but not individual,” following an anecdote about sour rye, is a brilliantly simple description of a world he sees as cold and mechanical, when progress and war have robbed men of their humanity. “The smell of a dead horse . . . is still a thousand times better than the smell of burning chemicals . . . the sight of a dead horse with a bullet hole in the temple . . . is still a better sight than that of a group of men in blue aprons coming out of the arched doorway of the tin factory . . .” Honest death and decay, “after life,” are better than “death from the roots, isolating men, making them bitter and fearful and lonely, giving them fruitless energy . . .”

Superior to Tropic of Cancer, Tropic of Capricorn still shows a lack of discipline, or a contempt for it. Separating the poetic gems are long, rambling passages that are sometimes pointless and sometimes nonsensical. He continues the use of incoherent metaphors such as, “Inwardly they are filled with worms. A tiny spark and they blow up.” Sometimes his attempts to play with words and prose are more childish than literary or artistic, for example, ” . . . deeper and deeper in sleep sleeping, the sleep of the deep in deepest sleep, at the nethermost depth full slept, the deepest and sleepest sleep of sleep’s sweet sleep,” and so on.

Tropic of Capricorn is uneven, ranging from the lively and the lovely to the self-conscious and tedious. It’s unfortunate that Miller expended so much effort trying to convince the reader (and himself) of his status as an evil monster and artist (perhaps with the idea that they are synonymous) and so little culling the irrelevant and refining the rest. Miller’s perspective and vision are interesting, even compelling, when not muddied by his fascination with himself and by his need to stand out.

13 October 2007
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf