Detail
Title: A Year in Provence (Provence #1) ISBN: 9780679731146Published June 4th 1991 by Vintage (first published December 31st 1989) · Paperback 207 pages
Genre: Travel, Nonfiction, Autobiography, Memoir, Cultural, France, Biography, Food and Drink, Food, Humor, Biography Memoir, Travelogue
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User Reviews
Noel
I read a couple of reviews on goodreads for this book and had to laugh at some of those who felt the book was whiney and written by a rich guy who could afford a super farmhouse with a pool no less! One review said that Mayle went back to England to live. Well – those reviews smack of small minded jealousy. Right now a farmhouse in France can be bought for as little as US$250,000.00; back in 1989 before this became trendy, property values were even more reasonable, especially coming from England where everything was/is expensive. It was kind of like selling your million dollar house in San Francisco and moving to Iowa – you could buy the entire town for the price of your modest house in California. I don’t think Mayle whined about the repairs to his house – in fact, he took it lightly and with a clear dose of patience and humor. Kudos to the Mayles to manage their money well enough to be able to enjoy the lifestyle which I don’t believe it was at all over the top.
Anyhow – I just had to say that.
Now for the book. I loved this book. I curled up with a glass of wine (Chilean, sorry) and read this in a couple of evenings. I laughed and laughed and commiserated with the Mayles. The writing is witty and the pace is excellent. It’s a romp through Provence over the course of a year. Peter and his wife have left behind their lives in England to move to Provence, buy a farmhouse and settle in to a slower pace of life. The story starts with the formidable paperwork process in buying a house, and reminded me of the process my son has gone through to rent a simple apartment in Brazil. Frustrating to the point of being funny. Mayle goes on to beautifully describe the climate, which is so different from common knowledge (again, very similar to our Brazilian experience); the absolutely mouthwatering gastronomic descriptions, locals, tourists, and then the never ending quest to fix the house. This part in particular reminded me of the time we bought a “fixer-upper” right on the beach in a beautiful town in Chile, and went through so many similar situations with repairmen and guests. At the time it drove us crazy, but now we look back at those times with a bit more fondness. In any case, Mayle brings the area to life, and does so in a light engaging way.
Maureen
Read this many years ago, but felt in need of a little escapism, so decided on a reread.
"And, as for the oil, it is a masterpiece. You’ll see.” Before dinner that night, we tested it, dripping it onto slices of bread that had been rubbed with the flesh of tomatoes. It was like eating sunshine.”
Love that quote! Love Mayle’s style of writing, and his humour. Enjoy the sun, the wine, and the food - enjoy a Year in Provence!
Jen
Hmmm...okay. I learned that:
1. With enough money you can relocate to Provence and buy a 200 year old farmhouse with mossy swimming pool, problematic pipes, and a wine cave backing up to the Luberon mountains. Wait, it gets worse!
2. Once you do this everyone who has ever vaguely heard your name and Provence together in the same sentence will attempt to visit whilst you are having a hell of a time fixing the charming antiquated house and bicycling into town. Hard times.
3. Tragedy strikes! Everything in Provence moves at a slower pace- including uninvited house guest departures and the guys you hired to remodel your soon to be awesome Provencal place. You are to be pitied, poor thing, having been forced to survive on mostly fresh breads, herbed cheeses, and the occasional sausage.
4. It can be rough rumbling around in an old car looking for great places to eat. It is a daunting task you face after finding them, having to stuff your face with delicacies drizzled with truffle sauce.
5. The somewhat backwards, rough, but ultimately charming locals are worth talking to- you never know if they'll tell you about how to choose a pig for hunting truffles or inform you that they've booby trapped the area from foreign campers. How quaint, the poor dears!
6. Truly, life in Provence can prove to be much tougher than it seems. But give it a year or so before you decide to go home- at the very least, wait until you have managed to have your grapes harvested by the guy that works your vines-you've got to have your own wine to drink with your breads and cheeses to give you the strength to go on.
Margitte
The next best thing to living in France, is to read this book. Loved it!
It is the first book in this genre which provided a complete picture of life in a rural French town by two Brits moving there.
Jan-Maat
Chiens de chasse are too specialised to be bought and sold across a counter, and we were told that no serious hunter would consider buying a pup without first meeting both parents. Judging by some of the hunting dogs we had seen, we could imagine that finding the father might have been difficult, but among all the hybrid curiosities there were three more or less identifiable types - the liver -coloured approximation of a large spaniel, the stretched beagle, and the tall, rail-thin hound with the wrinkled, lugubrious face (p.146)
I have come late to this book, my parent who bought it came late to it - it had been all the rage and on the best seller lists long before they bought it, and looking inside and seeing that it was published in 1989 it seemed to me that Mayle himself came late to writing it.
It is well known that many a British patriot will, given a chance, buy a residence in France and live there, the homeland easier maybe to love from a safe distance, this seemed to be particularly so when types who had made money on account of the deregulation and privatisations of the 1980s moved to France where life was more as it had been in the 1970s (or earlier). This it turns out wasn't quite true of Mayle who had made his packet of money in advertising in New York, but this book became emblematic of the aspiration of a generation - to sell up, move to France and enjoy the food and drink.
This book established itself as the basic and apparently near infinitely repeatable model for books and tv series of metropolitan Englishman heads to foreign country (or non-metropolitan part of Britain) buys old building which is potentially bucolic, spends a year getting it repaired while getting to know the locals, who are amusingly eccentric with delightful physical or sartorial quirks.
Perhaps in a nod to Mayle's background in advertising the book is shorter than typical, minus the illustrations maybe under 190 pages while I guess the typical book of this genre is more in the region of 240 pages. As adverts may do it leads to the curl of the lips without leading to full amusement (the above section on dogs I felt the funniest in the entire book). This is very efficient writing. Also true to the genre, change is all on the surface, the only adaptation to local habits is that he takes up the triple kiss as standard greeting. combien de Bises may be of assistance here but given the low number of votes for some departments I wonder if it is entirely accurate.
Mayle is curiously present and absent from the book - obviously he is the central figure but we learn nothing about him or his wife who really could have been a man or a particularly clingy kangaroo as far as I could tell from the text, they have some French (unusually for this genre in which humorous inability to communicate with locals may be a key plot point) but they struggle with the way French people speak it. At the same time Mayle is the measure of all humanity - the degree of deviation from Mayle is equal to the extent to which the person is amusingly original or eccentric. A thoughtful publisher could have provided a graphic to illustrate this so we can appreciate precisely how much the guy with bad teeth who eats foxes is funnier than the plumber who always wears a seasonally appropriate hat.
The narrative structure of a year is strong and simple, but as each month contains detailed recollections of the places they visited, meals eaten and how much they cost I wondered how accurate and honest this was.
The most curious feature to my mind was money, and the details of what things cost - million franc houses, 1,000 francs for a custom made stone table, the price of restaurant meals. Then one got about eight to nine francs for the UK pound so there is the undercurrent that one can live better than a Lord and eat better than the Queen for modest sums of cash money. At the same time he doesn't tell us how much his own house cost or the cost of installing central heating - this is all about living the dream (view spoiler) Perhaps more insidiously it suggests that the good life can be bought rather than cultivated - just the kind of sneaky message one has to expect from an advertising man. There's no sense of why he went to Provence or of developing a connection to it, beyond it as a place where amusing locals live, and beyond food and drink no appreciation of it either except as having better weather than Britain. So its as shallow as a dream too, but easy reading about full fat living.
Curiously the same is true about wine which exists for Mayle as white, pink, red and champagne. This despite owning some vines in an appellation controlee and a habit of buying wine direct from producers one of whom speaks lovingly of how micro differences in the vineyard produce differences in the wine. Still Mayle does not open up to us about Terroir - this is an advert, the product has to be simple and seductive, you can't be frightening the punter with complexity and the whole book is shaped by Kiss- as in keep it simple, son - rather than being a modern evocation of Epicureanism.
I did learn however that lemon juice freshly squeezed over ants encourages them to move their nest site - very useful if they take up residence in your electricity meter cupboard.
Leftbanker
It’s sad to think that there are probably dozens of great books about people who have moved to France that were rejected by publishers so they could take this book, which is completely devoid of insights, and shove it down our throats. The book has a wonderful premise in which a British guy and his wife move to the south of France and begin a new life. I think most people who read this book didn’t need much more than that. It is mostly the tedious description of the work he does on an old house and has little to do with France. I can’t recall a single entertaining passage in the entire book.
I give almost everything here five stars. I’m not a book critic but there are certain extremely popular books that just need to be eviscerated. Please explain to me why this book was popular? After I finished reading this I didn't think that I had learned a single thing about life in France.
I found zero sense of adventure in what he had to say about France. It’s travel writing for the rich which—at least for me—is usually boring. Instead of a book about an over-privileged douche bag paying people to fix up an old house I’d much rather read a memoir of someone who moved to France and actually had to work for a living. I rate this book down there with Under the Tuscan Sun.
David Zubl
I've read quite a few negative reviews of this book, many of them focusing on the author's presumption in being able to afford a home in Provence and the reviewers' consequent inability to "relate" to him. Others see it as "trite" and not at all what they were expecting.
Well, balderdash. I found this to be a very entertaining account of the first year in a new home and a new country, with all the explorations, discoveries, disappointments, triumphs and failures that go along with it.
Would it be a good basis for discussion in a book group? Probably not. Was it enlightening, or did it change the way I think about things? Can't say that it was, or did. But the author's dry wit, talent for understatement, and occasional eloquence painted an interesting picture of life in Provence, with characters that were by turn amusing, infuriating, puzzling, and human.
This book did a great job of carrying me away from Michigan into a place I've never been and experiences I'll likely never have. It was fun!
Dennis
J'adore the English sense of humor. With stiff upper lip and wry observation sprinkled with warm affection, Englishman Peter Mayle embraces a cadre of colorful characters inhabiting the warmer south of France in this memoir documenting his first year as a new permanent resident relocated from Britain to the Lubéron region of Provence.
A Year In Provence is suitably divided into twelve chapters, each devoted to one month, January through December, staging the progress of renovations on Peter and Madame’s newly purchased two hundred year old home. Over the course of the year it becomes clear that here time is measured in seasons, not days, and that the tempo in Provence would not change for newcomers. A project as simple as moving an antique concrete planter into the garden, for example, is not something that can be arranged overnight. “There would be visits of inspection, drinks, heated arguments. Dates would be fixed, and then forgotten. Shoulders would be shrugged and time would pass by.”
The author has a special penchant for observing human nature and describing it both with humor and heart. Lubéron country folk can be suspicious of visitors from throughout Europe who descend upon the Côte d’Azur in the summer months, including German campers, Belgian road hogs, Swiss hotel dwellers, and the British with their notoriously weak stomachs and plumbing complaints; but the Provençal people are warm, amiable, and all too eager to ensure their friends are well fed. The absolute joy of Provence is the food and free flowing local wine, which refreshes even the most curious of exchanges such as unexpected house calls made by traveling Oriental rug salesmen or visits paid by French bureaucrats at Christmastime to hint for annual tips.
These pages are peppered with French, “Voilà!” “Oh là là,” “Allez,” which enhances the feel for a foreigner’s life in France as well as doubling as a grammar in simple and useful phrases to those readers who are sure to add Provence to their must-see list. This account is often laugh-out-loud hilarious and is every bit as savory as the much sought after and highly prized black Périgord truffles grown only in this region.
Connie G
It was fun to experience living vicariously in a stone farmhouse in Provence by reading this delightful book. Stories about good food, great wine, living close to the land, and the spirit of the people of Provence fill the pages. "A Year in Provence" is very entertaining, and I was sorry to see the book end.
Cyndy Aleo
In the course of thinning out my book herd, I've been reading books that I haven't read in years, trying to determine whether I should keep them, or move them along. Going back to Peter Mayle's A Year in Provence was like going back to an old friend's house, but I've never been so hungry in my life as the two times I've read this book.
::: The Dream :::
Mayle and his wife live out a dream come true, dropping everything, selling their home, and moving full-time to Provence, a region of France generally known to span from the Alps to the Rhône River, with the Côte d'Azur in the southern section. Known for its food, its wine, and its perfumes, it is a popular vacation destination in Europe, with a generally Mediterranean climate. Mayle's book chronicles their first year in the 200-year-old farmhouse that they bought in a rural area of Provence, including their struggles with the language, renovation of the house, and settling in with their new neighbors.
::: The Year :::
A Year in Provence is broken into twelve chapters, one per month, beginning in January as they start out their new life in Provence and ending with their first Christmas. What makes the book so interesting (and for me, misplaced in the travel section) is that it focuses much more on the culture of Mayle's area of Provence rather than on the scenery. He includes tales of restaurants and meals eaten there, but even more memorable than the food are the chefs and servers that he meets, the additional knowledge and culture that they often impart. One woman sends Mayle to an olive oil mill, and we learn about the world of olive oil, which is almost as intricate as that of wine.
Even better are the characters Mayle introduces us to. We meet Faustin, who runs the vineyard on Mayle's property, the curmudgeonly neighbor Massot, and a host of skilled laborers who are in and out most of the year while working on the home renovations. Each individual the Mayles meet helps them on their journey from tourists who moved to Provence to something resembling natives. Each experience, from goat races to plumbing issues, is related in such detail that you almost believe you are there, and reading this book on an empty stomach will leave you pricing flights online.
::: The Final Say :::
A Year in Provence is one of those books that you can read a chapter every so often, or all at once. Like one of the excellent meals Mayle describes, it's a delicious read, and leaves you hungering not only for the food, but also for more on some of the characters. You feel as if they have become old friends, and I'm eagerly anticipating re-reading the follow-up, Toujours Provence.
This review previously published at Epinions: http://www.epinions.com/review/A_Year...
Hannah
4 Stars - Fantastic book, would absolutely recommend it.
There's really nothing I don't like about this book. It's short, easy to read, and such fun. Peter Mayle, the author, writes in a charming book that, in my opinion makes the people of Provence endearing. As an American, we often hear (or rather we're aware of the stereotype) how stuck-up, abrasive the French are. Albeit, I have met many-a French-person in my day and luckily I have never had this stereotype confirmed. Sure, they're mannerisms are different but isn't that to be expected? Anyway, I digress.
I enjoyed this book even more because it was relatable. I spent a significant amount of time living in a village, well more like a town, in the north of Moldova. Of course a former Soviet, Eastern European country is quite different than France but I was struck by how many similarities there are. For instance, the struggles the author and his wife faced during construction on their house , particularly the timeline is very familiar. In my Moldovan experiences, things don't run on a "city" schedule (e.g. when someone says work starts at 8:00 am, it would be a miracle if that actually happened). Also, the constant advice and interaction with neighbors is similar. It's fascinating. I guess provincial life is similar across the board in Europe, or at least in these two cases.
Julie Ehlers
In some ways it wasn't really this book's fault that I didn't like it. It came out in the U.S. in 1990 and was probably one of the first "I-lived-among-the-French-and-they-are-peculiar" memoirs. Since then, there have been countless other memoirs on this same topic, several of which I have read and enjoyed, so by the time I got to this, the flagship volume, the subject matter was a little old hat. Also problematic is that, while some of this book is composed of funny anecdotes, some of it is just Mayle explaining how the French do things (cheek kissing, for example), and those sections not only aren't particularly funny, they're sometimes rather dull. Maybe they were fascinating in 1990, I don't know. But frankly, once you've read David Sedaris on French villagers, Peter Mayle is just never going to stack up.
The book does contain the obligatory shout-outs to French paperwork and the way business is conducted there, as well as copious descriptions of food and wine, so it hits all the right marks, and I considered giving it an extra star (3 total) in recognition of the fact that I read it about 25 years too late. But I started to get annoyed at the way Mayle poked fun at French peasants, accusing them of being either penny-pinchers with ancient cars (hilarious, right?), or "greedy" for hoping to sell their houses for high prices. Meanwhile, he was spending a gargantuan sum on remodeling his large Provence house, not to mention all those cases of wine. His ridiculing the less well-off, even if all in good fun, rubbed me the wrong way, so the extra star came right back off. When my sister gave me this book years ago (after she had read it and loved it), she also gave me its sequel, Toujours Provence, but it's going to be a long time before I'll be willing go in for more of this sort of thing.
Dave
This is a fun book that is literally about the first year Mayle spent in his new home in Provence. The chapters are divided into months, so a reader gets to enjoy with Mayle the seasonal changes of this beautiful region of France. Mayle understands the importance of gastronomy to the French and his food descriptions are a well written part of his story.
Mayle mentions in passing, in an almost disparaging way, people of affluence buying up property in Southern France. This perspective was interesting because it says more about Mayle than it does about those other rich people. Mayle is, after all, a wealthy writer from England who is able to purchase a two century old stone house with a stone swimming pool on land that contains a vineyard, a cherry orchard, and other agricultural acreage all tended by a local farmer (the tradition being that the landowner purchases the seed/vines while the farmer does the work. The landowner gets 1/3 of the profit and the farmer gets 2/3--even though it may seem generous and not at all the tenant farming or sharecropping as we know it, it's still being a classic "Landlord"). It seems that Mayle considers himself more a part of the local population than a foreign "Lord of the Manor" type. It made me wonder what the locals really thought of Mayle and his wife.
The book is engagingly written and funny in parts; filled with memorable characters. Occasionally, these characters descended to the level of caricature however, so that sometimes the story read more like "Green Acres--The Continental Version."
Book Concierge
Review UPDATED on re-read, Feb 2019
This is a re-read and I enjoyed it just as much as the first time I read it back in 2001. What a delightful diversion! Mayle's account of his and his wife's first year owning a house in Provence is entertaining, relaxing and inspiring. I love the way he accepts his status as an outsider but tries to understand and join in with the local traditions. A few of these characters are definitely memorable, including his plumber Menicucci, neighbors Faustin and Henriette, and the colorful Massot, who lives alone in a ramshackle mountain cabin with his trio of vicious dogs and feels proprietary about the national forest.
As they stumble from one catastrophe to another during the remodeling of their home, they still manage to find humor in most situations (almost anything is helped with another bottle of wine) and enjoy life in the surrounding villages. I loved his descriptions of the many extraordinary meals, the shops, markets and scenery. I could practically hear the bay of hounds on the hunt, smell the enticing aromas of butter, garlic and truffles, and feel the sunshine on my face. The book inspires me to enjoy life - good food, good wine and the siesta.
I’ve read many more of his books since first reading this one, including a couple of his novels. There are a few that I haven’t read and I’ll definitely add them to my TBR, and I may have to revisit some of those I’ve previously read. I will miss Mayle’s writing, now that he has passed away.