Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #32827 in Books
• Published on: 1996-01-12
• Binding: Paperback
• 231 pages

Synopsis
Describes Norman Lewis's three post-war successive summers in the remote fishing village of Farol, on what is now the Costa Brava. The book records the villagers' struggle to sustain their precarious existence and to defend it against the enticements of tourist development.

Customer Reviews

Perfect holiday read
The UK edition is a miserable production. For much the same price get the US edition published by Carroll & Graf through Amazon 'used and new' list, or Abebooks. It has a larger format with proper margins on nice paper and opens properly, but type only slightly bigger and still rather squidgy.
How fictional is the book? Reviews talk about Farol and Sort as if they're real places, but I can't find them. Does anybody know?

A masterpiece
Travel writing has become a major sub-section of the publishing industry. These days, anyone from gloomy UK who has bought a ruin somewhere somewhere hot and inconvenient, surrounded by dodgy but colourful locals either swindling them rotten or turning out to be diamond geezers, might be able to pay for the fosse-septique or the pruning of the orange grove by knocking out a slim volume - and even a sequel or two. One thing that characterises many of these books is the inadequacy of the writing.

Not so with Norman Lewis. It is the wonderful writing that makes it inevitable that we are drawn completely into the world he describes. How can such simplicity of style produce such colour and tone? How can he be at once at arm's length and yet entirely immersed in the world he describes? It makes for sublime and delicate description. Lewis is present but barely so. This in itself is a major difference from today's solipsistic potboilers. The world he sees is what he writes about: he himself does not "do" anything. He does not rebuild a farm, buy a tractor, hire a plumber... Those that he finds there are the principle characters: he does not take the stage himself.

He writes about a Spain that was virtually mediaeval, even after WW2. Now a 14 hour run from Calais by car or 2 hours by no-frills airline, this community were then living "behind God's back". Tourism was as far as Franco was prepared to unbend: a few thousand foreigners for three or four weeks on an otherwise useless stretch of coast and the Guardi Civil to arrest anyone in a bikini ....

On all sides, the world was rushing forward into the material world of the second half of the 20thC. In Spain everything was stultified or going backwards. Lewis witnessed a world that placed burning wreathes around the necks of cattle to celebrate a saint's day, where superstition and the Catholic Church combined to create a potent medicine that made this community sick with despair and resignation and yet change was beyond them. The result we know now, that all this was swept away, is so very gently intimated by Lewis, not taking advantage of hindsight but letting the subtle shifts of alignment between the local don and some monied chancer trace the outlines of what would later be the ruin of these people's old lives.

There are memorable characters in this book. Norman Lewis is not one of them - which is how he wished it. The place and the people and the time of their lives; this is what he set out to show us and the picture is rich and clear and profound.

Exceptional account of a vanished way of life
This travel book explores the life of an impoverished fishing village in the far NE of the Spain during the late 1940s and early 1950s. It documents without sentimentality the gradual decline and destruction of traditional ways of life under pressure from the arrival of mass tourism and environmental decay. The way of life of the people and their beliefs is so extraordinary you'd think they lived on another planet. A wonderful book.