Product Description

Andalusia is a passion - and fifteen years after his last visit Laurie Lee returned. He found a country broken by Civil War, but the totems of indestructible Spain survive: the Christ in agony, the thrilling flamenco cry the pride in poverty, the gypsy intensity in vivid whitewashes slums, the cult of the bullfight, the exultation in death, the humour of hopelessness that paradoxes deep in the fiery bones of Spain.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #22123 in Books
• Published on: 2003-01-02
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 160 pages

Sunday Times
‘He writes like an angel, and conveys the pride and vitality of the humblest Spanish life with unfailing sharpness, zest and humour’

Guardian
‘He has a nightingale inside him, a capacity for sensuous, lyrical precision’

Independent
‘One of the great writers of the last century whose work conjured up a world of earthly warmth and beauty’

Customer Reviews

Vividly evocative
This little book describes the Andalucian journey Laurie Lee made with his wife Kati in winter of 1951-2. Published in 1955, it was his first book (not counting some earlier collections of verse), predating Cider with Rosie, his best-known work, by four years. He was to write about his Spanish travels again in his following book As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning (1969), although that deals with an earlier journey. Comparing the two, the present book could be viewed as a more straightforward travelogue, presenting vividly evocative pictures of a handful of towns, the landscape and the people who live there.

I took this along to reread on a trip to Andalucia last week, and was very pleased I'd remembered to do so: to be able to, for example, read about how (p34) "Seville remains, favoured and sensual, exuding from the banks of its golden river a miasma of perpetual excitement" whilst sitting on the bus headed for that fair city created a tangible sense of expectation that was more than met by the experience of seeing Seville for the first time.

The craft of writing
Not the best of Lee's work, but nonetheless an outstanding example, like all his work, of what the craft of writing, of poetic description in prose, is all about and a unique insight of Civil War Spain.

A weel knownbook but still a good read
This book has been on the library shelf for a long time but is still a good read