This summer I’ve been enjoying the general enthusiasm for the Paris Olympics despite having next to no interest in sport. I haven’t watched much of the action but I thought I’d set myself a small reading challenge and dig out some French set titles to enjoy whilst the games are on.
First up was Monty Don’s ‘The Road to Le Tholonet’, part memoir, part travel writing. His journey round France covers most of the country and, as you’d expect, visits an array of gardens of different styles and with varied histories. He visits vineyards, allotments, restaurants and even a nunnery. It’s not just a book about gardens though. Food, châteaux, history, landscape, language and dialect all get a look in, covering everything from silk worms to religious persecution. Don is also good on art and artists, including Van Gogh, Cézanne and Monet. He’s particularly insightful on the quality of the light, possibly because has SAD which means he responds well to the brightness of the South of France in summer. The book ends poignantly in carefully tended war cemeteries, as much part of the earth as formal gardens or allotments, and the part played in the conflict by family members.
‘A Time to Keep Silence’ by Patrick Leigh Fermor was written in 1957. Patrick Leigh Fermor writes beautifully and the book reflects thoughtfully on his time in three French monasteries. For each monastery we get a brief history and therefore a flavour of French religious history. There’s a real sense of his personal experience and the initial difficulties of slowing down, of adjusting to a different way of being. He talks about the impact of the life on the monks and there’s a clear respect for the life of prayer, the rhythm of the days, the beauty of the architecture and the liturgy. It’s also a book about solitude and coming to understand the local landscape as he takes walks outside the monastery walls. I found the short final section where he visited the Rock Monasteries of Cappadocia in Turkey less engaging but it was an interesting contrast. It works less well as the site is long abandoned and there’s not the same sense of connection to an ongoing way of life. It’s a slim volume but one that packs a punch.
For fiction I started with Blackberry Wine which is set in the same village as Joanne Harris’ ‘Chocolat’ series. Of all of her books, I picked this one because the first blackberries are appearing in the hedgerows near me and it’s partly a summer holiday tale. In one of the timelines we meet teenage Jay staying with his Grandparents in West Yorkshire in the 1970s. The friendship he strikes up with retired miner Joe is the core of the story. In 1999, Jay is a writer and escapes the London media world of his girlfriend and the expectation on him to write a second literary masterpiece, by impulse buying a house in France. The contrasts between an allotment in West Yorkshire and rural gardens and vineyards in France are part of the backdrop. I read this after the Monty Don book and on this reread I really appreciated the element of the story that is about soil and growing things, the connection to the earth. It’s not so much that Jay hankers for a simpler life but that he finds a way of living that is more meaningful.
‘The Glass-Blowers’ by Daphne Du Maurier is a reworking of her own family history. I was inspired to revisit this one thanks to a fascinating post by Peter Harkness which looks at an element of the French Revolution that took place outside of Paris in the Vendée region.
The book is essentially a family drama, one we are drawn into thanks to Du Maurier’s pacey narrative, which tells the story of several generations of glass makers. The setting is mostly rural France, with occasional visits to Paris and London. The story is told through the eyes of Sophie Duval, as she recounts the family history to her newly discovered nephew. We see the contrasting temperaments and fortunes of three brothers and two sisters as well as the wider impact of the conflict on the lives of factory workers and local communities. The book feels strongest when exploring the choices available to women – they can be wives and mothers, they die in childbirth, their children die young, their husbands and brothers join the fighting, they take on limited and tradition bound roles in factory life. Sophie’s younger sister Edmé manages to break free of some of this and her story is one of the most interesting in the book, even if it is very much a minor subplot. There’s a slightly melancholy feel, perhaps because it is a book about looking back, but it’s a good read and something a bit different from other Daphne Du Maurier books.
Books I didn’t get to
These are the books where my hand hovered over the spine but they didn’t quite make the cut. Still there’s always the Paralympics…
A Place of Greater Safety (Hilary Mantel) – an absolute brick of an historical novel about the French Revolution but fabulously rich and evocative.
Madame Bovary (Flaubert) – looking at the French literature shelf (well, part shelf) this is the one I nearly went for.
A Buzz in the Meadow (Dave Goulson) – an account of buying a derelict farm with 33 acres of meadow in rural France and managing the land for bees and other insects.
Travels With a Donkey in the Cévennes (R.L. Stevenson) – classic travel writing.
Verlaque and Bonnet novels (M.L. Longworth) – crime fiction set in Aix-en-Provence – I have a couple of titles to choose from. (Three TV films were made a couple of years ago under the title Murder in Provence, starring the marvellous Roger Allam as Verlaque)
Thanks for this reading list, Shelly. What a super challenge to give yourself. I think I must be the only person in the UK who hasn’t watched any of the Olympics, not even a news bulletin. So I feel I should have done something equally as awesome as you. But I’m wrapped up in prepping my book proposal and various other bids to further my writing career and there’s only so much time in the day. I’ll certainly pick up one or two of your recommendations - Monty’s is most appealing. Thanks for sharing. 😀📖🇫🇷
Some great books here, but I did re-read Madame Bovary recently to see if it improved, and sacrilegious though this is to some, I still found it really irritating and Emma very annoying....I know she's not meant to be a heroine...but she drives me potty. I don't really believe in her.