Mayle, P. (2008) A Year in Provence. Penguin Australia (Original: 1989, Hamish Hamilton)

 

Mayle, P. (2008) A Year in Provence. Penguin Australia (Original: 1989, Hamish Hamilton)

 

Summary

An English couple decide to ‘live the dream’ and abandon their urban lives to buy a 200-year old farmhouse in southern France. The book chronicles their first year in Provence, in which they discover that reality is quite different from the dream. A year of epic meals and country customs is disrupted by an intermittent and fraught relationship with local builders, who arrive to mend a frozen pipe and leave after a year, having rebuilt much of the house! A Year in Provence has been translated into several languages; a television series based on the book and starring John Thaw and Lindsey Duncan is now available on DVD.

 

 

My comments

The book has two foundational premises: rural live is essentially better than urban life; and the French are endlessly fascinating, because ‘they’ are so different to ‘us’ (i.e. the English/British). On those foundations, Mayle has assembled events that are connected only by the fact that they all happened to Peter Mayle and ‘his wife’ and that they all star the ‘exotic’ French. The result is a picture of ‘The French’ that is over-generalised and quite condescending.

 

The television series exaggerates the book’s problems. Its foundations are that the English are stupid because they go to foreign countries and complain that people there don’t speak English; and that the French are stupid because they do things differently … and don’t speak English!