Provence: Its magnificent landscape has inspired artists and
writers for centuries. In this stunning evocation of Provencal
culture and history, the critically lauded novelist and essayist
Nicholas Delbanco captures both the immediacy of this changing
region and the time-honored traditions of its past. Born in England
during the Second World War, raised in America, Delbanco spent many
of the most important periods of his life in Provence. Ensconced in
a farmhouse deep in the Alpes-Maritimes, writing books, he
developed lasting friendships with his neighbors, including
expatriate novelist James Baldwin. His narrative deals with the
stages of age-from his first, carefree visits and an early love
affair to his transformation into the "solid citizen" who imitates
his parents while guiding his children through the streets. In 1987
Delbanco returned to Provence with his family, planning "a
sentimental journey to our early haunts. It is to be, I tell
myself, a chance to travel with our daughters before we drift
apart, a chance to share our past with them before it proves
irrecoverable." With the mind of a historian and the eye of an
artist, Delbanco gracefully weaves strands of Provencal life into
scenes from his own past and present. In the precise, mellifluous
language that prompted the Chicago Tribune Book World to call him
"as fine a pure prose stylist as any writer living," Delbanco
provides a personal record of one of the world's most fertile
regions. He writes of the landscape of Petrarch and Laura, Cezanne
and van Gogh, the Marquis de Sade and Albert Camus ("who made his
home in Lourmarin because of the size of the sky"); of Provence's
thirty-two winds; and of aristocrat and peasant, cave and vineyard,
restaurant and gallery, coal stoves and mimosa, cars and climbing
roses, stone walls and bittersweet-describing a paradise still
pure, but not immune to progress. This book will bear comparison to
Hemingway's account of France; it, too, is a moveable feast.
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