Cadogan Guide: Umbria Book

I hear a lot of crap about how this book is silly, fluffy, boring, slow, unstructured, unserious. I've had three people now (all men =p) tell me it's "chicklit." First of all, is that supposed to be an insult? Second: What? Perhaps this all has something to do with how popular the book was and continues to be. Regardless, don't let the naysayers dissuade you from giving it a try.

The writing is poetically beautiful, illuminating a place that is equally so. Plenty of "place writing" does a disservice to the locations it tries to praise, but Mayes isn't just in love with Tuscany, she's also an astonishingly good writer, and she's sensitive to the fact that she is an outsider and therefore writes as one who does not "know" the culture. She's constantly delighted with new discoveries, and she shares them in such a way that you can share them, too.

The real genius here, though, is in the scope. It's not all sweeping vistas and Renaissance churches in this telling; Mayes transforms the details of daily life, and she considers big questions, too. Food and drink, new friends and neighbors, the non-human inhabitants of her house and land, the joys and frustrations of foreign gardening, the colors and textures and tastes daily encountered are all given their moments. The next moment, Mayes ruminates on the vagaries of renovating a house in a foreign country(this is what the book is ostensibly about), the reasons a person leaves their own homeland to find a home elsewhere, and the ways a person is changed by what they find in that elsewhere.

Is it cliche to say that I was changed by the experience of reading this, and that I am again, every time I revisit the book? Too bad, then -- this book is on my top shelf. I wish I could write like Frances Mayes.