A Year In Provence by Peter Mayle

Peter Mayle's wry sense of humor charmed me. Here’s a paraphrased example:  I’d never met a more mendacious, vicious brute. I liked him more every day.

Despite his oft-delightful wit, I didn’t end up loving A Year in Provence as much as I thought I would at first. Mayle went on about the most mundane things, though granted, I’ve never really been much for travel reading. I didn’t connect with his level of sophistication, I suppose, as he talked about continually going to restaurants and dancing at cocktail parties and all such.  I would glaze over and have to go back to re-read sections to make any sense of it.  Here’s how un-memorable the content was: I finished the book and went back to it, forgetting I’d finished it.  Not much of a story.

I did come away from it with a little better sense of Provence, though.  Some things I do recall: 

·    The Mistral is a severe, cutting wind that blows through the region in the winter, especially. The climate is quite cold much of the year.

·      The French spoken by the locals has a hard ‘g’ added to so many words, especially those ending with ‘ien’ or ‘in’.  So, ‘bieng, vieng’ and the like.

·     Some of the restaurants don’t have menus.  They just serve your meal, and you eat whatever it is!  I personally wouldn’t care for this, since I have dietary restrictions, but if I didn’t, I might actually enjoy that… 

·         Lots of mushrooms can be found in the woods.

·         Documents are required all the time, for everything.

·     The area is rich in vineyards and has many wine producers. I knew this about France generally, but not particularly about Provence.

Mayle drew memorable characters—the brutish neighbor; Menicucci, a very competent and cultured furnace guy whom he called about all his home issues; another neighbor who farmed the vineyards, but whose wife did the vast bulk of all the hard work, including chimney-sweeping, mechanical repairs, planting grapevines, etc.

*Spoiler Alert!*

The poor author-couple started remodeling their new house in January, and much of it still wasn’t complete in December!  Honestly, it makes you wonder if it really was THAT bad to be worth it. What a nightmare for them.  The couple had been pestering the workers for months, and they were given endless reassurances, the latest being, “Don’t worry, we’ll be finished way before Christmas!”  Anyhow, the author’s wife solved the issue by arranging a party to celebrate the ‘finished house’, inviting the workers AND their wives.  Since the workers didn’t want their wives to see their work incomplete, they showed up right away after getting the invitations and actually finished the job.  Brilliant stroke on her part, hmm? Too useful a tip not to mention here.

 The grand ending was really just the end of the year, on Christmas day. Aside from having the renovations completed (nearly), their electricity went out. The restaurant was already booked, but Peter explained their problem, and the restaurant set up a tiny extra table next to the kitchen for them. Mayle remarks on all sorts of extreme conditions that wouldn’t garner the sympathies of the natives of Provence, but he claims that any gastronomic suffering will in full.

A Year In Provence was amusing and occasionally engaging. I guess it should be easy in general to forget you’ve finished a travel book, so I won’t hold it against him—and few have, it seems. Apparently, the book was something of a sensation when it came out and was made into a TV miniseries.  I wouldn’t mind watching that…