Customer Reviews
Perfect holiday read - By: S. Schwarz, 12 Apr 2007 
The UK edition is a miserable production. For much the same price get the US edition published by Carroll & Graf through Amazon 'used & new' list, or Abebooks. It has a larger format with proper margins on nice paper & opens properly, but type only slightly bigger & still rather squidgy.
How fictional is the book? Reviews talk about Farol & Sort as if they're real places, but I can't find them. Does anybody know?
A masterpiece - By: C. Nation, 20 Sep 2004 Travel writing has become a major sub-section of the publishing industry. These days, anyone from gloomy UK who has bought a ruin somewhere somewhere hot & inconvenient, surrounded by dodgy but colourful locals either swindling them rotten or turning out to be diamond geezers, might be able to pay for the fosse-septique or the pruning of the orange grove by knocking out a slim volume - & even a sequel or two. One thing that characterises many of these books is the inadequacy of the writing.
Not so with Norman Lewis. It is the wonderful writing that makes it inevitable that we are drawn completely into the world he describes. How can such simplicity of style produce such colour & tone? How can he be at once at arm's length & yet entirely immersedin the world he describes? It makes for sublime & delicate description. Lewis is present but barely so. Thisin itself is a major difference from today's solipsistic potboilers. The world he sees is what he writes about: he himself does not "do" anything. He does not rebuild a farm, buy a tractor, hire a plumber... Those that he finds there are the principle characters: he does not take the stage himself.
He writes about a Spain that was virtually mediaeval, even after WW2. Now a 14 hour run from Calais by car or 2 hours by no-frills airline, this community were then living "behind God's back". Tourism was as far as Franco was prepared to unbend: a few thousand foreigners for three or four weeks on an otherwise useless stretch of coast & the Guardi Civil to arrest anyonein a bikini ....
On all sides, the world was rushing forward into the material world of the second half of the 20thC. In Spain everything was stultified or going backwards. Lewis witnessed a world that placed burning wreathes around the necks of cattle to celebrate a saint's day, where superstition & the Catholic Church combined to create a potent medicine that made this community sick with despair & resignation & yet change was beyond them. The result we know now, that all this was swept away, is so very gently intimated by Lewis, not taking advantage of hindsight but letting the subtle shifts of alignment between the local don & some monied chancer trace the outlines of what would later be the ruin of these people's old lives.
There are memorable charactersin this book. Norman Lewis is not one of them - which is how he wished it. The place & the people & the time of their lives; this is what he set out to show us & the picture is rich & clear & profound.
Exceptional account of a vanished way of life - By: , 13 Dec 1998 This travel book explores the life of an impoverished fishing villagein the far NE of the Spain during the late 1940s & early 1950s. It documents without sentimentality the gradual decline & destruction of traditional ways of life under pressure from the arrival of mass tourism & environmental decay. The way of life of the people & their beliefs is so extraordinary you'd think they lived on another planet. A wonderful book.
