The author Peter Mayle, champion of all things Provence, here in a final volume of all new writing, offers ... recollections from his twenty-five years in the South of France, lessons learned, culinary delights enjoyed, and changes observed
Many a reader has reveled in Peter Mayle’s musings on the expat life in southern France since A Year in Provence arrived in 1989. It’s only fitting that he give us one more taste in My Twenty-Five Years in Provence: Reflections on Then and Now ... Mayle set a new course for travel writing with his self-deprecating account of an English couple’s adventures fixing up a home in a culture that does not mark time like Big Ben. Other installments followed as he and his wife, Jennie, learned French, made friends and became part of the Provençale community ... This flawless novel, written in 2013 and newly published in paperback, is an epic tragedy graced with tendrils of hope. Tragic, too, is the reality that its gifted author, Canadian Richard Wagamese, is no longer with us, having passed into the mystery in 2017.
It’s a short, breezy read on small-format pages, enhanced by eight pages of Jennie Mayle’s full-color photographs of things mentioned in the text, such as a sunflower field, a rare snowfall, a mobile wine bar at the farmers’ market. Though concise, it’s full of thoughtful reflections and trenchant observations of how things have changed—and remained the same—over Mayle’s time there ... The book’s variety seems a bit scattershot, but it all adds up to a better understanding of the people and culture of Provence. Mayle is astute at capturing the rhythm of life there, which he says visitors often don’t get ... In his first Provencal memoir, Mayle was the outsider trying to break in. Here, he has the perspective of a seasoned local, pointing out the laughable missteps of the tourists (and his own foreign guests) who flood the region each spring and summer ... It’s wonderful to get to go on one more journey with him and remember why we fell in love with him and his writing.
A milder tension between the romantic and the wryly observant informs Mayle’s posthumously published retrospective ... Mayle’s mellowest book, touched by the tenderness of a writer summing himself up ... But even in moments of majesty, Mayle’s puckish humor prevails.
