I’m trying to catch up on posts I left in draft. This is pretty pathetic because I started this one in September 2004 and it is now March 2010. Needless to say, I remember almost nothing about the book, but I made a number of notes and copied some quotations. My stubborn nature won’t let me abandon it. OK: Greene rehabs a presbytery into a house in rural France. Not the South—although one might have thought at some point that every single publisher needed to release a book about expats in Provence—in Rogny, a town in the Puisaye region of Burgundy. I do not need to read the book again to know that it costs more and takes longer than he thought. During the course of the rehab\/book, he marries Mary, devoting an excessive 3 chapters to the wedding. They do get the best wedding present ever: a meteorite. We have the requisite colorful neighbors—Madame Savin, Coco, Pere Jo—and at least one pointed observation: “Nothing brightens French spirits more than explaining the right way to do something.”<\/p>\n
A few jarring details: some of the French is translated, but some is not; we get a bit of sex with enough specifics to feel out of kilter with the rest of the book (“Mary had her bare bottom against the cold, dusty plastic”); when Greene’s mother comes to visit, we get strong foreshadowing of her death, which luckily doesn’t occur; we hear the details of furniture buying, which isn’t particularly interesting.<\/p>\n
Finally, I copied off this quote:<\/p>\n
…they went about their hard-core and undoubtedly hard-earned vacationing, setting lines and tossing balls of meal into the opaque water to attract carp, a Hungarian favorite in soup, with paprika.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
I don’t remember who “they” are, but I do love the way that sentence falls into a heap at the end—especially the paprika.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I’m trying to catch up on posts I left in draft. This is pretty pathetic because I started this one in September 2004 and it is now March 2010. Needless to say, I remember almost nothing about the book, but I made a number of notes and copied some quotations. My stubborn nature won’t let […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":651,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15\/revisions\/651"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}