- Paperback: 231 pages
- Publisher: Picador; 3 edition (12 Jan 1996)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0330345613
- ISBN-13: 978-0330345613
- Product Dimensions: 13.1 x 1.7 x 19.5 cm
- Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
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Amazon Bestsellers Rank:
108,520 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #3 in Books > Travel & Holiday > Countries & Regions > Europe > Spain > Cities & Regions > Catalonia
- #35 in Books > History > Europe > Spain
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More About the Author
Product Description
Review
"Lewis really goes deep, like a sharp, polished knife."
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Product Description
'Limpidly and lovingly, Norman Lewis has caught the helpless, unwitting, often foolish but always hopeful village in its dying summers and saved the tragedy with sublime comedy' Observer
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
39 of 39 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
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 and 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 - and 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 and tone? How can he be at once at arm's length and yet entirely immersed in the world he describes? It makes for sublime and delicate description. Lewis is present but barely so. This in 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 and the Guardi Civil to arrest anyone in 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 and the Catholic Church combined to create a potent medicine that made this community sick with despair and resignation and 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 and some monied chancer trace the outlines of what would later be the ruin of these people's old lives.
There are memorable characters in this book. Norman Lewis is not one of them - which is how he wished it. The place and the people and the time of their lives; this is what he set out to show us and the picture is rich and clear and profound.
27 of 27 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This travel book explores the life of an impoverished fishing village in the far NE of the Spain during the late 1940s and early 1950s. It documents without sentimentality the gradual decline and destruction of traditional ways of life under pressure from the arrival of mass tourism and environmental decay. The way of life of the people and their beliefs is so extraordinary you'd think they lived on another planet. A wonderful book.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Yes, too short! How I wish there could have been perhaps as much again! The plots are clever, amusing, yet real life...the characters and rivalries are hugely entertaining, and you just know that this account is written from close, first hand surveillance.
How sad, in a way, to trace the last years of innocence, custom and folklore, to the first days of mass tourism on the costas, and see what was destroyed along the way...yet, how amazing to have this first-hand account of that astonishing transition.
I won't spoil your pleasure by revealing anything more, but if you have read the seminal South From Granada, by Gerald Brennan, and yearn for such tales again, in a slightly lighter vein, this book will delight...
How sad, in a way, to trace the last years of innocence, custom and folklore, to the first days of mass tourism on the costas, and see what was destroyed along the way...yet, how amazing to have this first-hand account of that astonishing transition.
I won't spoil your pleasure by revealing anything more, but if you have read the seminal South From Granada, by Gerald Brennan, and yearn for such tales again, in a slightly lighter vein, this book will delight...
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
Voices of the Old Sea
This is Spain as it was before the advent of multi storey hotels. When the peseta was the currency
and life there was a bit slower. Very well written.
and life there was a bit slower. Very well written.
Published 8 months ago by Rossi
A present
This book was bought as a present. It was received with a big smile and lots of thanks by someone who loves all things Spanish and is in the suitcase to provide reading during the... Read more
Published 8 months ago by Nudge
good
It was a book mentioned by Rick Stein in Spain. I then got it and enjoyed it and found it interesting as an eyeopener about a local area forced to change from fishing to tourism
Published 8 months ago by J. Wylie
Voices of the Old Sea
Not Spain as we know it. An excellent description of North Spain and it's people before tourism took it's toll! An excellent read.
Published 21 months ago by D Bird
Perfect holiday read
The UK edition is a miserable production. For much the same price get the US edition published by Carroll & Graf through Amazon 'used and new' list, or Abebooks. Read more
Published on 12 April 2007 by S. Schwarz
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