Under the Tuscan Sun by Frances Mayes
Chronicle Books, 1996
Category: Biography

The books I like best are all about people, places, cultures that are far removed from my own. This explains why most of what I read is speculative fiction–you cannot get farther away than imagined worlds–but it also means that I love historical fiction, hard science, and travel memoirs. Traveling through literature is satisfying in a different way than traveling for real; you miss out on actually being there, but you also get to see the world distilled through someone else’s eyes, free from the little annoyances of being in an alien place that can ruin your experience. Like Peter Mayle settling in Provence, Frances Mayes came to Tuscany and became caught up in the place, suggesting that each of us has a home of the heart where, if we are lucky, we’ll be able to live.

This book is not a true biography or even a travel book, but it is the kind of memoir that becomes biography just by being an accurate depiction of events. Fresh from a failed marriage “that was never supposed to fail” Mayes has just begun finding herself in a new life, with a new companion, when she buys this abandoned villa in Italy and sets about the awesome task of repairing it. As she tells of each new development, each moment in her new life, Mayes also reveals the person she is becoming, her development paralleling subtly the rebuilding of the house. She and Ed, who married in 1998 (and I mention this because she fascinatingly never refers to him by any relational term like “boyfriend” or “life partner”), put a lot of themselves into the work, mostly because of the cost, but in the end because it’s unimaginable not to. At one point Mayes compares the heavy lifting of clearing stones to the aerobic workouts she does back at “home” in California. Both build the body but only one is actually fun. I started imagining myself clearing out the small patch of garden at the side of my house or actually learning how to care for the rosebushes, which dangle forlorn dried-up pods, or buds, or something leftover from last summer at the tips of their branches. Another disadvantage to traveling through literature is the horrible dissociative shock when you step back into reality and it has thorns.

This is also not a book to read when you are on a diet, particularly a low-carb diet. Why do southern Europeans love their food so much? The only times I’ve ever wished my religion didn’t forbid wine is in reading about French and Italian cuisine, where the great variety of wines seems not to exist for the sake of intoxication but as an integral part of the meal; I get the sense that refusing the bottle the waiter brings to the table is sort of like wanting your food served without tomatoes, or something like that. On the other hand, it’s very clear that traditional Tuscan cuisine is the sort of thing I could enjoy cooking, because it is so simple. You people who love to cook and refer to certain recipes as “simple” often don’t remember that you’re comparing that recipe to something that takes ten hours and a dozen reductions. “Simple,” from my perspective, is the recipe for cold tomato soup: chopped basil and tomatoes stirred into chicken stock and refrigerated. Mayes’s travels throughout the countryside include frequent descriptions of the places she and Ed stop to eat and how basic and unvaried the menus are (“menu” in this case meaning “what the lady of the house decided to make that day”). I’m getting hungry just thinking about it.

Mayes is, at heart, a poet, and I think prose written by poets is always either unbearably purple or beautifully right. Mayes’s writing falls into the last category. It even infected me, not a poet of anything beyond limericks or fake haiku, and I can feel even now how my syntax in this review is altered because of it. I can heartily recommend this book to a wide variety of readers–lovers of Italy, lovers of good food, lovers of poetry, but most especially to those who find themselves at a point in life that is not so much a crossroads as a trackless wood.