French Spirits : A House, a Village, and a Love Affair in Burgundy

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Summary: inexpensive trip to a french village.
Review: Jeff Greene is doing what the rest of us dream about doing. I found this book to be enchanting. His descriptions of the village physical are so stimulating. I have a sister living in a small village in France so I found so many similarities between his village and my sister's village. The characters are wonderful, full of life. The next time I visit my sister I will surely stop in Rogny and see for myself Jeff Greene's dream.

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Summary: French Spirits: A House, a Village, and a Love Affair in Bur
Review: The story of yet another French country house and its travails in the hands of its new, non-French owners, this time told in a relaxed, un-selfconscious, and observant fashion by poet Greene (American Spirituals, not reviewed). In the small Burgundian village of Rogny in France's Puisaye, still a raw and wild landscape, Greene and his wife purchase the remains of a presbytery and set about putting it back in shape. This is to be a weekend place-they live in Paris and have day jobs, Greene's taking him back to the US every autumn-so they can't get too precious about the details of getting the house up to speed, nor so enrapt as to become tedious. They display just enough exasperation to show that they're thoroughly familiar with the distinctively French sense of time. Greene gets to know his neighbors as humans rather than sideshow curiosities, charismatics and nuisances together: "farmers, woodsmen, artisans, widows, thieves, and drunks," the last category including the alcoholic Coco, "the tutelary spirit of the presbytery." Running through the story are the happenings-enough of them disagreeable to create a convincing sense of reality-that make up a life: big occasions, like Greene's and Mary's wedding or his mother's arrival to live with them; smaller ones, like their maneuverings with a neighboring marquis to acquire a prayer path of ancient hornbeams bordering their property, or the purchase of furniture of suspicious provenance. Greene is also attentive to the land, discerning its seasonal moods, mooching along its river, informing himself about its wildlife, even adopting and nursing a robin-like bird he names Charles, which promisingly returns to the wild. There's always something afoot in these pages, but the atmosphere bespeaks sweet torpor as Greene pursues an infusion of pleasure, a modest slice of history, an honest sense of place. Author tour

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Summary: review of the reviewers
Review: This book combines the best of both the travel AND memoir genre. The reviewers who found fault with this book have critiqued the book based on expectations that the book is exclusively a travel book or a "romance." The book should be evaluated on its own merits. What is described by one reviewer as "vanity" on the part of the author is a positive aspect to me; it's the very thing that elevates the book beyond the run-of-the-mill travel piece that rarely dares to delve beyond the superficial. It is also difficult to understand how a reader can expect a "romance" in the Gothic tradition; this is a book about a love affair that is real and mature and satisfying.

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Summary: A significant disappointment
Review: This book is tedious from cover to cover. The author isn't a bad writer, he simply has little to say--at least in this volume. Having had a love affair with Burgundy for over 20 years, I picked up this book with great anticipation. I found little inside that created for me any feeling of connection, either with the region or the writer's experience. The detail is crushing in its weight. The entire read reminded me of those awful typed holiday letters from people one hardly knows that contain a level of detail of daily life that makes you wonder why they haven't attached the garden hose to the exhaust pipe to put an end to their misery. The problem here is that the misery continues for 282 pages. I stayed with it only to see if somehow the ending would vindicate my decision to doggedly plow through the prose. It didn't. I know this review is harsh, but it is richly deserved. The author wasted his time and mine too.

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Summary: Sure to be a classic!
Review: This book so clearly transcends the current crop of travel and/or memoir books. It follows in the tradition of My Family and Other Animals (Gerald Durrell) and Life Among the Savages (Shirley Jackson), a book of delight that is ever mindful of the transitory nature of all our pleasures. Jeffrey Greene, an accomplished poet, writes with a poet's eye and ear, transforming the ordinary into an illuminated world. One hates to return to reality after this pastoral foray into the French countryside, at once both comical and lyrical. You'll remember these characters long after you close the book and you'll be packing for your next visit.