Notes from the Cevennes : Half a Lifetime in Provincial France

For the past 25 years, Adam Thorpe has made his home in an old house in the Cévennes, a wild range of mountains in southern France. It was here, in an ancient millhouse in the oxbow of a Cévenol river, that he wrote the novel that would become the Booker Prize-nominated Ulverton, now a Vintage Classic. In this charming journal, Thorpe explores his adopted landscape, drawing on the legends, history and above all the people of this remarkable part of France, while also capturing the contrasts of city life in nearby Nîmes.

At the heart of the book is Thorpe's fascination with how the past leaves impressions—marks—on our landscape and on us. What do we find in the grass, earth and stone beneath our feet and in the objects around us? How do they tie us to our forebears? He discovers a fossil imprinted in the single worked stone of his house's front doorstep, explores the attic once used as a silk factory, and contemplates the stamp of a chance paw in a fragment of Roman roof-tile. He ponders mutilated fleur-de-lys in his study door and unwittingly uses the tomb-rail of two sisters buried in the garden as a gazebo.

Then there are the personal fragments that make up a life and a family history: memories dredged up by "dusty toys, dried-up poster paints, a painted clay lump in the bottom of a box." Part celebration of both rustic and urban France, part memoir, Thorpe's humorous and precise prose shows a wonderful stylist at work, recalling classics such as Robert Louis Stevenson's Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes.