Product Description

The author who unforgettably captured the experience of starting a new life in Tuscany in bestselling travel memoirs expands her horizons to immerse herself—and her readers—in the sights, aromas, and treasures of twelve new special places.

A Year in the World is vintage Frances Mayes—a celebration of the allure of travel, of serendipitous pleasures found in unlikely locales, of memory woven into the present, and of a joyous sense of quest. An ideal travel companion, Frances Mayes brings to the page the curiosity of an intrepid explorer, remarkable insights into the wonder of the everyday, and a compelling narrative style that entertains as it informs.

With her beloved Tuscany as a home base, Mayes travels to Spain, Portugal, France, the British Isles, and to the Mediterranean world of Turkey, Greece, the South of Italy, and North Africa. In Andalucía, she relishes the intersection of cultures. She cooks in Portugal, gathers ideas in the gardens of England and Scotland, takes a literary pilgrimage to Burgundy, discovers an ideal place to live in Mantova, and explores the essential Moroccan city of Fez. She rents houses among ordinary residents, shops at neighborhood markets, wanders the back streets, and everywhere contemplates the concept of home. While in Greece, she follows the classic Homeric voyage across the Aegean, lives in a bougainvillea-draped stone house in Crete, and then drives deep into the Mani. In Turkey with friends, she sails the ancient coast, hiking to archaeological sites and snorkeling over sunken Byzantine towns. Weaving together personal perceptions and informed commentary on art, architecture, history, landscape, and social and culinary traditions of each area, Mayes brings the immediacy of life in her temporary homes to the reader. An illuminating and passionate book that will be savored by all who loved Under the Tuscan Sun, A Year in the World is travel writing at its peak.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #79033 in Books
• Published on: 2007-03-13
• Released on: 2007-03-13
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 448 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780767910064
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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From Publishers Weekly
Even people who don't normally read travel books are aware of the old Italian villa that Mayes and her husband restored, chronicled in Mayes's bestseller Under the Tuscan Sun and three other books about Tuscany. So it's somewhat surprising when Mayes declares her wanderlust, her passion for other beautiful places in the world. She adores Tuscany, but also loves tasting other people's cuisines, learning their gardening habits, reading their poetry, swimming their waters. She's always looking around and wondering, "How do place and character intertwine? Could I feel at home here? What is home to those around me? Who are they in their homes, those mysterious others?" In this luminous volume, she and her husband visit southern Spain, Portugal, Sicily, southern Italy, Morocco, Greece, Crete, Scotland, Turkey and places in between. Usually they rent an apartment or villa, so they can cook, sprawl and feel like "locals." They survive a couple of package trips (a cruise around the Greek islands, a small charter around Turkey) which only highlight the pleasures of independent travel—having the freedom to wander and discover things for themselves, without a schedule. And happily, there's no mention of prices to mar readers' escapist fantasies. (Mar. 14)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post
In this age of adventure travel, the lure of the increasingly exotic holds sway. It's no longer enough for vacationers to take a barge down a French river or browse in an Italian market -- no, one must rappel in Africa, kayak in Nepal. The activities must be rugged, and the locales far from the Western traveler's starting place. Given this, many travel-hounds will eye the mostly European destinations listed in Frances Mayes's table of contents dismissively.

Mayes, author of the best-selling Under the Tuscan Sun plus three more follow-up odes to her adopted home, lives a blessedly split life -- going back and forth between northern California and Cortona, Italy, which provides her Tuscan sunshine. It is from these bases that she and her husband, Ed, venture forth to the places some will find too familiar -- Scotland, the Greek islands, Naples. But paradoxically, it is just this sticking to well-trod ground that is one of the book's strengths. For although much, much, too much has been written of the wonders of Burgundy, the beauties of Capri and the gardens of England, when Mayes is at her best, she proves the point that a good writer, a good traveler, can always come up with new insights.

Yet they are not the insights one would expect from a book with the title A Year in the World, which implies that Mayes actually spent a year out in the world -- traveling, traipsing, exploring. In reality what she did was string together reports on many trips, taken over a five-year period, to form this collection. Perhaps it doesn't really matter whether the trips were taken all at once or sandwiched in and around the minutiae of everyday life. But a year spent unmoored -- from home and errands and work and the ties that bind -- would have yielded a very different sort of book from this. These trips -- house rentals, hotel stays, even a cruise -- represent a series of vacations, instead of the year-long quest that the title promises.

Mayes was a poet and professor before she became a one-woman Tuscan industry. She's well versed in literature and art history, and obviously relishes reading up on the history of any new part of the world she encounters. When her method works well, as in her section on Mantova, Italy, it's enriching; her talk of the painter Mantegna and of Shakespeare (in English, Mantova is Mantua, where Romeo awaits news of Juliet) and of the powerful ruling Gonzaga family adds depth and texture to her narrative. (You find yourself making a mental note to plan a visit to the city and to re-read "Romeo and Juliet" on the way there.) But when it fails, it's just clunky verbiage -- fact after enumerated fact, layered one upon another in endless succession (towers in Istanbul, wildflowers in Greece: the eyes glaze, the attention wanders).

In Mayes's world, the blues are always "intense," the waters always "limpid." But just when you think you can't stand another minute, she saves herself. A chapter on a cruise through the Greek islands starts out unpromisingly with Mayes explaining that this is no romantic sea voyage, but rather an ordinary, all-buffets-all-the-time cruise on which she has been invited as a speaker. Then the section takes off, as she reveals a seldom-seen aspect of her writing: an acerbic wit. Quickly, she sees what she's in for with this style of group travel, so far from her usual Tuscan Sun mode: "This first day off the ship, I see how the trip will be. We may choose one dish from a whole menu, one sip from a great bottle of wine. One monastery, not ten. The sublime Byzantine icon museum, but not the Archaeology Museum. We'll have a glimpse, a taste, a few impressions to memorize, and then we go back on board, flashing our ID cards, and sail on."

Among Mayes's most thought-provoking passages are the ones in which she faces the least Western cultures of her travels: a visit to the city of Fez in Morocco and another cruise (of a very different sort) in a traditional wooden gulet along Turkey's Lycian coast. Her penchant for historical detail and her keen observer's eye stand her in particularly good stead in these less familiar surroundings. She also does well when she draws back the curtain on her emotional life, notably during the chapter on Scotland, in which she ruminates on friendships over the passage of time. The friends with whom she is sharing her house-rental are of long standing, but seen infrequently now. Her life has changed a great deal, perhaps the most of anyone in the group -- she knows that, she makes the effort to bring the old friends together. Her thoughts here are interesting, real, honestly felt -- unlike those in a section on Taormina, Sicily, when she ponders the connection between land and local character. This latter passage ends up feeling overly intellectualized, a falsely inserted gloss.

And unfortunately, the book ends on another false note, in which Mayes, obviously feeling the need to tie things up in a neat bundle, tacks on a sort of afterword, "The Riddle of Home," in which she speculates that she will someday open a restaurant-auberge-trattoria, to be called the Yellow Café, on her home turf. Not the home turf of Cortona, not the home turf of California, but her original hometown in the good old American South, in Georgia. Where, you see, they are in need of a civilizing influence, an appreciation of intense blues and limpid waters.

Reviewed by Anne Glusker
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

From Booklist
What Mayes accomplished in her popularization of Tuscany she now extends to a larger stage. Despite the title's claim, she does not reach everywhere on this orb, but she and her husband do manage a slow, deliberate itinerary taking them across much of Western Europe with a brief touchdown in Africa. Commencing with an excursion to Madrid in January, Mayes tours Spain down through Andalusia and the Costa del Sol. Portugal follows. By May, she returns to Italy, not to her beloved Tuscany, but first to Naples and then to Sicily. The couple spends time in Burgundy and Scotland before hopping back to Aegean lands. Wherever she goes, Mayes reflects at length on the cultural, historical, and literary highlights of the lands and peoples she visits. Mayes' touchstone in every locale is the region's cuisine. Her brief inventory of Portuguese soups alone could inspire a reexamination of that nation's cookery. Naples' pizza and cheese, Sicily's seafood, Crete's lamb, and Scotland's shortbread receive Mayes' encomiums. From time to time, Mayes even offers some recipes. Befitting her gifts as a poet, Mayes' prose shines with evocative imagery, bringing life to every subject she encounters across her peripatetic year. Mark Knoblauch
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Customer Reviews

I was bored!
Frances Mayes is a great a writer. I've read "Under the Tuscan Sun" and "Bella Tuscany" three times each and just love them. I had anticipated this new book for months before its release and was so excited to hold it in my hands. I wanted to savor every page. Very quickly, though, I was simply bored and kept falling asleep. Each chapter is divided by destination. To say Frances writes about food is an understatement. Pages and pages are filled with nothing but food and drink. It's tedious after a while. I thought perhaps it was because she was writing about Spain's food and Portugal's food (even hiring someone to teach her to cook the local food). I thought maybe I was only interested in her writing about Italy & that's why I was losing interest. I finally managed to get to the chapter in Sicily. Oh boy. The chapter had Frances writing about two Sicilian authors and reiterating their books for pages and pages, quoting lengthy paragraphs, comparing the two authors. I felt like I was back in college reading a boring essay. So I finally skipped to the chapter on Capri....a vacation dream of mine. Frances complained about other tourists there (as she did in Bella Tuscany). I just don't know if I'll go back and read the chapters on Greece and Ireland.

Reluctantly dragged along with Frances Mayes
This book really irritated me. I loved Mayes's previous books and was really looking forward to reading this one. The concept, a year of traveling to different locations, seemed like it would be really interesting combined with Mayes' fresh perspectives, enthusiasm for discovery, feisty opinions and poetic descriptions. But somehow it didn't work.

I get the sense that her heart wasn't really in this book. Maybe because the trips were taken over a span of five years, and cobbled together? Or because there's so much `padding' - endless quotes from her own or other people's writing. When she liked the place, her descriptions feel artificially enthusiastic, almost as if the book was paid for by the chamber of commerce. I got tired of reading that she could live there, or could imagine taking her grandson there, or wishes she was born there, or that it's SO much better than San Francisco. Where she doesn't live anymore, and hasn't for years. There are also too many stories about refreshing local characters who think Frances Mayes is the nicest, most tasteful, most interesting person they've ever met. Especially since these people tend to be waiters, cab drivers, rug salesmen or others whose business depends on charming the tourists.

Most of the book consists of sneering at her fellow Americans, or talking about people's personal appearance. This is boring and clichéd - and if you like that kind of thing, Bill Bryson does it better. There's also way too much name dropping (she's always mentioning "my friend so-and-so, the famous ____"). What happened to the ordinary, financially stretched, middle-aged college professor? She seems to be taking on the persona of a celebrity. She doesn't want to be crowded in with a group, doesn't want to associate with ordinary tourist types - now she deserves the VIP treatment. This is definitely a change from her previous books.

I think when it comes right down to it, there's too much Frances Mayes in this book. I thought I liked her, but what I really like is her writing style. It can still be magical - when she gets her ego out of the way. But when she puts herself front and center, she becomes more tedious and pretentious than interesting. Now I'm sorry I read this book, because I'm afraid it will spoil my enjoyment of the earlier ones.

Evocative but Disjointed
Frances Mayes, author of Under the Tuscan Sun, did not set out to write a typical travel book with A Year in the World. She wanted to forgo the usual hotel stays and the trekking from one tourist hotspot to the next, and instead aimed to discover, "could I feel at home here? What is home to those around me?"

Renting (mostly luxurious) homes in such places as Fez, Turkey, Italy, Greece, Portugal and Britain, Mayes and her husband set about attempting to truly feel at home in these various locations. While this premise sounds interesting enough, Mayes struggles to convey her experiences to her audience. Her writing seems at times not to wander far from notebook sketches, yet at other moments is full of self-important prose and metaphors so tired I want to pick them up and carry them. And all throughout, she peppers long - and quite unnecessary - quotes from the various books she is reading along with recipes, and descriptions of gardens that go into far too much detail. The result seems disjointed and too clever, and renders the book very difficult to read.

A Year in the World does have some fine moments, such as Mayes' evocative descriptions of local food that reveal her delight at discovering new taste sensations. But mostly I found myself wanting more - such as when she prefers to conjure up imaginative images of historical scenes rather than inform the reader of the often fascinating true history - or I found myself wanting less, as many inclusions in the book seem superfluous. The impression I ended with was not of what it meant to be `at home' in the countries Mayes and her husband visited, but of what is was to have a series of obviously expensive holidays that centered around food, gardens, and literature.