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| Spanish Lessons |
| Derek Lambert |
| Ebury Press, 2001 |
Review by Christopher North  |
| Easy to read and diverting because relevant to what Marisa and I have been doing in our quest to establish ourselves in Spain – but really this is a very poor book. The irritations are endless but start with the cover which shows a distant shot of Jaen in Andalucia – whereas the story is set in a village near Denia, well north of Alicante. I think this sort of detail is important in a book found on the travel shelves. The narrator is very self-opinionated rather like the low/middlebrow saloon bar columnists in the Costa Blanca News but I think what irritated me most was realising that somehow he knew he was writing down to a pop readership. It’s a natural companion to the endless ‘Year in Provence’ nausea. I am sure that there are about fifty manuscripts in circulation trying to repeat that success. If this is the best going, it’s boggling to think how bad the others are. It’s main-lining in the ‘Aren’t foreigners funny’ genre and it is obvious that the writer really doesn’t like the villagers much.. But the real cringe maker was the episode described where the author felt himself qualified in negotiating an end to a village feud that had, according to him, lasted since the civil war. He describes bringing together two old men who’d fought on opposite sides in the hostilities and who haven’t spoken since. I wonder he didn’t get himself beaten up or worse. All that said one or two bits of pure information were interesting (local bull runs, the weather etc.) and here and there he gets it right. But surely the readership for this type of book should have evolved a bit by now. |
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