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Running in Place: Scenes from the South of France
Running in Place is a stunning evocation of Provencal culture and history. An acclaimed novelist and essayist, Nicholas Delbanco provides a vivid portrait of a paradise still pure but not immune to progress. A perfect book for anyone who loves the work of Peter Mayle and Frances Mayes.
Paperback, 256 pages
Published
June 6th 2001
by Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
(first published 1989)
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I had a very hard time enjoying this book. It felt disjointed, and I could not relate to the writer. It is a literature professor's memoir on traveling to the same area in Provence over the course of 30 years, and has a very literature-based take on it. I got the feeling from the writer that he was of the sort who has many opportunities given to him, and that, combined with some minor name-dropping, kept me from connecting to his story. Some passages (particularly Lascaux), piqued my interes...more
Interesting recollections of the author's various stays in the South of France. It's a little hard to relate to someone who has those kinds of opportunities to travel. This is more of an travel book than a change in lifestyle story, "I bought a farm in Provence and ..."
A somewhat disjointed, but well-written, account of several trips to Provence separated by 30 years, and the people he traveled with and met there. Not a story, in the usual sense, and not about the part of France I am interested in.
A very literary memoir of extended visits by an American professor to the same spot in Provence, over the years. He starts as a student, then travels back and forth in time, writing about his visits with a girlfriend, wife, wife and baby, then the return with family including two teenage girls. Toward the end he asks, do people change and the place doesn't, or does the place change and people don't?
I particularly recall his discussion of visits to Lascaux, and other sites which do not get as much coverage in this genre of travel/biography...not only description of places but the writer's integration of a visit into his life journey....in the more contemplative mode of Frances Mayes, or Tim Parks.
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Nicholas Delbanco is the Robert Frost Distinguished University Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Michigan and Chair of the Hopwood Committee. He has published twenty-five books of fiction and non-fiction. His most recent novels are The Count of Concord and Spring and Fall; his most recent works of non-fiction are The Countess of Stanlein Restored and The Lost Suitca...more
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