false 691685 081120992X 9780811209922 4 1 http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1177282508m/691685.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/691685.The_Memoirs_of_Frederic_Mistral 628694 Frederic Mistral 4 1 5 0 false Mon Jun 01 00:00:00 -0700 2009 Mon Jun 15 14:21:11 -0700 2009 Mon Jun 15 14:28:13 -0700 2009 Memoirs are Romantic and winning in their humble insistence that the “back to the land” poetic he and his fellow Felibriges pioneered sprang from a doggedly non-literary way of life, in this case the earthy cadence and harvest cycles of Provence, that Land of the Lost that becomes through Mistral’s rosy lenses everything the 20th-century isn’t: rustic, contentedly patriarchal, pre-industrial, frankly religious, and integrated into a satisfying cosmic whole. Mistral has to be one of the least alienated writers modernity ever threw up, though his Provence looks so much like Tolkien’s Shire that you have to wonder if the modernity’s in the escapism; the glow comes in part from Mistral’s awareness of a world disappeared, like childhood. You choose your illusion and takes your chances; Mistral lived a long life—and helped keep a language from dying—inside his. ]]>