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Instructions for Visitors: Life and Love in a French Town
When living abroad, there are two rules to be 1 -- If you are lucky enough to find a place you belong, you should never actually live there. And 2 -- Never live with a man you think you could never live without. But then, what fun would that be? In this funny, forthright, and charming memoir, Helen Stevenson chronicles her experiences as a young British expatriate living in the countryside of France. With emotional depth and lyrical sensitivity, Stevenson introduces readers to the myriad residents of the quaint hamlet known only as "le village." There's Stefan, the Maoist tennis buff, who has his own unique way of showing empathy for the masses; Gigi, the chic Parisian who uses her boutique to dress her ex-lovers' girlfriends; and Luc, the cowboy painter and part-time dentist, who, overcoming his aversion to blondes, becomes enamored of the Englishwoman who has been warmly embraced by the rural community.But her troubled love affair with this local lothario comes to represent the poignant she is still, somehow, an outsider. Luc reminds "Le village, c'est moi," and she can never say the same. Evoking the languid, sensual essence of Mediterranean France, Instructions for Visitors is a very personal revelation of the wonders and the difficulties of relocating one's home -- and one's heart.
256 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2001
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Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews
August 24, 2017
interesting narrative of life in a small french town in the late 1980-90's. The protagonist arrives in town, falls in love with the local dentist who's also a renown but very surly artist, buys a house to be near him, then finally sells the house when she leaves him. "I'm going to sell it,' I said. [As they said good bye to each other]. I couldn't keep it and not be with him. I'd bought it so I'd never have to leave the village, but I'd left anyway, so as not to be with him.'
The sentence pretty much sums up their whole affair, a complex entwinement of 'push me-pull you', with him constantly saying 'leave'/'stay'/'go away, I never want to see you again'/ 'come back'.
I'm surprised she stays as long as she did but she wrote a very vibrant account of individual town's people and village life before she left...
She has a way of describing relationships between people and between things that is really UNusual and at times very weird but interesting... Such as the dynamic between a patient and her dentist, Luc.
pp.26 'The woman next door sits outside because there is nowhere to sit inside her house, not because she is curious or waiting for anyone. She will smile at you as you pass her door and bare the gaps where her teeth should be. She went to Luc last year saying she'd lost her dentures: he made her a new set. She went back a week later and said she had lost them, too. They decided between them that the reason she kept losing them was because she didn't really want any teeth. There were no words she particularly wanted to say that couldn't be said without them.''
Very odd, but also very unusual and therefore catches my interest.
This was a book that I picked up/put down/then picked up again a year later and still carried on easily with her narration. Just that kind of book... entwining threads run through each chapter but it's not a 'story', such as a novel would tell, so you can do just as I did and still enjoy it.
The sentence pretty much sums up their whole affair, a complex entwinement of 'push me-pull you', with him constantly saying 'leave'/'stay'/'go away, I never want to see you again'/ 'come back'.
I'm surprised she stays as long as she did but she wrote a very vibrant account of individual town's people and village life before she left...
She has a way of describing relationships between people and between things that is really UNusual and at times very weird but interesting... Such as the dynamic between a patient and her dentist, Luc.
pp.26 'The woman next door sits outside because there is nowhere to sit inside her house, not because she is curious or waiting for anyone. She will smile at you as you pass her door and bare the gaps where her teeth should be. She went to Luc last year saying she'd lost her dentures: he made her a new set. She went back a week later and said she had lost them, too. They decided between them that the reason she kept losing them was because she didn't really want any teeth. There were no words she particularly wanted to say that couldn't be said without them.''
Very odd, but also very unusual and therefore catches my interest.
This was a book that I picked up/put down/then picked up again a year later and still carried on easily with her narration. Just that kind of book... entwining threads run through each chapter but it's not a 'story', such as a novel would tell, so you can do just as I did and still enjoy it.
February 11, 2011
In her memoir Helen Stevenson writes about her time living in a small town in France. Ever read a book you were totally torn about? Were you just couldn't say whether you liked it or not? This is such a book for me. The story, as fleeting as a summer breeze, didn't draw me in at all. Neither her description of the town and its people, nor her life in the village or her affair with Luc. Add that the story is divided into chapters that follow their own timeline and are thus quite confusing.
On the other side though, after getting used to her inability to divide her thoughts into paragraphs which I found a bit annoying, I found myself confronted with such beautiful wordings with which she put scenes on paper that I often just lingered with a particular phrase for a while, not really caring for the rest of the story. So, this has been a weird reading experience for me.
In short: A story that gave me nothing, but lots of gems of the written word.
On the other side though, after getting used to her inability to divide her thoughts into paragraphs which I found a bit annoying, I found myself confronted with such beautiful wordings with which she put scenes on paper that I often just lingered with a particular phrase for a while, not really caring for the rest of the story. So, this has been a weird reading experience for me.
In short: A story that gave me nothing, but lots of gems of the written word.
July 7, 2016
Is there always an edge of jealousy when reading a travel memoir? By default the author is somewhere we want to be. Helen Stevenson’s Instructions for Visitors is the story of her time spent living in a small French town in the Pyrenees close to the Spanish border. The book’s title and the section titles – ‘Instructions, First Impressions, Useful Background, Local Life, Visitors, Leaving’ - groom us to expect a useful manual for travellers, but very early on the travelogue is hijacked by another type of book altogether: a memoir of a love affair. Stevenson tells the story of her on-off relationship with Luc. He is, all at once, the local dentist, the village Lothario, a philosopher-farmer and a successful painter.
I began reading Stevenson’s book feeling rather hostile towards her and her lover. Perhaps it was because she was on ‘my patch’ or very close to a village I have lived in. By the middle of the book, however, I found myself warming to Luc, despite his penchant for admiring himself in mirrors, and to the author-heroine, despite her lamentable tendency to conform to the whims of men and to see herself in terms of their desire. As well as catching Luc’s eye and raising the jealousy of his discarded lovers, the town’s anarchist also fancies her.
The houses, local politics, love affairs and marriages of the town jostle vividly for our attention. She makes us feel that we are visitors ourselves with this array of idiosyncratic people: ‘her eyes are warm, the colour of oxtail soup ... Her speech is one long, hyphenated sentence of greeting, consolation, price-naming and scolding, from eight till eight. She seems to run on sherbet.’ This is a beautifully written story, as we might expect since Stevenson has published three novels. Her writing is laden with metaphors and similes: a boat sail is like ‘the skirt of a ball gown caught in a moment of grace’ and her rival, the dress shop owner, ‘crawls around the window space like a reptile in an illuminated tank’. When Luc smiles at her: ‘I felt like a plant set back in softly forked earth, packed gently into place’.
There is a melancholy sense throughout the book that Stevenson is already absent from this place. The lovers both seem curiously non-committal and fatalistic about their relationship. Stevenson probes the experience of the visitor who will not stay or ever be fully accepted, and of the inhabitant who will never go anywhere else or change. Her ‘instructions’ operate for two levels of visitors: for her tourist lodgers and for herself. At one point Luc suggests that she has been temporarily left behind by a UFO and will soon disappear again. There is a cryptic moment at the end of the story when he tells her she is famous and there has been a lot of interest in the village. The reader has to presume that this is because she has published a section of the book we are reading. Stevenson suggests that as a writer she is a disconnected and perhaps parasitic observer. Luc tells her to ‘get back to your own world... I’m not a tourist attraction.’ Leaving, she describes her last view of the town sitting ‘like a newborn child, wrapped in the folds of these protecting slopes, a pleat in the landscape ... it is never not here... the landscape shifts a season, passing from mimosa into summer yellows and then orange and red’.
This book in the Life Writing genre is a compelling blend of fiction and autobiography. I found myself wondering whether her lover was an actual person, or whether he and her love affair with him, are really a fantasised personification of the place. Stevenson takes us to a charming town in the south of France and she takes us into her inner landscape.
I began reading Stevenson’s book feeling rather hostile towards her and her lover. Perhaps it was because she was on ‘my patch’ or very close to a village I have lived in. By the middle of the book, however, I found myself warming to Luc, despite his penchant for admiring himself in mirrors, and to the author-heroine, despite her lamentable tendency to conform to the whims of men and to see herself in terms of their desire. As well as catching Luc’s eye and raising the jealousy of his discarded lovers, the town’s anarchist also fancies her.
The houses, local politics, love affairs and marriages of the town jostle vividly for our attention. She makes us feel that we are visitors ourselves with this array of idiosyncratic people: ‘her eyes are warm, the colour of oxtail soup ... Her speech is one long, hyphenated sentence of greeting, consolation, price-naming and scolding, from eight till eight. She seems to run on sherbet.’ This is a beautifully written story, as we might expect since Stevenson has published three novels. Her writing is laden with metaphors and similes: a boat sail is like ‘the skirt of a ball gown caught in a moment of grace’ and her rival, the dress shop owner, ‘crawls around the window space like a reptile in an illuminated tank’. When Luc smiles at her: ‘I felt like a plant set back in softly forked earth, packed gently into place’.
There is a melancholy sense throughout the book that Stevenson is already absent from this place. The lovers both seem curiously non-committal and fatalistic about their relationship. Stevenson probes the experience of the visitor who will not stay or ever be fully accepted, and of the inhabitant who will never go anywhere else or change. Her ‘instructions’ operate for two levels of visitors: for her tourist lodgers and for herself. At one point Luc suggests that she has been temporarily left behind by a UFO and will soon disappear again. There is a cryptic moment at the end of the story when he tells her she is famous and there has been a lot of interest in the village. The reader has to presume that this is because she has published a section of the book we are reading. Stevenson suggests that as a writer she is a disconnected and perhaps parasitic observer. Luc tells her to ‘get back to your own world... I’m not a tourist attraction.’ Leaving, she describes her last view of the town sitting ‘like a newborn child, wrapped in the folds of these protecting slopes, a pleat in the landscape ... it is never not here... the landscape shifts a season, passing from mimosa into summer yellows and then orange and red’.
This book in the Life Writing genre is a compelling blend of fiction and autobiography. I found myself wondering whether her lover was an actual person, or whether he and her love affair with him, are really a fantasised personification of the place. Stevenson takes us to a charming town in the south of France and she takes us into her inner landscape.
December 20, 2014
Subtitle: Life and Love in a French Town. This is a memoir of the author’s experiences as a young British expatriate living in a village near the Spanish border.
Her writing is very atmospheric and I really felt as if I were in the French countryside. I loved the way she described certain people or scenes: “ …she had the face of someone put together by a police artist.” But I have to admit I was somewhat frustrated by her head-over-heels feeling for Luc – cowboy, painter, dentist and lothario. He was bad news from the beginning and I never understood the attraction for her. Still it was a charming read and it made me want to experience this kind of village life for myself.
Her writing is very atmospheric and I really felt as if I were in the French countryside. I loved the way she described certain people or scenes: “ …she had the face of someone put together by a police artist.” But I have to admit I was somewhat frustrated by her head-over-heels feeling for Luc – cowboy, painter, dentist and lothario. He was bad news from the beginning and I never understood the attraction for her. Still it was a charming read and it made me want to experience this kind of village life for myself.
August 7, 2017
I did enjoy this book after I got past her style of writing fluffy descriptives, I think my eyes rolled every page for 20 pages. In the end I though it was a good book but I think it helped I was reading it whilst in a small French village, anywhere else and i would have put it down and not returned.
August 5, 2022
If you're looking for the quirky, fish-out-of-water memoir about someone who buys a house in France and has to adjust to village life, Helen Stevenson's memoir "Instructions for Visitors: Life and Love in a French Town" isn't quite it. Yes, she buys a house, and yes, she is a fish-out-of-water, and yes, everyone in Le Village can be called quirky in the most French way possible, but it still isn't it. Stevenson, at the tail end of her marriage, ends up in the south of France near the Spanish border and falls in with Luc, a complex and complicated artist (shorthand for jerk). So this is not quite a travel memoir, but a memoir of a woman in transition from one way of life to the next and France is the interlude. She seems to drift her way into town and drift back out again; there is no clear sense of agency on her part. Life just happens to her. Her writing is beautiful and evocative, and she succeeds in having this reader look up French towns along the Pyrenees for future exploration, but I am at a loss for what her book was about, like what exactly I am supposed to take away from her experience. It doesn't quite lend itself to being a something I'd recommend to someone wanting to travel to France, but it is also not something I would quite recommend for a woman trying to find herself, but it is also a book that I would not not recommend, but I just don't know for who.
May 29, 2020
Sometime during the 1990's, British author Helen Stevenson moved to a village in the south of France with her husband. When the marriage ended, she picked up with Luc, a local man who was one of the village's dentists but also an artist. She moves out to his farm where he paints, she writes, and they both go on long horseback rides and live off of rice and eggs. This book starts out as a travel guide and morphs into the details of the life she led with Luc, including stories both funny and poignant about other notable village residents. While the book is well written, I grew impatient with the narrow (as presented in the book) world views of most residents, and if you believe that the French are constantly having sex with anything that breathes, this book does nothing to dispel that notion. I found it difficult to understand why she was so enamored of either Luc or village life; while perhaps a step up from London it came across as claustrophobic, small-minded and perennially too hot.
July 25, 2024
For a while I couldn't discern a plot. But I didn't care; every sentence is a masterpiece. Once the plot clarified it wasn't that important. I never did warm up the the man she fell in love with. But I loved the descriptions and the wandering off. This book is a little treasure.
October 7, 2024
Delightful. You can feel the texture of the mountains and village,
May 21, 2013
In this memoir, the author chronicles her experience as a young British expatriate living in the countryside in France. She introduces us to all the residents of the quaint hamlet known only as "the village". One of these is Luc, the cowboy/painter and part time dentist who becomes enamoured with her. A hard book to get into-the beginning seemed to wander in circles, but it gradually draws you in.
March 19, 2013
Beautiful prose about a doomed affair with a man, and the question of whether an affair with a country can ever end well.
Lyrical phrases to linger over, shame the storey didnt grip me so deeply. Sadly not more than the sum if it's parts, though the parts are individually delightful.
Holiday read travelling by train to/from Nice, not far from the book's setting.
Lyrical phrases to linger over, shame the storey didnt grip me so deeply. Sadly not more than the sum if it's parts, though the parts are individually delightful.
Holiday read travelling by train to/from Nice, not far from the book's setting.
January 18, 2010
A young Englishwoman settles in a French village near the Spanish border, escaping a failed marriage. The book is cleverly set in three time periods and is crammed with interesting personalities, centred around Luc her dentist/farmer/artist lover. A really well written memoir.
September 21, 2007
This was an engaging travel memoir/ personal memoir.
February 19, 2008
Peter Mayle must wish he written "Oh yet another year somewhere in France" as, if it had sold as many copies as this rubbish had, he'd be even richer.
January 6, 2024
Not your normal love story, but all the more refreshing for that. A puzzle: which is incidental? The travelogue or the romance? Perhaps both happen to be incidental as life drifts on.
April 6, 2023
Não era o que do estava procurando.
April 19, 2017
Le village is a thinly-disguised Céret, identifiable in this day of search engines. I loved some of her descriptions and understood her attraction to Luc, who was so uncompromising. The details of Céret's loves, sex and relationships was fascinating and I liked the way her narrative jumps in time from people to scenes, street life to animals, atmosphere to feelings. There is an underlying honesty to her attitudes to her own indecisiveness and the people (particularly men) who make up Céret. She is more remote from women who live a traditionally less public life than men. If you have a particular interest in the French, the region and the heat and light of Pyrénées-Orientales, then you'll love this book but it has a lot to offer for anyone interested in travelogues.
Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews