Lili is Crying by Helene Bessette

He is dragging his wife along the hot road in the shadowless evening.
He is shouting:
--You'll have to choose, it's me or her.
--She's my mother, sobs Lili, I choose my mother.
--Naturally, Lili, she is your mother, and its a great shame, but if you want to see her again, you'll have to do it without me there. A separation, Lili. This evening, I broke up with my mother-in-law.
He cracks a match. He lights a cigarette, leaning forward, cupping his hands around his mouth.
He's a man.
And this evening he's fighting.
This troubled evening.
This tormented evening.
This tearful evening.
This cigarettes evening.
Lily is crying.
He hates to see Lili cry.
And so he gets angry.

Lili is Crying takes place in Provence during the early 20th century. Lili is a young woman living with her domineering and possessive mother, Charlotte, who runs a small boarding house. Charlotte is suspicious and resentful of any suitor of Lili's, regarding them as thieves who want to take her daughter away from her. To Charlotte, a mother should enough for Lili--a patently ridiculous thing to believe about the life of a young woman, but a belief with long-reaching consequences. Eventually, Lili marries a man who has no idea the trap he's walking into, how Charlotte will rage against him simply because she took her daughter away, and much of the novel is a back-and-forth between Charlotte and Lili's husband in which one demands that Lili choose them over the other. No wonder Lili is crying. "There are so many ways to love a daughter," Bessette writes, "And how well she could have loved her daughter, that mother Charlotte. There are thirty-six right ways. (But she chose the thirty-seventh.)"

This impossible dynamic is solved, in a way, when the man is taken away by the Nazis and sent to Dachau. In his absence, Lili and her mother become entangled again, and though the man eventually comes back, he struggles to realize that he has lost Lili's affections entirely in his absence. He's rich, in a way, having filled his pockets with the jewels and other affects that the dead of Dachau will no longer need, but Charlotte threatens to turn him into the authorities for this--all of which is a particularly bitter image of the life that those who managed to come back from the Nazi camps might have found. There's no place for Lili's husband; his absence was like a vacuum that has been filled. This culminates in a dalliance between Lili--who is now in her 40's--and a simple-minded shepherd who is thirteen years younger. Life at Charlotte's side has made Lili stunted, and an ordinary life seems to have passed her by; she has aged without ever really having the normal married life she dreamed of.

Helene Bessette was a member of Oulipo, the French school of "potential literature" founded by Raymond Queneau that prized wordplay and "constrained" writing. Lili is Crying is not so playful or experimental as some of what the Oulipians produced, but you can see the influence in her language. The novel unfolds almost like a poem of strung dialogue, sometimes demarcated by dashes when a speaker changes. The line between what characters think and what they say is not always clear. Its simple, staccato phrasing provides a grounding of the strangeness and tragedy of the story, which i found very affecting.

A Year in Provence by Peter Mayle

This is good, simple travel writing. A Year in Provence is part satire, part cookbook, part narrative and part guide. Mayle and his wife moved to Provence from England after vacationing there inspired them to buy a 200 year-old farmhouse. Mayle lives what so many travel enthusiasts and Francophiles only ever dream of. The life he describes is incredibly bucolic: his only responsibilities are to buy new vines at the start of each grape growing season, and collect his profit in either cash or bottles at the end of it.

Through the open door we could hear the croaking of our resident frog, and the long, sliding song of a nightingale. We took a final glass of wine outside and looked by the light of the moon at the new lavender bed while the dogs rooted for mice in the Lucerne fields. The rabbits would eat well this summer and, Faustin had promised, would taste all the better for it in the winter. We realized we were becoming as obsessive about food as the French, and went back indoors to attend to some unfinished business with a goat’s cheese.

Mayle and his wife live in the Lubéron, a Provençal mountain range, supposedly out of the way of so much of the Côte d’Azur tourism. However, even in 1989, he talked about how the region was changing to become more commercial. The impression that I got was that, in France, Provence is viewed as its own, culturally isolated country. Parisians scorn the rustic, simple Provençal life, yet flock there in the millions (along with Germans, Belgians, Swiss and English) to weekend and vacation homes. Mayle occupied a sort of middle ground, not quite tourist and not quite native, from which he could satirize both. It’s interesting, to me, to learn more about a small corner of the world that dealt with so many of its own localized problems when I was only three years old, still learning to feed myself properly. All of his anecdotes about rural life were interesting, but where he really excelled were his descriptions of fresh, country food. This book actually made me hungry; Mayle spent pages on thick stews, roasted lambs with rosemary, black truffles, local wines, fresh cheeses and hearty, crusty breads that made my mouth literally start watering.

He describes so well such a simple, idyllic lifestyle that I wonder, and hope against, how much change the region must have gone through in the past 18 years. But Mayle is very impersonal, and, for that reason, Bill Bryson is still my favorite travel writer. Where Bryson really helps you relate to him, and see experiences through his eyes, Mayle keeps the reader at arm’s length. The book is minimal on dialogue, at least on Mayle’s part, and relies more on observations and briefly summed up conversations. It’s a quick read, and often very humorous, as only an outsider’s perspective can be. You could probably get through it on a slow afternoon if you wanted too, and it’s definitely worth the time.