Book description
If you are lucky enough to find your place, you should never actually
live in it, never make it your home. And never live with the man you
think you cannot live without.
Le Village is a small town at the southwestern-most tip of France.
Here a young Englishwoman fell in love with France, the French and one
Frenchman in particular.
In her seductive, lyrical and witty memoir Helen Stevenson writes
about life in Le Village, not as an expat, but as someone adopted by
her neighbours as one of their own. By Stefan, the Maoist tennis
fanatic, who lives off his lover in solidarity with the unemployed; by
Gigi, the chic Parisian who dresses her ex-lovers' girlfriends from
the stock of her exquisite boutique; and by Luc, the crumpled cowboy
painter and part-time dentist, who, overcoming an aversion to blondes,
takes the Englishwoman up to his remote mas, shows her his paintings
and teaches her to ride.
Describing the colour and light of the landscape with lyrical
intensity, and savouring the languid and sexy flavour of the
Mediterranean lifestyle, Helen Stevenson lays bare a romantic but
potentially disastrous love affair with the man 'who seems like the
only man alive to me, the one with the halo round his head in a crowd,
if I should ever see him in a crowd'. INSTRUCTIONS FOR VISITORS may
start as an objective guide for tenants arriving at her village house,
but it ends as a very personal revelation of how difficult it can be
to transplant oneself into someone else's country, someone else's
culture, someone else's heart.
Helen Stevenson grew up in South Yorkshire and studied modern
languages at Somerville College, Oxford. She is the author of three
novels, Pierrot Lunaire, Windfall and Mad Elaine, and has worked as a
translator for Faber & Faber and Serpent's Tail. Since taking up
full-time writing, she regularly reviews for the Independent. She now
lives in London.
