ROAD READS
Road Reads
"A Year in the World," by Frances Mayes
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BOOK: "A Year in the World," by Frances Mayes (Broadway Books, $26)
TARGET AUDIENCE: People with boundaries to push.
Mayes, best known for "Under the Tuscan Sun," says, "I travel for images." And she collects delicious ones: blue boats in a French canal "riding on their reflections"; spoken Portuguese, with its "many sounds that previously I have heard only from the washing machine"; the slow-moving Cotswolds, "the polar opposite to adventure travel." The world that Mayes and her husband, Ed (espresso snob and source of pithy observations), literally travel is limited (mostly comfortable, mostly Southern Europe). But she means "world" in the sense of new things. "Travel pushes my boundaries."
Alas, she is a better image collector than storyteller. So many of her descriptions merely hang prettily in midair, as you make frustrated "keep going" motions with your hands and ask, "And the significance of that was . . . ?" Further, how many real couples talk like Frances and Ed -- in perfect, complete sentences, making effortless literary allusions? It sounds like idealized dialogue in, perhaps, an idealized "world." -- Jerry V. Haines
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