The Price of Water in Finistère
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- £5.99
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- £5.99
Publisher Description
'In the same way as there's a partner for every person, there's a place. All you have to do is find the one that's yours among the billions that belong to someone else, you have to be awake, you have to choose.'
With this conviction in mind, acclaimed Swedish writer Bodil Malmsten abandons her native country at the age of fifty-five and settles in Brittany.
At the heart of this memoir is the conviction that the happiness to be found in Finistère will not allow itself to be, cannot be, expressed in writing. Embroidered around this seeming paradox are poignant, outraged and thought-provoking observations on the widest range of subjects: how not to buy plants, the elicit pleasures of bargain-hunting, the misery of writer's block, social democracy, racism, tulipomania, the stubbornness of bank managers, the controlling of moles and slugs, death, political hypocrisy, the delights of wild weather. Malmsten's passion and humour shine through every episode she describes, however minor, offering the reader a window onto a solitary life at once touching, thought-provoking and, occasionally, hilarious.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In 2000, poet and writer Malmsten left the false promises, small-mindedness and cold weather of her native Sweden for the remote seaside French village of Finist re, "where the land comes to an end in Europe fin des terres, finis terrae." If not engrossing, this memoir about trying, unsuccessfully, to get away from the world has a quiet and honest charm. At her new Brittany home, Malmsten putters in her garden and enjoys her solitude, but the project of writing a book about her time in Finist re forces her to express what she previously only had to live through. While commenting on petty but humorous annoyances like the high-priced resource of the title, her botanical struggles and her few ventures into friendship, Malmsten dwells on her happiness in the face of her leftist despair about the state of the world. The book moves with an episodic, sluggish pace but might appeal to both lovers of a quiet book about the garden and the more socially minded who struggle with "the guilt of the privileged."
