A Place in Normandy - Softcover

Kilmer, Nicholas

3.62

39 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0805055320 ISBN 13: 9780805055320

Publisher: Holt Paperbacks, 1997

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Chronicles the author's purchase and reconstruction of his family's farmhouse in Normandy and his collisions with plumbers, owls, France, food, laundry, and the hardware store

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Review:

A Place in Normandy is the story of the author's struggle over whether to retain his grandfather's home in Normandy-, France--a place that evokes enchanted childhood memories--or sell it. The farmhouse was the place where his grandfather, Impressionist painter Frederick Frieseke, created some of his greatest works. (His other grandfather was the poet Joyce Kilmer.) Nicholas Kilmer recalls several days in late spring he spent preparing the house for summer renters. As he considers his wife's arguments for selling the house, he weighs his own attachment to its quaint quirks, the beautiful surrounding countryside and the history and traditions the family home embodies.

From Kirkus Reviews:

Quaint, quirky, leisurely, and often confiningly parochial, this is a paean to the rambling farmhouse in Normandy that's been in his family since 1920 and that Kilmer can't resist trying to restore to habitability. Kilmer, author of the Fred Taylor mystery series that debuted last year (Harmony in Flesh and Black, 1995), is also a painter, as was his grandfather, Frederick Frieseke, the American impressionist who first found the property near the isolated town of Mesnil. Kilmer's wife, Julia, smitten herself, pretends to pragmatism in the face of his love for the place where they've roughed it intermittently en famille since 1968. Her resistance to his idea to finally commit real money to it makes for such dramatic tension as there is here. Nick solos in Mesnil for a week to assess the situation seriously. The bathroom floor caves in, an owl takes up residence in the chimney, the sheets seem to have vanished just when old friends from home come to stay. One of those friends gets it absolutely right when, talking to Julia about the place, she says, ``Why don't you just think of it as his mistress?'' Any task, from preparing a Calvados-marinated rabbit to arranging for the rehabilitation of the family cemetery plot, easily engages Kilmer, a born adherent to the do-it-yourself ethos (which, he observes, is so inimical to the French that they don't even have their own word for it), but when not thwarted by custom or inexpediency, his ambitions are subject to sidetracking by all manner of social and commercial transactions. He does take time out to appreciate local color, patiently recording details of private and provincial genealogy and collecting and sharing natural and civic arcana. Kilmer's gentrified-hippy sensibility, at first rather engaging, grows thin long before the narrative winds down. (b&w photos, not seen) -- Copyright �1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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