Romancing Spain
-
- $9.99
-
- $9.99
Publisher Description
Does a man fall in love with a country first or the woman he finds there?
And which love is finally the greatest?
In this elegant account of his falling for the Spanish woman he married 30 years ago, Lamar Herrin opens his heart, his natural skepticism, and an American’s awe of history to a complex nation that is both rich in tradition and astoundingly foreign.
Portraying himself as a Quixote in love with Romance, Herrin allows us to watch as he struggles to win the woman who will finally open her arms to him in a world where the Church and Bureaucracy are unwilling to.
By turns comic and moving — and always lyrical — there are beauty and good heart enough in this eloquent book for travelers and lovers alike.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Herrin (House of the Deaf) invokes the patron saints of picaresque, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, to furnish a conceit on which to hang his diffuse tale: "Which do you fall in love with first?" he wonders, the Valencian beauty he married 30 years ago, or the enigmatic country that shaped her? He explores this rhetorical conundrum through a jittery cut down memory lane, whisking his wife through the Spanish hinterlands to arouse fond memories of his sublimely ridiculous quest to woo and marry her a quest besieged with challenges leveled by the patriarchal powers-that-be. He delivers an amusing, perceptive treatment of the culture clash that both stoked and soured their romance: straight-shooting, Kentucky-bred Protestant meets coddled, delicate Spaniard steeped in Catholicism, in a land where Americans engender both awe and suspicion. Readers who can surrender to Herrin's nostalgic drift and quixotic dreaminess will find moments of lyrical beauty and genuine sweetness, especially his finely wrought observations of Spain's plazas and vistas. Suffused with a palpable sense of wonder, the travelogue bends over backwards to double as a valentine to his wife.
