Spanish Lessons

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY MAY 1, 2000

"We were looking for a village so ordinary that it would bring us into contact with people remote from the cliches of Spain--flamenco, sangria and bullfights." British journalist Lambert and his Canadian wife, Diane, find just the right place when they visit La Jara, an unassuming Spanish village inland from the Mediterranean shore of Costa Blanca. This lively memoir recounts their adventures finding their way among the local characters. Much of the book is taken up with anecdotes about how Lambert, Diane and their four-year-old son settle into their new home (a rundown house with a citrus grove and a garden), take on the construction of a timbered dining hall with a minstrel gallery and deal with a sly carpenter, a fey young gardener who argues with his employer about everything from fences to flowers, and a roofer who is afraid of heights. What sets this book apart from others of its genre is the author's way of dealing with his new neighbors, all of whom seem to be related to one another and determined to intimidate him. Although Lambert wants to be accepted, he has a fierce temper, and he gives as good as he gets: he bests the "sewage specialist" who claims he can find a mysterious underground leak, assaults a policeman in the brothel where he and his wife unknowingly spend the night, calls the bluff of a mean debt collector who haunts one of the men working on his house and engineers a public showdown between two feuding ancients who claim to have fought on opposite sides in the Spanish Civil War. Some of Lambert's tales seem a bit tall, but he tells them amusingly in this chronicle of a newcomer's eventful year with the feisty residents of a very ordinary village in Spain.