The Tomb in Seville

In 1934, Norman Lewis and his brother-in-law Eugene Corvaja travelled across the breadth of Spain on what turned out to be the eve of the murderous civil war. Commissioned by his Sicilian father-in-law to locate the tomb of the last Spanish Corvaja in the cathedral of Seville, when public transport came to a standstill, the two walked more than a hundred miles to Madrid, and were then forced via Portugal to Seville. Lewis makes light of being caught in the crossfire of a fractious country, sometimes literally, and glories in the beauty of nature and the common humanity of the Spaniards he meets on the way. What is entirely in keeping with the mischievous character of Norman Lewis is that this, his very last book, is also his first. For the extraordinary set of misadventures distilled and honed by the nonagenerian writer in The Tomb of Seville were first described in Lewis's apprentice work, Spanish Adventure.