Reluctant Tuscan, The
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- £2.99
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- £2.99
Publisher Description
Rising From The Mist in the sun-blushed hills of Tuscany is Il Piccolo Rustico, a 300-year-old stone farmhouse that Nancy Doran dreams of lovingly restoring into an idlyllic home. All her husband Phil can see is a crumbling money pit that, as far as dreams go, is more of a nightmare.
Reluctantly leaving behind high -octane, air-conditioned Los Angeles where he lives and works as a writer-producer, Phil is uprooted to a strange country intoxicated by O sole mio, virgin olive oil and oak-aged Chianti. The local village reveals itself to be a hive of seething passions, secrets and age-old blood feuds, and the newcomers find that life is not all strolls around town during the passagiato and relaxing under the awnings of picturesque cafes.
Beset by a rift of exasperating challenges - from the cunning tricks of the Pinatore family to an infuriating Byzantine Italian bureaucracy - it is only with an inspired touch of the 'Inner Italian' that Phil and Nancy finally manage to soften the hearts of their neighbours and are embraced by the community.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Readers of Doran's amusing memoir about relocating from Los Angeles to the tiny Tuscan town of Cambione must first suspend their disbelief that a person in his right mind would actively resist such an opportunity. But resist Doran does and when his sculptor wife buys a ramshackle, 300-year-old house there on a whim, she must drag him kicking and screaming out of his high-stress, low-reward life as a Hollywood writer and producer (among his hits: Who's the Boss? and The Wonder Years). What follows is rather predictable: the house turns out to be in even worse shape than anyone imagined, and the construction crew has no "discernable pattern" when it comes to showing up for work. Lines like "Things happen in Italy that don't happen anywhere else on earth. A magical friendliness is spread all over the place like pixie dust" don't do much to distinguish Doran's story from other books of its ilk, but the author's grudging optimism and dead-on ear for dialogue certainly do. Doran's brutally funny accounts of tangles with everyone (including the mayor, the police, an inefficient landlord and Doran's long-suffering wife) are enough to keep readers hooked until the last page. It may not be a surprise that he lives happily ever after, but how he gets there is certainly worth the ride.
