A Season for That
Lost and Found in the Other Southern France
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- €8.99
Publisher Description
In this poignant, delicious memoir, American tax preparer and food writer Steve Hoffman tells the story of how he and his family move to the French countryside, where the locals upend everything he knows about food, wine, and learning how to belong.
Steve Hoffman is a perfectly comfortable middle-aged Minnesotan man who has always been desperately, pretentiously in love with France, more specifically with the idea of France. To follow that love, he and his family move, nearly at random, to the small, rural, scratchy-hot village of Autignac in the south of the country, and he immediately thinks he’s made a terrible mistake. Life here is not holding your cigarette chest-high while walking to the café and pulling off the trick of pretending to be Parisian, it’s getting into fights with your wife because you won’t break character and introduce your very American family to the locals, who can smell you and your perfect city-French from a mile away.
But through cooking what the local grocer tells him to cook, he feels more of this place. A neighbor leads him into the world of winemaking, where he learns not as a pedantic oenophile, but bodily, as a grape picker and winemaker’s apprentice. Along the way, he lets go of the abstract ideas he’d held about France, discovering instead the beauty of a culture that is one with its landscape, and of becoming one with that culture.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Food writer Hoffman debuts with a finely detailed memoir about learning to live, cook, and eat like a local. When the author, a longtime Francophone, and his wife traded their Minnesota suburb for a small village in southern France in hopes of helping their kids master the language, Autignac turned out to be less than the quaint immersion site they'd expected ("Nowhere in France isn't pretty... except for the place we picked to live for the next six months"). Hoffman felt excluded from the "harmonious bubble" of village life until trips to the grocer, nights spent cooking unfamiliar dishes, and long days of harvesting grapes with a neighbor yielded insights into a culture that tightly linked food, wine, land, family, and community. Hoffman's musings on his adopted home sometimes lapse into sentimentality (", figs were those rare and precious things" on charcuterie boards, while "Here, ubiquitous and free, they were the blue collar refreshment that Yvan the carpenter grabbed from the tree in the alley"). Still, the author's perceptive dissections of such small moments as watching his son try an oyster for the first time, and, he imagines, experiencing "a feeling of joining the adult world in some way he couldn't make happen in other realms," speak lucidly to the challenges and rewards of connection at home and abroad. Francophones and foodies will be charmed.
