Ligurian Love (Extra Virgin - Annie Hawes)

Member Name: MALU

Product:	Extra Virgin - Annie Hawes
Date:	19/07/09 (173 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: good characterisations and descriptions of landscape

Disadvantages: none

Annie Hawes and her sister Lucy, twentysomethings from London, go to the village Diano San Pietro in Liguria, situated in the hinterland of the Italian Riviera to graft roses over a period of ten weeks. They fall in love with a derelict two-room tool-shed high up in the hills which they can get for about 2000 pounds. "...no mortgage. The idea of a fixed home, a home anywhere, which I don't have to spend the rest of my life atoning for - even if it's a very long walk to Central Line - is irresistible."

They buy it together with a neglected olive grove, make it habitable and have lived there on and off for over 15 years and don't intend to ever leave.

The book is neither a novel nor a diary, it can be labelled 'faction', real life facts enhanced, stretched, belittled, whatever is needed to keep the readers' attention alive, put in a structure and presented in a certain order; nobody would survive a one-to-one description of real life!

Annie Hawes describes their very first time among the Ligurian olive-growing folks in great detail, when the two English women have settled down a bit, she condenses the following years and concentrates on outstanding events.

Rarely have I found so much of my own experience in a piece of literature! My husband is from Sardinia and I remember very well the day when I came to the village of my future in-laws the first time. I was nodding my head in agreement while reading thinking, "Yes, indeed / just what happened to me / I put my foot in the same way / don't I recall the blunder!" Minefields of embarrassment lurking everywhere!

Food is one of them. "It has taken us some time to learn that you're meant to start with a few...antipasti things, then move on to your 'primo piatto' of pasta. Next, the focal point of the meal: your 'secondo piatto' of meat and vegetables or salad. Followed, if you want, by fruit or cheese. This, to locals, is so obvious that it needs no explaining: just part of the bedrock of civilisation...Conceptually challenged, we saw only a deliciously haphazard abundance (of antipasti), tried a bit of everything - or two bits of particularly good stuff...and stopped, naturally, when we were full up. Usually before we'd even got on to the pasta course, and only, as far as our hosts were concerned, a third way through our meal. Causing immense consternation all round."

The attitude toward wine is another one. Only Northern Barbarians can be so deranged as to drink wine outside meals, and not to know that the main aim is to enjoy the colour, the flavour and the taste of the stuff. For Southern Europeans it hasn't been invented as a means to reach pissedness (?) as quickly as possible.

What else do the sisters have to learn? Well, how to care for their olive trees, of course. A neighbour 'adopts' them and shows them what there is to do and when, by and by he succeeds in turning them into lower-level experts.

Following their career we, too, learn how to make extra virgin olive oil, but not only that, we also learn to make our own wine. Don't use soap when you wash your feet before stamping the grapes, only ever fresh water! "The principle being that whatever's naturally and organically on your feet is less likely to be inimical to the well-being of your wine than soapy perfumy 'roba chimica' (chemical stuff)."

Don't get the (wrong) idea that 'Extra Virgin' is a 'How to...' book although you may take the elaborate description of up to 4-hours-long food orgies as a collection of recipes.

What kind of book is it then?

I belongs to the relatively new genre of (Northern and Central European) ex-pat lit on Mediterranean destinations. Here it's a declaration of love of the Ligurian landscape and its indigenous inhabitants. When the two English women decide to stay, they go for total immersion. Seen with British, i.e., Northern, eyes much of what they find in this rural backwater is odd to the extreme and could easily be ridiculed. Annie Hawes, however, describes what she sees lovingly, not without humour, but fully aware that she and her sister are the foreigners with outlandish behaviour. They learn to endure stoically their Italian friends' good-natured mocking, because more often than not they've got reasons to mock. When she compares the two lifestyles, it's not always the British one getting the better marks.

Together with total immersion into Italian village life comes total surveillance. "You could certainly never manage to die and not be found till you were black and flyblown the way people so regularly do in England, but you might be driven to suicide anyway by the relentless pressure or be driven to escaping to Milan, Turin, or heroin...Oppression lurks horribly unreconstructed amongst all the cheerful nosey-neighbourliness...Do nothing worth remarking upon, ever. And, remember, hardly anything round here isn't worth remarking upon."

To be sure, you can experience this in all villages all over the world, but Annie Hawes from Shepherd's Bush knows only the village Diano San Pietro, so it is *the village* for her.

It's logical that such a book doesn't have a plot and a denouement, it could go on and on. How then does the author reach a satisfying ending?

Throughout the book no exact dates are given; I assume that the English sisters arrived in Italy in the 1970s when the olive economy was at its lowest possible level, people cultivated the trees only to be able to make oil for themselves. (The average family needs one litre (!) a week) We know that the book was written after 15 years had passed, so it ends in the 90s. The ending of the book corresponds with the beginning of a new era for the olive growing region of Liguria thanks to financial help from the European Union and the discovery of olive oil by gourmets and connoisseurs of the Mediterranean cuisine.

We hear how the new, still modest, wealth affects the lives of the people we've accompanied throughout the book and leave them wishing them the best of luck.

On page 111 Annie Hawes drops the mysterious remark, "...we will manage to go on importing our boyfriends for a good few years, *until I finally fall by the wayside*." What might that mean? This, dear reader, is for you to find out.

Summary: two English women in Liguria, Italy