Skip to main content

Review: A Parrot in the Pepper Tree by Chris Stewart

Genre: Expat memoir.
Subjects: Spain, farming, country life, daily life, people and animals.
Reading challenge: What's in a Name 2016
Challenge book no.: 1, a book with the word "tree" in the title.

This is the sequel to Stewart’s bestseller, Driving Over Lemons: An Optimist in Andalucia, which I read and enjoyed not long after it was published, but did not review. I can’t really compare the two books, because it has been over 10 years since I read the other and I can’t really remember much about it.

This is one of the books in the popular genre that Peter Mayle (another successful expat author) calls “being there” books (and I have sometimes called "Brits abroad" books, because so many of the authors are British). Such books can be either enjoyable or annoying, and fortunately this one falls into the former category. This is not one of those “good life” books that some people like to deride. At the point in time portrayed in the book - beginning just before he sent off the first stories that would become Driving Over Lemons and ending some time after that book was published and he began to receive publicity for it - Stewart and his wife, Ana, were unable to support themselves from their farm alone, and Stewart was going off, sometimes for weeks on end, to work as a sheep-shearer to earn extra money, and the book begins on a dark road somewhere in Sweden in the middle of winter, with him on his way to a farm to do some shearing.

I suppose this could almost be called a “broke but happy” kind of story.

The narrative jumps between past and present (the book’s present, obviously, since it was published in 2002), telling of Stewart’s early days as a musician, how he switched from drumming to guitar, with his obsession with the guitar running like a read thread through the narrative. It then jumps into the present and discusses life on the farm, his neighbours, and the ominous day they discovered that a dam was to be build in their valley. All of this is described with gentle humour.

Stewart portrays himself as bumbling and often unlucky (and occasionally put-upon), somewhat in the style of Bill Bryson, except he knows when to stop with the self-deprecation and never whines, both things Bryson still hasn’t learned.

This isn’t going in my permanent collection and I doubt I’d read it again, but it’s nice, relaxing, undemanding read that has everything one would expect from a book in this genre: humour, unusual people, funny animals, descriptions of nature and weather, some problems but not too many of them; and it generally paints an idyllic enough image of the area where Stewart lives that one wants to visit it.


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Book 40: The Martian by Andy Weir, audiobook read by Wil Wheaton

Note : This will be a general scattershot discussion about my thoughts on the book and the movie, and not a cohesive review. When movies are based on books I am interested in reading but haven't yet read, I generally wait to read the book until I have seen the movie, but when a movie is made based on a book I have already read, I try to abstain from rereading the book until I have seen the movie. The reason is simple: I am one of those people who can be reduced to near-incoherent rage when a movie severely alters the perfectly good story line of a beloved book, changes the ending beyond recognition or adds unnecessarily to the story ( The Hobbit , anyone?) without any apparent reason. I don't mind omissions of unnecessary parts so much (I did not, for example, become enraged to find Tom Bombadil missing from The Lord of the Rings ), because one expects that - movies based on books would be TV-series long if they tried to include everything, so the material must be pared down ...

Icelandic folk-tale: The Devil Takes a Wife

Stories of people who have made a deal with and then beaten the devil exist all over Christendom and even in literature. Here is a typical one: O nce upon a time there were a mother and daughter who lived together. They were rich and the daughter was considered a great catch and had many suitors, but she accepted no-one and it was the opinion of many that she intended to stay celebrate and serve God, being a very devout  woman. The devil didn’t like this at all and took on the form of a young man and proposed to the girl, intending to seduce her over to his side little by little. He insinuated himself into her good graces and charmed her so thoroughly that she accepted his suit and they were betrothed and eventually married. But when the time came for him to enter the marriage bed the girl was so pure and innocent that he couldn’t go near her. He excused himself by saying that he couldn’t sleep and needed a bath in order to go to sleep. A bath was prepared for him and in he went...

List love: 10 recommended stories with cross-dressing characters

This trope is almost as old as literature, what with Achilles, Hercules and Athena all cross-dressing in the Greek myths, Thor and Odin disguising themselves as women in the Norse myths, and Arjuna doing the same in the Mahabaratha. In modern times it is most common in romance novels, especially historicals in which a heroine often spends part of the book disguised as a boy, the hero sometimes falling for her while thinking she is a boy. Occasionally a hero will cross-dress, using a female disguise to avoid recognition or to gain access to someplace where he would never be able to go as a man. However, the trope isn’t just found in romances, as may be seen in the list below, in which I recommend stories with a variety of cross-dressing characters. Unfortunately I was only able to dredge up from the depths of my memory two book-length stories I had read in which men cross-dress, so this is mostly a list of women dressed as men. Ghost Riders by Sharyn McCrumb. One of the interwove...