Page 52 - Phonebox Magazine July 2007

Book Review
By Oxfam Bookshop, Olney
A Valley in Italy: confessions of a house addict by Lisa St Aubin de Teran
Lisa St Aubin de Teran, eccentric, slightly mad but very engaging, has had the sort of life that you couldn't make believable if you were writing it as fiction, and I enjoyed reading her ‘Slow Train to Milan’ very much, so I approached this book expecting to be entertained, and I was not disappointed.
This is the story of the finding, buying and restoration of the Villa Orsola in the Umbrian hills by Lisa and her husband. A house she describes as “the house I had been looking for all my life,' 'so huge that I could move from room to empty room without disturbing anyone.” It is also a house without windows or doors, with parts of the floors and of the roof missing, never completed and never lived in. It is used by the local community as a venue for dances and fetes and as storage space for rusting tractors.
They can't afford it, but they buy it anyway which means that to restore it they have to camp there, without water or electricity, but with two children, and pay the local builders and workmen as and when they have the money to do so.
The positive side of this is the opportunity it gives for the family to build relationships with the local people and be drawn into village life, so that the book becomes not just the story of an obsession – the restoration in the grand style of an impossible house – but also a portrait of the Umbrian village of San Orsolo, its people and its way of life which, according to Lisa is not 'the most aesthetically pleasing village in Umbria. But its spirit is 'bello' and I happily concur that there really is no place like it.' ❑
Review by Sandra Metcalf
Black Swan Green by David Mitchell
The year is 1982; the Falklands war is due to break out; Margaret Thatcher is Prime Minister, and Jason Taylor is 13 years old. Jason lives in Black Swan Green, a remote English village in Worcestershire, where the traditional villagers resent the wealthier ‘incomers’, of whom Jason is one. Consequently, he is the target for school bullies, a situation made worse by the stammer he tries valiantly to disguise – fortunately, he has managed to hide his poetry-writing by using the rather unlikely nom de plume, Eliot Bolivar when sending his efforts to the church magazine editor. His attempts to be accepted, to join one of the gangs end in disaster, and just when it seems that things cannot get any worse, they do!
Jason does not find family life easy either; his older sister Julia habitually refers to him as ‘thing’, and his parents seem to be arguing more and more, particularly after his mum finds herself a job at an elegant gallery in Cheltenham – a cut above the Greenland supermarket chain where his dad is manager.
The book is an account of a year in the life of an adolescent, told with such empathy, such keen attention to detail that we are transported back to that painful gap between childhood and adulthood, when embarrassment is ever-present, humiliation always in the offing. Nostalgia and humour are combined to make this a lively read, to be savoured with pleasure and ended with regret. ‘Black Swan Green’ is a book I thoroughly recommend. ❑
Review by Thelma Shacklady
Join the ‘Black Swan Green’ Big Read, organised by the ‘New Books’ magazine.
52 Phonebox Magazine
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