I don't think I can quite bring myself to give this a lowly one-star, but it's a pretty dreadful book.

The main issue I had was I found Mayes insufferable. Her attempts at poetic descriptions of the area and her experiences are awkward. The cooking narratives are procedural: some exquisitely fresh local ingredients are chanced upon, delicious smells soon fill the magnificent kitchen, her stunning dish is enjoyed languorously with a bottle (or two, how daring!) of wisely chosen Italian wine, bliss ensues. Her complaints about having to prune the roses appear somehow hollow when contrasted with the unbearable smugness that prevails throughout. For example, Mayes asks of a visitor: "You're new here so you must tell me if I'm under an illusion - or is this the most divine town on the planet?" Boke.

I found it difficult to get much of a feel for what makes her experience truly Tuscan, or even Italian. An ancient house is in worse repair than anticipated. Shock! Renovations don't proceed to plan when the owners are absent eight months of the year. Outrage! Such banalities constitute much of the first half. For a much keener observation of the idiosyncrasies of a foreigner settling in Italy, pick up Italian Neighbours: An Englishman in Verona instead.

A personal fascination with the country and region alone kept me persevering through to the end. The author herself perhaps best sums up my sentiments when she says of D.H. Lawrence: "what an ass he was...this obnoxious foreigner...I forgive him now and then, when he totally disappears from the text and just writes what he sees."

Avoid.

Yəqin hər insanın xəyallarında canlandırdığı bir məkan var. Mənimki Toskanadı. Günəşin və şərabın bol olduğu bir yer. Sivilizasiyanın və zamanın dayandığı bir əyalət. Kitabı çox sevdim. Əminəm ki hələ çox əlimə alıb vərəqləyəcəm.

The author has an incredible ability to describe things she has experienced until they become real to the reader as well. I had long, boring episodes that described only landscapes, sites, and food, and I read it all, mainly thanks to the fact that I could almost see all the scenes, feel the unique atmosphere in the historical sites and taste the tasty recipes. After reading this book you feel like you've been to Tuscany, and more than that - as if you know her - and it's a significant advantage because Tuscany is fantastic, and I know that since three times in my life I've been to it. It is astonishing to see how a foreign writer managed to write in such a precise and vivid way the essence of a whole country in a distant land and to pass it on to many people around the world, awakening a yearning for a remote and unknown place.

Sorry for my english but I am french and I love F. Mayes'book. I might have ridden her 3 books , under the tuscany, Bella Italia, and around the world ( saveurs vagabondes in french) that I am still reading for the 3rd times ! I offered those books many times to my friend. We must travel to Spain next september and I love so much Italia , I read " around the world " to find some pleasure to go there with the same eyes than Frances Mayes. She has such glance to the beauty of simple life, read her book with a glass of french rosé is the best medecine against the spleen ! I just see that she wrote a new book "everyday in Tuscany" . So thanks to her to give her such pleasure for the next weeks. Just one thing, I live in a very nice place in France named "Vallée du Loir" close to "vallée de la Loire" very charming , and in our house came in the past XIXth century a writer named Alfred de Musset, he wrote a book here named " Pierre et Camille", sitting in Chardonneux, our house because it's a very peaceful and nice house if one day day Frances Mayes comes to France, she 'll be welcome !!! to write a new book, why not?

I have mixed feelings about this book. You know how that tiresome neighbour catches you when you are just leaving for office and tells you all about his/her last vacation? The book felt like that, the first few chapters as the author, after her divorce, decides to buy an unkempt villa in Tuscany countryside with her new partner Ed. It talks about the negotiation, the corruption about her slow renovators etc. By this part, I was pissed enough to say, I don't care for your first world problems!

Then the house becomes a given and chapter after chapter she talks about great Italian food and selection of best wines. There are even recipes of dishes made in the countryside which tries to use fresh produce completely. She talks about the ingredients, how she tried growing them in her villa, including making wine and olive oil on her own which tastes the best cold pressed.

This part was fun and made me both hungry and longing for a good wine. The author also talks about coffee and how the natives are particular choosy about how they have it (Espresso with a lot of sugar that it becomes a dessert). There are holidays, trips planned and exploration of the various cities, towns and beaches in the region. There is also a talk of the religion and lifestyle - seen from the eyes of a "foreigner".

It does seem like a picture post card. But then, we started off on a bad note. Yet, I would like to read one copy of the book before I ever decide to visit this part of Italy.

Be prepared to go out to an Italian wine dinner after reading this book.

I FINALLY finished this book, but at what cost? 


I purchased this book on sale last January with much excitement because it has been on my reading list for years. I saved it for half a year because I wanted to enjoy it over my summer holiday - I had big plans to really enjoy this book. Finally, summer vacation rolls around and the holiday stars have aligned for me to sit down and read this. On a sunny afternoon at a beautiful farm, I opened this book and boy was I surprised. It is so tedious and superfluous that I put it down around the 40% mark and never picked it up again…until now.


A week ago, on a cold rainy January morning, I picked it up again because I thought that reading about summer in Italy would offer me the perfect respite from the dreary wintering happening outside. 


This book isn't an escape, it is a sentence. 


To call this book self-indulgent is an understatement. It is a very long and detailed travel diary. Though, to give it some grace, I think this book likely worked well in a pre-Instagram and travel blog or vlog world - choose your poison. Perhaps I am a victim of the social media era attention span decay or perhaps this book has always been a boring account of someone who has decided to restore a home in Tuscany. I did find the chapters which focused on the villa restoration to be interesting and insightful from a historical and cultural perspective but for the amount that Mayes details her mini trips and visits to restaurants and shops the book becomes really tiring to read. 


Since there is no real plot happening here, the book has a very diary feel to it. Is this a product of a different time for memoirs? I think that memoirs can easily slide off the deep end and become personal journals if they do not have overarching themes or connections. Maybe it is also a personal preference towards essay style memoirs where memories are given value in the context of supporting a greater idea or moment of author self reflection. This book actively avoids self-reflection for the sake of detailing every passing shop, thought, restaurant, menu, cathedral, etc. The reader is asked to stay with Mayes over the course of a few summers and some winter holidays while she painstakingly describes her vacation home in a small Italian village, for very little in return. 


The writing in this is daunting as well. Written by a university professor, Mayes knows all the big words and all the adjectives, and she wants you to know that. I found the book to be exhausting to read. Nothing about this book evokes a sense of moving forward, it feels very slow and stuck. The descriptions of foods, landscapes, sculptures, architecture, etc. become superfluous as Mayes takes a more is more approach. Do you remember when people used to make actual photo albums of their vacations and then make you look through them as they tell you about each and every photo? After the 4th or 5th photo it becomes difficult to feign interest. As an expat, I have even accepted that every time I go home people are only willing to listen to a few of my stories or descriptions of a place that has nothing to do with them for only so long. This book just does it for over 300 pages. I feel strongly that this book is not meant for the reader, it is for the writer and it surprises me that it rose to popularity as it did - such were the times. I don’t think this book would have made it as far today. 


The worst part of the book though is definitely Mayes herself. This woman never met a label or description of wealth she didn't like. Apart from constant label and name dropping she never misses an opportunity to highlight her financial success - whether it be referring to William Sonoma (in the 90s) as a toy shop, the fabric of her clothing or shopping at the organic grocery store, Mayes never misses the chance to tell you about which tier of society she lives in. Now, this isn’t an eat the rich review, this is more commentary on the type of cultural currency that Mayes is always throwing down or trying to pick up. She views Italian culture and language as something to consume in the same way she views bringing gallons of olive oil back to California every fall. She weaponises the Italian language in the book as means for lifting her cultural currency. She uses patronizing tones when speaking of the Italians and condescending ones when speaking of tourists, arrogance and snobbery are maintained for both. 


During the sections on restoring her new villa, she lacks any self-awareness about how her expectations of what would be done in the U.S would contrast the work culture and style of that of a rural Italian village. She comes off as entitled and intolerant as opposed to curious and sincere. A few lines of self-awareness mixed in with her observations would have gone a long way to make her a more likable narrator. A sense of humour may have also helped her look like she wasn’t simply complaining. Her expectations rarely align with reality and she thinks that she can just throw money at people for her vision to come through faster - she often complains that the Italians take too much time off working but then in other chapters celebrates the value of work-life balance that Italians maintain. It is contradictory that Maye’s is only willing to celebrate Italian culture when it is convenient for her - she happily waltzes into another country ready to consume but is unwilling to accept differences that she finds displeasing or inconvenient. 


The best parts of this book were the sections that read like a cookbook, but if that's all you want you are better off just picking up a copy of Giada in Italy - better narrator, better recipes. In this book, the long lists of groceries and menu items became so tiring to read that the recipes became respite from Mayes' stream of consciousness style writing. 


This book may have been better served as mini essays or more focused travel articles, but in its entirety it is hard to read the density of her thoughts for so many pages. I don’t honestly know who would enjoy this book. People rich enough not to be bothered by Mayes' tone deaf voice are better off just going to Italy on their own and anyone wanting to escape there by book should opt in to pretty much any other book on the subject. As a reader of this book I feel left with nothing for my (very) hard efforts of finishing this book, except that if someone were to every ask me who I would LEAST like to dine with, and inclusive of all of the horrible tyrants who have walked this earth, I can say with bravado, Frances Mayes. 


In the afterword of the 20th anniversary edition I was reading, Mayes dropped this bomb: 


“But, I wondered: How to sustain a book that has no tense plot, an unforeseeable resolution, and not even an “I survived” motif? Well, I thought, let’s just go a little against the grain. I quit worrying about conflict/ resolution and character-development requirements. I’ll try, I told myself, simply to recreate this place in tactile, evocative words. The writing was spontaneous.”

At 66 pages in, I'm throwing in the towel.

Somewhere around the age of 22 or 23, I decided I was done with library books. Now, don't get me wrong, I love and appreciate libraries. I became a reader because of access to wonderful libraries. But, as an adult, I'm OCD enough not to enjoy the concept of library books. Wondering how many people read them while on the toilet, encountering books that smelled like ash trays, finding potato chip crumbs wedged between pages 32 and 33, encountering a sticky cover, or, dear God, whose hair is that?!!?--these are all things that would give me a nervous twitch for days. Add to that a county library that seemed unaware of the existence of authors other than Nicholas Sparks, Norah Roberts, James Patterson, and John Grisham, well, the choice was clear. I had to buy my own books.

The thing is, I was so punchdrunk giddy with the idea of buying my own books and not being limited to what was on the library shelves that I was pretty damn bad at it in the beginning. I bought anything and everything that struck my fancy. Part of this was also because I was willing to see if I was the kind of person who would like these books that I didn't have access to previously. A book about a woman moving to sun-drenched Italy and finding herself? Why not? Maybe I'm the kind of person who could like that. My shelves are still filled with secret shames I acquired in those heady days of biblio-freedom.

Let's just say that, today, I am not the kind of person who would ever pick this book up.

Under the Tuscan Sun is not a bad book. It's just not a me book. As far as I can tell, here is the basic premise:

1) Frances and Ed search all of Italy for the perfect summer house and have terrible trouble finding the place that's meant for them (talk about rich people problems, eh?)
2) Frances and Ed buy the house that speaks to them--and apparently the house is saying, "Freeze! Gimme all your money and no one gets hurt!" Because this house needs some serious work.
3) Frances and Ed perpetually need or get permits, contracts, money wires, and estimates for the bajillion and one things that need to be fixed. Every time the expense is exorbitant, but, before one can feel sorry for them, they scrape together the money needed with seemingly minimal effort. It's kind of like the movie The Money Pit with Tom Hanks and Shelly Long--only this time I was kind of rooting for the house.
4) Frances and Ed make a quaint little discovery on their property! Isn't Italy wonderful!
5) Something else goes wrong with the house. (Stick it to 'em, house!)
6) Frances cooks something. It's always Italian. It always has fresh ingredients. It is always fabulous.

It reads like a well-written, but repetitive and ultimately uninteresting diary.

Now, again, I did not finish reading the book, but skimmed through it enough to feel fairly assured that nothing new was ever going to happen. Other reviews reaffirmed this belief, so I do not feel compelled to read further. Had this been a travel article, I probably would have been intrigued but I just can't do another 240 pages of this. And so, Under the Tuscan Sun, ciao! I'm off to sunnier literary climes.

Cross posted at This Insignificant Cinder

i love this book for its beautifully reflective prose, its ruminations on being and history, and its explorations of culture and cuisine. at the same time, the wealth of it all creates a henry james-like problem that ultimately reduced my overall enjoyment.

This book is truly a ticket to Italy. It’s written so beautifully and casually(?). It just feels like you are reading her diary complete with the tastes / smells / visuals of Italy. I loved it. I feel like it was a great wintertime read, but dang, I really have to go to Italy ASAP.

I also want to say that I am a lover of homes. The restoration and love she gives to Bramasole warmed me!!!

Reading the book and seeing the movie are like two completely different stories, so if you only saw the movie, be sure to pick up the book. Both are good, but answer two distinct needs. But Tuscany is a land of my heart (and my taste buds), so what could be bad?

Not really my kind of book. Mayes buys an ancient house in Italy and remodels it. The remodeling part was ok. Don't really like reading about what people eat at restaurants, cook in their home or plant in their gardens. She even had two chapters of recipes. Learned about the making of olive oil.

Começo por dizer que este livro não tem muito a ver com o filme. Frances Mayes resolve comprar uma propriedade em Itália, na Toscana, junto à vila de Cortona. Aqui está o relato de como foi o processo de compra e transformação (como no filme), mas muito mais. Conta as suas viagens pela região com o marido Ed (inexistente no filme...) e relata todo o seu encantamento com Itália, com a natureza, a história, as pessoas e a comida. Não nos podemos esquecer que a autora é americana e todo o seu fascínio (justo) também tem a ver com a sua cultura. É um relato não ficcional que transmite alegria e encantamento na vida em Itália, com cores, cheiros e paladares contagiantes. Como é feito de impressões, no entanto, falta algum fio condutor e lógico, tornando-se um pouco aborrecido em certas partes, pois é difícil acompanhar a demolição de uma parede gigantesca para a transformar em porta e outras coisaa do tipo. Faltaram-me imagens em certas partes. Tem receitas culinárias que me parecem simples e correntes, mas deslumbraram alguém da patria do "fast-food". É mais do que o romance que eu esperava, mas talvez não me tenha agradado tanto por isso. Dá vontade de estar lá, naqueles sítios, a viver aquela vida, cheia de paz, comida e compras. E sol e calor...