A Book Review
This review is so well written and thoughtful that I might have posted it even if the book were not by me.
John McCumber, Eloquent Stones: Tales from a Provençal Farmhouse (July 2024), 299 pp., ISBN 979-8328954921.
In 1977 McCumber, a midwesterner who recently retired as a professor at UCLA, and his French wife bought a farmhouse near Aix-en-Provence, in the vicinity of several of his wife’s aunts and cousins. Although after buying the house they continued their careers in the USA, they’ve spent as much time as they could at the farmhouse, and McCumber has obviously fallen in love with this part of the world. His book weaves together a tapestry of the rich and conflicted history of Provence, and its beautiful and diverse landscape, its dramatic weather, the soups and herbs of its cuisine, the rosés and pastis liqueurs of its cellars, the lifeways of its peoples, and many, many memorable anecdotes. His writing style is engaging, witty, and evocative.
What counts as history, and what counts as story, remains happily unclarified here. The same French word covers both. For McCumber’s purposes, the distinction between creative non-fiction and fiction matters little; the stories that give people their place in the world don’t always require the validation of a historian.
The recurrent focus of the book is the farmhouse itself, which is more than a place to stay: it’s a character that opens a window into Provence. The house began as a way-station for sheep and their shepherds and sheepdogs on their way from the lowlands to the mountains in the summer, and vice versa in the winter. This semiannual transhumance began thousands of years before any recorded history. In Roman times, the Salyes people of the area built a Celtic religious shrine up the McCumbers’ road. In the Middle Ages the sheepfold was administered by a nearby Cistercian monastery. During the Revolution its remote location made it a temporary sanctuary for the enemies of the republican government. Then it fell into disrepair, until, a few decades ago, it was nicely but quietly fixed up by a new owner who, like many folks in Provence, wasn’t particularly fastidious about construction permits.
Nevertheless, most of the book takes the reader well beyond the farmhouse. A fair sampling of the book’s excursions would include the salt flats of the Camargue, the fortress of the Baux, the bouillabaisse restaurants of Marseilles, the easels of Paul Cézanne, the papal palace of Avignon, Petrarch’s retreat in the Vaucluse, the trickle of water (unless it rains) that postures as the Durance River, and the site of the bloody battle of Aquae Sextiae, the Roman name for Aix, in the year 102.
The book invites some comparison with Peter Mayle’s 1991 best-seller My Year in Provence. Both are books by visitors to Provence who decide to make a home there, and experience a cultural learning curve. But Mayle specializes in his first year’s impressions as a Brit trying to navigate a foreign culture, and many readers find his approach a bit stereotyping and condescending. McCumber, helped no doubt by having a wife and in-laws who have lived in the area, explores the culture more deeply and sympathetically. Moreover, the book inevitably also gives the reader some insight into McCumber himself, and he’s an unusually interesting author, with a family tree that includes Scottish Catholics and Hungarian Jews, a teaching career in ancient Greek and modern German philosophy, and wide cultural horizons. Accordingly, his reflections and insights raise the book well above the common level of a memoir or travel guide.
Alan L. Hayes
Professor emeritus, history of Christianity,
Wycliffe College at the University of Toronto
September 2024