Living in Italy, there’s always a fair chance that someone will spot a book like Annie Hawes’ ‘Extra Virgin’ (Amongst the olive groves of Liguria)’ and decide it would make an ideal present.
My mother brought it with her on her last visit, telling me how much she enjoyed it and how she recognised a lot of observations about the Italian way of life. Alarm bells sounded when she told me this given that her general philosophy is that the English do everything best (don’t get her started on Americans!)
The author can also be patronising (“How wise these peasants are!”) but, in fairness, she is at least able to recognise that the English superiority complex is not born out by the facts.
The book tells the tale of two sisters who while doing a 10 week Summer job, decide , on a whim,to buy a run down house which is for sale for a small fee of around £2,000. She tells how the locals of the village – Diano San Pietro – are mystified by their decision: “Here in Liguria, you live in a town or village, travel to work on your land as if it was a job. The idea of living alone and isolated up in the country is horrible, and totally foreign to them. English, in fact”.
She explains well how they are able to get the home at such a low price : “Pompeo is selling fifty olive trees and a piece of arable land which just happens to have a useless rustic building on it……………. we, on the other hand, are buying a lovely rustic dwelling with a large garden which just happens to contain fifty olive trees”
As you might expect, the rest of the book is occupied in relating how they struggle against the odds to cope in these alien surroundings . They are pages and pages about the quirks of local eccentrics, struggles to understand the local dialect and ,inevitably, admiration for the simple life with a major focus on local culinary specialities.
It is ironic that at one point she complains that “the endless Italian food obsession can get very wearing” since a large part of the book is about this very topic.
Ultimately, it is what the book leaves out which is as noteworthy as what she chooses to include. Hawes is a genial and witty host up to a point but leaves far too many unanswered questions about her motives for moving and the nature of her relationship with her sister, Lucy. We are told very little about what her life in England was like other than the obvious fact that she was dissatisfied and in need of a fresh challenge. Her sister remains a shadowy figure and, for the most part, Anne Hawes might just as well be there alone. We get sentences like “Lucy comes and stands gloomily next to me” and you assume from this that they have a close bond but we never get to know what Lucy looks like, what she did in England or what her hopes and aspirations are.
On top of this, because of the studied absence of anything relating to sex you would be forgiven for taking the book’s title as a double intendre. It’s not that I expected tales of romps with rugged Italian rustics, but the fact that two youngish women are living alone in a remote house, you would expect this topic to be more prominent. You occasionally get an aside to show that they are not living like nuns. For instance, Hawes admires two “Heathcliff lookalikes” – nephews of one of their neighbours -and comments “We can’t help but hope they are unencumbered with wives and girlfriends”
Later on they realise the hazards of having a fling in such a tight knit community : “It is borne in upon us, rather tragically, that we must never become romantically involved with anyone from San Pietro” . As a consequence, she tells us that “we will manage to go on importing our boyfriends for a good few years, until I finally fall by the wayside”. The way she tells it makes it sound like they get their men by mail order and , for all the information we’re given on the topic, this may be the case. It is also typical of her infuriating ambiguity on personal issues that we delicate readers are left to interpret exactly what she means when she says she falls “by the wayside”. Does it mean she gets married or that she gives up on men and starts a local lesbian commune. We are not told.
Hawes’ experiences would work fine as a regular series in a magazine, as a kind of ‘Diary of a Ligurian lady’, but ploughing through 350 pages of the stuff gets very tiresome and repetitive.
If you’re looking for a stocking filler – I’d be happier with a cook book.
