The Memoirs of Frédéric Mistral

Mistral launched, and won the Nobel for, the Provencal renaissance, a quixotic shot at restoring the language of the troubadours to the respectability of print after centuries sheltered in the mouths of south French peasants. His Memoirs are Romantic and winning in their humble insistence that the "back to the land" poetic he and his fellow Felibriges pioneered sprang from a doggedly non-literary way of life, in this case the earthy cadence and harvest cycles of Provence, that Land of the Lost that becomes through Mistral's rosy lenses everything the 20th-century isn't: rustic, contentedly patriarchal, pre-industrial, frankly religious, and integrated into a satisfying cosmic whole. Mistral has to be one of the least alienated writers modernity ever threw up, though his Provence looks so much like Tolkien's Shire that you have to wonder if the modernity's in the escapism; the glow comes in part from Mistral's awareness of a world disappeared, like childhood. You choose your illusion and takes your chances; Mistral lived a long life--and helped keep a language from dying--inside his.

The Nobel poet who brought back the Provencal language to his beloved Provence writes of his home and surroundings and his quartrains. If you love the childhood memories of Marcel Pagnol, you'll love this book too.