Voice of the Old Sea

Of course this is a wonderful book, easily gotten through, but whence the idea this is travel writing? It's one of several autobiographical books Lewis put out decades after his visits. This one first appeared in 1984 recounting three seasons he spent in the late 1940s in a remote Spanish fishing village. Voices of the Old Sea is more like an ethnography, but by someone who writes like no social scientist - descriptively, ironically, and with some kind of love for the people he's studying. It's a primitive world Lewis remembers. You'll be shocked by his images of animal cruelty - bear baiting, dog starving, dolphin maiming. But that is part of the whole package. Throughout, we get a sense of an unstoppable vanishing. Farol and Sort, its sister village two miles away, are as different from each other as they are from the rest of Spain. In a little while, the hustlers and the tourists will discover them and we'll just have this book to record what's lost. Would it have hurt this publisher to include a map locating Farol and Sort in relation to Barcelona and Gerona? We have no idea where they were or whether they exist anymore.

This is the first book I have read by Norman Lewis (d. 2003), and I can now appreciate the encomniums on the book covers and first page: "one of the best writers . . . of our century" (Graham Greene); "magical storyteller"; "the best, and most underrated, English travel writer of the 20th century"; and on and on in a similar vein. VOICES OF THE OLD SEA is an account of three summers that Lewis spent in a subsistence-level fishing village along the Costa Brava coast of Northeast Spain in the late 1940s. As things happened, it also is an account of the beginning of the end of centuries-old ways of life, swept aside by modernization and capitalism. Lewis does not really decry the changes that slowly begin transforming his particular pocket of rural Spain. Indeed, he rarely casts judgments, other than occasional aesthetic ones. He is somewhat self-effacing. Rather than imposing himself on his hosts and environs, he blends in, and as a result otherwise insular and superstitious locals begin to open up to him and allow him to observe and participate in activities from which outsiders usually are excluded. But the value and appeal of VOICES OF THE OLD SEA is not so much in its subject as in the telling. Lewis was a superb writer, with a gentle sense of humor and irony. The publisher lauds Lewis as "the father of modern travel writing". If only that were truer. If only more modern travel writers had Lewis's skill and his modesty.

Literate, traveller, teacher, observer, the mold of this type of travelling and beautiful prose will not be seen again, please appreciate his genius and take heart

describes a lost world--a tiny village on the Spanish Mediterranean coast subsisting on fishing and the harvesting of cork. The book is simple and evocative. The reader creates the tragedy himself or herself with the certain knowledge that Lewis is detailing a world, and way of life, that have now ceased to exist.

Anyone who has read anything by Norman Lewis knows that he is unquestionably the world's greatest living travel writer and one of the best who ever lived. I have read everything he has written and this is my favourite. It combines stylish simplicity and poetic resonance to create a haunting evocation of a lost time and place. A masterpiece.