A Year in the World: Journeys of A Passionate Traveller (Paperback)

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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Even people who don't normally read travel books are aware of the old Italian villa that Mayes and her husband restored, chronicled in Mayes's bestseller Under the Tuscan Sun and three other books about Tuscany. So it's somewhat surprising when Mayes declares her wanderlust, her passion for other beautiful places in the world. She adores Tuscany, but also loves tasting other people's cuisines, learning their gardening habits, reading their poetry, swimming their waters. She's always looking around and wondering, "How do place and character intertwine? Could I feel at home here? What is home to those around me? Who are they in their homes, those mysterious others?" In this luminous volume, she and her husband visit southern Spain, Portugal, Sicily, southern Italy, Morocco, Greece, Crete, Scotland, Turkey and places in between. Usually they rent an apartment or villa, so they can cook, sprawl and feel like "locals." They survive a couple of package trips (a cruise around the Greek islands, a small charter around Turkey) which only highlight the pleasures of independent travel—having the freedom to wander and discover things for themselves, without a schedule. And happily, there's no mention of prices to mar readers' escapist fantasies. (Mar. 14)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From The Washington Post

In this age of adventure travel, the lure of the increasingly exotic holds sway. It's no longer enough for vacationers to take a barge down a French river or browse in an Italian market -- no, one must rappel in Africa, kayak in Nepal. The activities must be rugged, and the locales far from the Western traveler's starting place. Given this, many travel-hounds will eye the mostly European destinations listed in Frances Mayes's table of contents dismissively.

Mayes, author of the best-selling Under the Tuscan Sun plus three more follow-up odes to her adopted home, lives a blessedly split life -- going back and forth between northern California and Cortona, Italy, which provides her Tuscan sunshine. It is from these bases that she and her husband, Ed, venture forth to the places some will find too familiar -- Scotland, the Greek islands, Naples. But paradoxically, it is just this sticking to well-trod ground that is one of the book's strengths. For although much, much, too much has been written of the wonders of Burgundy, the beauties of Capri and the gardens of England, when Mayes is at her best, she proves the point that a good writer, a good traveler, can always come up with new insights.

Yet they are not the insights one would expect from a book with the title A Year in the World, which implies that Mayes actually spent a year out in the world -- traveling, traipsing, exploring. In reality what she did was string together reports on many trips, taken over a five-year period, to form this collection. Perhaps it doesn't really matter whether the trips were taken all at once or sandwiched in and around the minutiae of everyday life. But a year spent unmoored -- from home and errands and work and the ties that bind -- would have yielded a very different sort of book from this. These trips -- house rentals, hotel stays, even a cruise -- represent a series of vacations, instead of the year-long quest that the title promises.

Mayes was a poet and professor before she became a one-woman Tuscan industry. She's well versed in literature and art history, and obviously relishes reading up on the history of any new part of the world she encounters. When her method works well, as in her section on Mantova, Italy, it's enriching; her talk of the painter Mantegna and of Shakespeare (in English, Mantova is Mantua, where Romeo awaits news of Juliet) and of the powerful ruling Gonzaga family adds depth and texture to her narrative. (You find yourself making a mental note to plan a visit to the city and to re-read "Romeo and Juliet" on the way there.) But when it fails, it's just clunky verbiage -- fact after enumerated fact, layered one upon another in endless succession (towers in Istanbul, wildflowers in Greece: the eyes glaze, the attention wanders).

In Mayes's world, the blues are always "intense," the waters always "limpid." But just when you think you can't stand another minute, she saves herself. A chapter on a cruise through the Greek islands starts out unpromisingly with Mayes explaining that this is no romantic sea voyage, but rather an ordinary, all-buffets-all-the-time cruise on which she has been invited as a speaker. Then the section takes off, as she reveals a seldom-seen aspect of her writing: an acerbic wit. Quickly, she sees what she's in for with this style of group travel, so far from her usual Tuscan Sun mode: "This first day off the ship, I see how the trip will be. We may choose one dish from a whole menu, one sip from a great bottle of wine. One monastery, not ten. The sublime Byzantine icon museum, but not the Archaeology Museum. We'll have a glimpse, a taste, a few impressions to memorize, and then we go back on board, flashing our ID cards, and sail on."

Among Mayes's most thought-provoking passages are the ones in which she faces the least Western cultures of her travels: a visit to the city of Fez in Morocco and another cruise (of a very different sort) in a traditional wooden gulet along Turkey's Lycian coast. Her penchant for historical detail and her keen observer's eye stand her in particularly good stead in these less familiar surroundings. She also does well when she draws back the curtain on her emotional life, notably during the chapter on Scotland, in which she ruminates on friendships over the passage of time. The friends with whom she is sharing her house-rental are of long standing, but seen infrequently now. Her life has changed a great deal, perhaps the most of anyone in the group -- she knows that, she makes the effort to bring the old friends together. Her thoughts here are interesting, real, honestly felt -- unlike those in a section on Taormina, Sicily, when she ponders the connection between land and local character. This latter passage ends up feeling overly intellectualized, a falsely inserted gloss.

And unfortunately, the book ends on another false note, in which Mayes, obviously feeling the need to tie things up in a neat bundle, tacks on a sort of afterword, "The Riddle of Home," in which she speculates that she will someday open a restaurant-auberge-trattoria, to be called the Yellow Café, on her home turf. Not the home turf of Cortona, not the home turf of California, but her original hometown in the good old American South, in Georgia. Where, you see, they are in need of a civilizing influence, an appreciation of intense blues and limpid waters.

Reviewed by Anne Glusker
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 448 pages
• Publisher: Broadway (March 13, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0767910060
• ISBN-13: 978-0767910064
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.2 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (62 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #38,318 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

69 of 75 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars I was bored!, March 26, 2006

By	M.C. (Spring Valley, CA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Year in the World: Journeys of A Passionate Traveller (Hardcover)

Frances Mayes is a great a writer. I've read "Under the Tuscan Sun" and "Bella Tuscany" three times each and just love them. I had anticipated this new book for months before its release and was so excited to hold it in my hands. I wanted to savor every page. Very quickly, though, I was simply bored and kept falling asleep. Each chapter is divided by destination. To say Frances writes about food is an understatement. Pages and pages are filled with nothing but food and drink. It's tedious after a while. I thought perhaps it was because she was writing about Spain's food and Portugal's food (even hiring someone to teach her to cook the local food). I thought maybe I was only interested in her writing about Italy & that's why I was losing interest. I finally managed to get to the chapter in Sicily. Oh boy. The chapter had Frances writing about two Sicilian authors and reiterating their books for pages and pages, quoting lengthy paragraphs, comparing the two authors. I felt like I was back in college reading a boring essay. So I finally skipped to the chapter on Capri....a vacation dream of mine. Frances complained about other tourists there (as she did in Bella Tuscany). I just don't know if I'll go back and read the chapters on Greece and Ireland.

43 of 45 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Reluctantly dragged along with Frances Mayes, August 14, 2006

By	Reading Mom (San Jose, California) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Year in the World: Journeys of A Passionate Traveller (Hardcover)

This book really irritated me. I loved Mayes's previous books and was really looking forward to reading this one. The concept, a year of traveling to different locations, seemed like it would be really interesting combined with Mayes' fresh perspectives, enthusiasm for discovery, feisty opinions and poetic descriptions. But somehow it didn't work.

I get the sense that her heart wasn't really in this book. Maybe because the trips were taken over a span of five years, and cobbled together? Or because there's so much `padding' - endless quotes from her own or other people's writing. When she liked the place, her descriptions feel artificially enthusiastic, almost as if the book was paid for by the chamber of commerce. I got tired of reading that she could live there, or could imagine taking her grandson there, or wishes she was born there, or that it's SO much better than San Francisco. Where she doesn't live anymore, and hasn't for years. There are also too many stories about refreshing local characters who think Frances Mayes is the nicest, most tasteful, most interesting person they've ever met. Especially since these people tend to be waiters, cab drivers, rug salesmen or others whose business depends on charming the tourists.

Most of the book consists of sneering at her fellow Americans, or talking about people's personal appearance. This is boring and clichéd - and if you like that kind of thing, Bill Bryson does it better. There's also way too much name dropping (she's always mentioning "my friend so-and-so, the famous ____"). What happened to the ordinary, financially stretched, middle-aged college professor? She seems to be taking on the persona of a celebrity. She doesn't want to be crowded in with a group, doesn't want to associate with ordinary tourist types - now she deserves the VIP treatment. This is definitely a change from her previous books.

I think when it comes right down to it, there's too much Frances Mayes in this book. I thought I liked her, but what I really like is her writing style. It can still be magical - when she gets her ego out of the way. But when she puts herself front and center, she becomes more tedious and pretentious than interesting. Now I'm sorry I read this book, because I'm afraid it will spoil my enjoyment of the earlier ones.

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Under the Tuscan Shadow Lies a Hopscotch Tour of Europe and the Mediterranean, March 21, 2006

By	Ed Uyeshima (San Francisco, CA USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This review is from: A Year in the World: Journeys of A Passionate Traveller (Hardcover)

I think the best travel essay books transcend the logistics of roaming through exotic locations to bring out a strong narrative thread that illuminates themes more resonant than the author's own self-discovery. Author Frances Mayes achieved a universal sense of liberation and self-acceptance with her most famous book, "Under the Tuscan Sun", but despite her immense gift in conveying the images of foreign cultures, she falls a bit short with her latest collection of essays. Timing also works against her as fellow writer Elizabeth Gilbert has recently come out with her own revealing diary of a year traveling abroad with "Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia".

Whereas Gilbert undergoes a cathartic experience that transforms her from an urban-dwelling workaholic, Mayes - having already experienced her own catharsis in refurbishing a 900-year old Tuscan villa - already seems well prepared for the pleasures and hazards of travel and often comes across as a dilettante in the way she and her husband Ed hopscotch the globe in search of a feeling of home all over Europe and the Mediterranean. Giving up the security of their tenured university positions, the couple covers quite a bit of ground, and in fact, each chapter represents a unique locale and consequently an idiosyncratic experience. As if hosting a travel series, they go to museums that range from the world-renowned Prado in Madrid to a Welsh museum filled with over one thousand teapots. In a less adventurous vein than Anthony Bourdain, they also dine on the local cuisine whether it is churros in Sevilla or Sally Lunn bread in the Cotswolds or Ed's constant quest for the perfect espresso. Academics at heart, they immerse themselves into the local literature to ensure they are not ignorant before coming to landmarks of historical or cultural significance.

However, as with Gilbert's book, the best passages in Mayes' book have to do with the local people that she and Ed meet and get to know. Mayes has a particular talent in describing unique characters like the aggressive, multilingual Istanbul rug dealer who sends notes in miniature looms or the Fez tour guide who loves to quote from Joseph Conrad. These are the people that bring the book to life. Frances and Ed, on the other hand, seem like observers, thoughtful tour guides for the upscale traveler. The author seems to be taking a page from Alain de Botton's "The Art of Travel" where he waxes fondly on the multitude of epiphanies brought about by one's own voyaging and mixing the resulting experiences with observations made by the great artists and writers. I just think Mayes doesn't quite elucidate those epiphanies at a meaningful enough level given the hodgepodge approach of their journey.