Romancing Spain by Lamar Herrin
Memoir Hardcover
ISBN 1-932961-22-4
6×9 / 272 Pages / $23.95 / July 2006
Summary | Praise | Excerpt | Reading Guide | Widgets | Bio | Events
Summary
Does a man fall in love with a country first or the woman he finds there?
And which love is finally the greatest?
In this elegant account of his falling for the Spanish woman he married 30 years ago, Lamar Herrin opens his heart, his natural skepticism, and an American’s awe of history to a complex nation that is both rich in tradition and astoundingly foreign.
Portraying himself as a Quixote in love with Romance, Herrin allows us to watch as he struggles to win the woman who will finally open her arms to him in a world where the Church and Bureaucracy are unwilling to.
By turns comic and moving — and always lyrical — there are beauty and good heart enough in this eloquent book for travelers and lovers alike.
Praise
“[A] dreamy memoir that’s also a soft-focus travelogue of Spain, perfect for someone about to explore that country and its people. Herrin tells two stories, intertwined and layered. First is the story of the author and his wife, 30 years into marriage, returning to the wife’s native country to find a pueblo where they could retire…. The descriptions of the landscapes, the old women holding the keys to the rural churches, of the hotels and the meals, are gorgeous, loving and rich….The book’s second story, and its real thrust, is the author’s story of how he arrived in Franco’s Spain in the 1960s, a disgruntled, newly divorced American looking to discover Europe. Instead, he met a young woman, fell in love and married….Utterly romantic….In a world of memoirs describing tragic childhoods and miserable lives, Herrin’s book takes the reader on a very different, very pleasant journey.” —The San Francisco Chronicle
”[D]elivers an amusing, perceptive treatment of the culture... in a land where Americans engender both awe and suspicion. Readers… will find moments of lyrical beauty and genuine sweetness, especially his finely wrought observations of Spain’s plazas and vistas. Suffused with a palpable sense of wonder, the travelogue … double(s) as a valentine to his wife.” —Publishers Weekly
“Which did I fall in love with first, the woman or the country?” This is Herrin’s refrain in this memoir-cum-travelogue, which reads like a love letter both to his wife of 30 years, Amparo, and to Spain, her native country…The culture clash between the recently divorced, Kentucky-born Protestant and the overprotected, moody Catholic is eloquently and often humorously rendered… Meanwhile the couple’s quest to find the ideal retirement village is described in luminous detail, with much instructive commentary on architecture and food and drink. A lovely book that will appeal to both romantics and travelers.” —Booklist
“Lyrically unfolds the author’s passion for both a woman and a culture….” —The Ithaca Journal
“[An] extraordinary love story…Herrin has plotted this book like a suspenseful novel. It succeeds as a unique love story and as an evocation of Spain: its sweeping plateaus and fragrant orange orchards, its great regional foods and attentive formalities.” —The Louisville Courier-Journal
“[A]s a sort of second honeymoon, the pair retrace the roots of their love by traveling the countryside together while the author ponders whether he was ROMANCING SPAIN when he courted Amparo or romancing Amparo and found Spain. Either way Lamar Herrin knows that three decades ago he found his soulmate.—- This terrific lyrical biography combines a beautiful declaration of love with a wonderful look at Spain from an American expatriate and the wife he still cherishes. Readers will appreciate the travelogue on three levels: a true love story and salute to his wife, a guide to Spain, and a deep philosophical debate. Mr. Herrin’s thought provoking question as to whether it is Spain, which shaped his beloved, or Amparo is delicately and eloquently developed so that the audience will ponder what dynamics shaped the roots of those they cherish. ROMANCING SPAIN is an insightful romantic philosophical treasure.” —Harriet Klausner, bn.com
“Novelist Herrin (House of the Deaf) uses his considerable agility with words to great effect in his first full-length nonfiction work, a memoir of his courtship of a beautiful young Spanish girl. He intertwines that story of 30 years ago with the present-day journey he and the girl, who is now his wife, take through Spain, looking for the perfect town. This is a romance between Herrin and Spain and, more profoundly, between the author and his wife, whose courtship sorely tested both them and their families. Herrin’s authentic descriptions of his wife’s family members and the complicated events leading to their wedding…will touch and amuse many readers; at the same time, he takes in the exotic scents and sounds of ancient Spanish villages and rituals. Herrin’s love for his wife and for Spain have only matured and deepened in the decades since he was introduced to them.” —Library Journal
“[A] wonderful summer reading experience.” —Bookviews
“Lamar Herrin has always written beautifully.” —Lorrie Moore
Bio
Lamar Herrin is the author of House of the Deaf and of five previous novels. His short stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Paris Review, and Epoch. Herrin is also the recipient of a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and was a professor of creative writing and contemporary literature at Cornell University.
Amparo Herrin’s Orange Flan recipe
Off the Page interviews Lamar Herrin
Excerpt
I am writing these words seated at a leather-topped table in a high-backed chair with my feet up off the floor on a footrest. The floor, parquet now, would once have been laid with cold tiles. The room is nicely heated, spacious, with period furnishings. We thought we were coming to a monk’s cell, for the room is located in the Real Monasterio de Guadalupe, and instead find ourselves in a Renaissance palace. The curtains are long velvet drapes. This is the same Virgin of Guadalupe who was taken to the New World and became the virgen de las americas, but she is as revered here as she is there. Pilgrims still make their way to her shrine, located high in the sierra along the eastern edge of Extremadura. Extremadura, a hard land, gave Spain most of its conquistadores. They exchanged the Virgin for New World gold. Every altarpiece in every church in Seville is coated with it.
My wife lies asleep. The town of Guadalupe is steeply sloped and after a morning of walking its medieval streets she has decided to extend the afternoon siesta. From my writing table I can see up the hill to the peak and a hermitage located there. We had planned to make our way up to that hermitage together. She whispers, You go.
I go to sleep instead. Then I wake up and start up that hillside.
We are two weeks into this trip, but as I piece together shepherds’ trails and the narrow diagonal paths left by the sheep, it’s as if I’m trying to put an end to preliminaries. I am no pilgrim, no believer—in fact, the statue of the Virgin, a spare, expressionless piece of sculpture, crowned and lavishly gowned, leaves me cold—but something tells me the time to make an effort has come. There’s a road you can drive to the hermitage now, and I see no one else walking this hillside. I come upon a flock of sheep that start, wobbly-legged, to each side and let me pass. I am afraid that night will catch me, not afraid of what might happen to me then, just that the darkness will roll down this hillside and make the piecing together of paths a matter of chance. For that reason, I don’t spend much time looking back; when I do, the monastery and its church look like a massive bulwark around which the white chips of the houses are clustered, and the surrounding hills, a rich russet brown with tints of lavender, are deepening in their folds. I hear the sheep, the dull-clappered movements of the bellwether, and smell their droppings and the drifting smoke of someone burning the prunings of olive trees. Toward the top of the hill the path becomes better defined and is partway accompanied by a rock wall. You can begin to imagine yourself in the presence of other pilgrims, not a procession of the devout, but perhaps someone not entirely out for exercise either. I think of my wife. She would have resisted the arduous uphill climb but would have come to life here.