A book full of lyrical prose, a blurry romantic look at France, and a large heaping serving of sex. I liked it!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The writing in this book is especially beautiful – written in the third person (usually) from the point of view of an (ostensibly) older man staying in a small town in France ruminating about the romantic life of a younger man discovering love with a local woman. As you can see, there is a lot going on here, and sometimes the reader is at a loss to figure out who is saying what, and what is imagined and what is truly observed. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The writing about France is especially well done – you can get the feel of visiting these places and have the sense of time passing languidly in the heat of the summer sun.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There\u2019s plenty of sex in this book – unapologetic and handled in a way that isn\u2019t lurid or gratuitous. It is not something that you could cut out – it is critical to the story – but it must have been pretty shocking when people first read it back in the late 60\u2019s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I enjoyed reading this book – I think the story (and how it ended) will stay with me for a long time. I\u2019d like to read books like this that use a country (or a city) as a main character like this one did. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Next I\u2019m reading See You in the Piazza by Frances Mayes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A book full of lyrical prose, a blurry romantic look at France, and a large heaping serving of sex. I liked it! The writing in this book is especially beautiful – written in the third person (usually) from the point of view of an (ostensibly) older man staying in a small town in France ruminating […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[14],"class_list":["post-3421","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-books"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pOpl7-Tb","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3421","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3421"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3421\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3421"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3421"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3421"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}