The Time in Tavel - Paperback

by Brewster Chamberlin (Author)

Brewster Chamberlin readily admits one of the great pieces of buona Fortuna in his life was the 14 months he spent with Lynn-Marie Smith in a small village in the South of France just northwest of the old walled city of Avignon. This sprightly memoir is the story of those deeply enriching and adventurous months in a landscape both enchanted and occasionally dangerous, filled with the wildly magical scenes Van Gogh, Lawrence Durrell and other painters and writers have so vividly captured in their Provence-inspired work. Chamberlin's narrative takes the reader from the couple's first jaunty but seemingly frivolous thoughts about living in France generated by equal amounts of wine, food and frustration with life in Washington, through the serious matter of actually moving there and living through the vicissitudes of daily life in a countryside and language with which the couple possessed only a shaky acquaintance.

Author Biography

Unable to break into the tenured groves of academe, despite a solid and well-received doctoral dissertation, Brewster Chamberlin spent several decades of his life working as a historian, archivist, university teacher, lecturer, poet, essayist and writer of longer and shorter fictions while living in Manhattan, Germany, France (Provence), Italy, Washington DC and Greece. In 2001 he retired from an executive position at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC to move with his wife Lynn-Marie Smith to Key West, Florida to concentrate on a series of five novels revolving around the city of Berlin in the 20th century, one of which takes place in the Conch Republic, as the island of Key West is also known. His most recent books are Paris Now and Then: Memoirs, Opinions and a Companion to the City of Light for the Literate Traveler (2002, revised edition 2004), Mediterranean Sketches: Fictions, Memories and Metafictions (2005), (with Nance Frank) Mario Sanchez: Once Upon a Way of Life (2006), A Chronology of the Life and Times of Lawrence Durrell (2007), Situation Reports on the Emotional Equipoise: Collected Poems 1959-2006 (2007), Radovic's Dilemma. A Mediterranean Thriller (2009), and The Time in Tavel: An Informal Illustrated Memoir of a Sojourn in Provence (2010). Chamberlin also serves on the Durrell School of Corfu board of directors and faculty, and is a board member of the Friends of the Key West Library and Save the Pines.