So Sylvie

I need to find some guest writers for those times when I'm having my migraines for days on end, or when I'm sick as a dog as is the case for this past week. It's the first time that I've gotten sick since having my mastectomy and it really hit me hard considering I have six fewer lymph nodes now to filter the toxins. But as you can tell, I'm back at the PC and so on the mend.

Now, I want to give an update and clarify something about the book A Valley in Italy which I prematurely raved about in an earlier post. Spoiler alert: if you're not done reading it, or if you're still intending to read it abandon this post now as I will be giving it all away.

What a looney bird this woman turned out to be. Her and her husband having no jobs, and seemingly no resources, somehow manage to spend millions on a palace and subsequent renovations of said palace in an Umbrian village. Fine. I'll suspend disbelief long enough to be taken along on the journey of restoring one's dream home, the one they've searched for all their lives. But it wasn't to be. The only time she mentions the process of the reno it's in muddled and dizzying terms that are not easily translated to any real image of the place. At one moment you would think that she's describing a former stable or garage, at other times she's describing a decadent fortress with a ballroom lavish enough to hold 500 guests and architecture dripping with pediments and exquisite embellishments.

It's another one in a long line of expatriate memoirs that makes freakish observations of the "little" people of the village. This one being the worst yet. The story became more and more absurd as it went along culminating in the bizarre marriage between her 16 year-old daughter and an older man from France, whereby the author claims a great triumph at having pulled off the wedding at the palazzo with 400 guests in attendance. I had to double-check, what with all of the lazing about, debauchery, and deformed characters, that this wasn't written in the 16th century.

Footnote: the author, Lisa St Aubin de Teran, after oozing about how she'll live in this palace forever, blah, blah, blah, and spending not such a small fortune on it, has since moved to Amsterdam.