Signs of the Heart

The inveterate popularity of this genre lies in mythologising the Mediterranean idyll as a world where stressed-out urbanites can lose their cares in lazy days and red wine. Like other role-models of its type, "Kissac"--Christopher Hope's home of six years--is peopled by the larger-than-life: a pathological collector of clocks and bones, a woman who believes in her own divinity, an alcoholic donkey.

Where this book transcends the genre, though, is in the playful subversion of the myth. Kissac is filled with immigrants all living the good life. Yet an air of dissatisfaction pervades their idyll, most apparently of all in the story of the British painter who subsists by selling melancholy ex-pats her body and Horlicks-- rekindling those memories of home that all exiles try to erase.

Hope is a sensitive and witty writer whose sentences betray an interest in the emotions above all else. His subtly expressed disdain for our age, with its scientific certainties and slow betrayal of the feelings, saturates these memorable stories of love and death, and the curious symbiosis between the two:

"God is officially dead, and life is run from California. But then I don't care about these things. I care about signs from the heart."

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A brilliant novelist's take on "La France profonde" - Rated
Hope informs us that Kissac, the village in the Midi where many of the characters in the book live out their uprooted and often idiosyncratic lives, "is not simply a place, it's a heartland". It's a composite place, an invention unmarked on any map - a moodier version of Clochemerle, where the comedy is darker. A wanderer himself, Hope encounters deep in the beautiful and wild landscape of Languedoc a fantastic gallery of refugees from elsewhere in Europe, mystics, clock repairers, prostitutes, language teachers.... And these exotic imports are depicted in the midst of an ancient social order itself painfully adjusting to the realities of the new Europe. Hope conveys a powerful feeling for history as well as character - he is well aware that he finds himself in a land that was the setting for one of the bloodiest and most violent religious and social conflicts of the middle ages, in the shape of the wars associated with the Albigensian heresy. His writing transmits a compelling sense that something of the heterodox, dissenting mood of that era resonates still in the Midi - and may well at some level be the force attracting so many oddball immigrants to the region. This is a superbly written, evocative and subtle portrait of a landscape and its various inhabitants, native or otherwise - obligatory for anyone interested in rural France, its history and culture, as well as for those who simply enjoy the delights of a fine stylist with a very perceptive eye. Strongly recommended.