Chris Stewart (1) (1950–)

This is book three in the Driving Over Lemons series by Stewart. All three of the books are set in Andalusian Spain where Stewart and his wife moved after purchasing a subsistence sheep farm in a remote mountainous area of southern Spain. The series starts in the 1990's and the last book was published in 2014. Stewart was a minor celebrity when he purchased the farm. He was the original drummer for the rock band Genesis. His books have made him into a well known European author due to their best seller status in the UK and in Europe. The books are not well known in the USA and I had to get all of them through Inter-Library Loan requests. Almost all of them came from public library collections.

This series is really fun to read. They are part memoir and part travelogue as they chronicle the day-to-day life on the farm and in the remote villages of Spain. They also give details of travels that Stewart and his family do around Spain. In this book, the Almond Blossom Appreciation Society is a small group of men who hike up into the mountains to see the blossoms on the Almond trees. There is also a chapter on Stewart's skiing trip during a wicked cold snap, and his venture into Morocco to gather seeds to sell to gardeners in the UK. There is also details of farm life and the constant struggles of such a life that are leavened with humor and just the right amount of pathos.… (more)

This was a random secondhand bookshop purchase a while back, and I'm still scratching my head a little over what I thought of it.

Chris Stewart, a young (we think) nomadic Englishman, decides to buy a remote farm in Andalucia with his wife. Rural is not the word. The farm is cut off on one side of a river such that the only way to access it is via a handmade bridge made of a single log which is only expected to last for a few months of the year before it's consumed by the river. When they first move in there's no running water to the house, with 'house' sounding an overly grand way to describe it - a few barely habitable outhouses would be closer. It's primitive beyond belief, and Stewart's book is about their first years living there, as they become accepted by the local peasants (who all seem to be invariably drunk on cheap wine from early hours of the day and dirt poor, subsisting almost entirely on the fruits of their land).

Stewart writes of interesting characters and the challenges of adapting to the environment as they get in tune with the topography of the area and work to find a balance between modern methods of farming and the ways that have served the locals well for hundreds of year. In many ways it's a warm and charming tale, but yet it feels full of glaring gaps.

The book jacket tells us that Stewart was the original drummer of Genesis, yet at no point in the book does he refer to this. By the end of the book he's as elusive as he was at the beginning. We're not entirely sure what age group he falls into or what drove his decision with his wife to embrace not just a life in a new country, but a peasant-like existence on a remote shack of a farm. Beyond a few lines about sheep shearing in England and writing a bit for Lonely Planet we know nothing about him, and that makes the book difficult to fully engage with. He writes enthusiastically about the local shepherds, but who is he, our protagonist and narrator? And who is his wife? It takes a very unique woman to embrace a home with no basic creature comforts which is chock full of uninvited creature guests of various crawling guises, but we never get to know her. What drives her to want to live this cut off life? Even the photos that commence every chapter beg more questions as opposed to answering some. They're tiny close ups which leave you wishing they were larger and showing more of the periphery to fill in some gaps. What did the house really look like? What was the view like from the house? Who are Mr and Mrs Stewart?

3.5 stars - enjoyable yet perplexing. Christ Stewart, in seeking this life off the beaten track, obviously closely guards his privacy and wishes it to remain that way. A shame, as this book would have worked so much more had he let us have a glimpse of who he really is.… (more)