Voices of the Old Sea

By Norman Lewis

In the late 1940s, Norman Lewis settled in a remote fishing village on what is now the Costa Brava, relishing a society where men regulated their lives by the sardine shoals of spring and autumn and the tuna fishing of summer, and where women kept goats and gardens, arranged marriages and made frugal ends meet. Over the course of three years he watches with sorrow and affection as the villagers struggle to hang on to a way of life unchanged for centuries. How long can their precarious economy, their ancient feuds and traditions - not least the evenings of impromptu blank verse in the bar - hold out against the encroaching tide of package tourism, which sidles insidiously into the village with the arrival of black-marketeer Muga?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Eland Publishing
• Release date: Mar 18, 2013
• ISBN: 9781780600345

Norman Lewis

Norman Lewis (1908–2003) was one of the greatest English-language travel writers. He was the author of thirteen novels and fourteen works of nonfiction, including Naples ’44, The Tomb in Seville, and Voices of the Old Sea. Lewis served in the Allied occupation of Italy during World War II, and reported from Mafia-ruled Sicily and Vietnam under French-colonial rule, among other locations. Born in England, he traveled extensively, living in places including London, Wales, Nicaragua, a Spanish fishing village, and the countryside near Rome.

Reviews for Voices of the Old Sea

[deebee1_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Norman Lewis returns to Spain after World War II, drawn by its spiritual and cultural isolation from the rest of Europe, wanting to experience a way of life in its remotest regions that has remained unchanged since the medieval times. He chose to spend three summers in a village called Farol in Costa Brava, on the northeast coast of the country.Farol is a tiny, poor fishing community where life revolved around the seasonal sardine catches, the Alcalde's bar, and its feuds with the neighboring village of farmers. Nothing, not even the civil war, had been known to break apart their tiny world and life remains simple and perpetual as the tides of the eastern Mediterranean to which their daily fate is joined. As he gets to know more about Farol (also known as the cat village), its colorful and idiosyncratic characters, their customs and folklore, Lewis also gets a glimpse of the "enemy" village -- the peasant community (also known as the dog village) who took care of the thousands of oak trees. On Lewis's second summer, the trees started to show signs of disease, and before long there was no healthy tree standing. The fate and life of these two villages, for all their seeming enmity with each other, are so intertwined that soon enough, the fishing village too felt the decline. Worse, the sardine catches lately had been very poor. The situation was desperate for everybody. In the meantime, it was observed that some construction was being done on an old, abandoned house. Soon after, a handful of foreigners arrived and and lodged in that house, apparently now converted into a small hotel. More construction, and a busload of tourists later, Farol was on its way to becoming a resort town. Curious, angry, but above all, helpless to stop the wave and having no alternatives, villagers had to struggle between continuing the only way of life they know and love but which was increasingly difficult to sustain, and changing and going with the flow. We know how it ended. What war failed to destroy, mass tourism ruined irrevocably. Farol's story is not unique, as we are now starkly reminded by travel brochures bombarded on us advertising trip packages in huge hotel complexes, bars and entertainment places up and down the entire Spanish coast that every summer is overran by the tourist hordes. We can be sure that under each of these monstrosities is buried the fishing village that Farol once was. What we want to be acquainted with is that lost village, its singularity, its identity intact and still possessing of a soul. Lewis does this for us wonderfully without engaging in sentimentality. He brings the past of Farol back to life in a vivid and memorable portrayal that is not short of affection, humor and sympathy. Two events he describes are exceptionally well-written. One is the great sardine fishing to which he had the rare honor as an outsider to be invited, not done in any way you and I would imagine, but with the ritual and ceremony for what amounts to these heretical people (the poor Catholic priest from the neighboring parish has given up on them) as sacred, followed by a violence during the snaring of the fish that is bloody and gracefully choreographed as a ballet. Another unforgettable description he makes is that of spear fishing in the shallower waters.