Voices of the Old Sea

Book excerpt: A memoir of a remote Spanish fishing village just after WWII, a community on the brink of change, by “the finest travel writer of the last century” (The New Yorker). Seeking solace in the everyday after his World War II army service, travel writer Norman Lewis returns to his beloved Spain, to the fishing village of Farol, in the hopes of recapturing a lost sense of home. It is a place he knows better than his native England, and he finds the Spanish countryside “still as nostalgically backward-looking as ever, still magnificent, still invested with all its ancient virtues and ancient defects.” He spends three seasons as a fisherman, basking in the simplicity of village customs. Lovingly written and richly evocative, Voices of the Old Sea is an absorbing look at a centuries-old lifestyle in its final days, as the tide of modernization threatens to change it forever.