Voices of the Old Sea by Norman Lewis

Voices of the Old Sea Reviews

• 
  Candi

  3.5 stars
  
  "After three war years in the Army overseas I looked for the familiar in England, but found change. Perhaps it was the search for vanished times that drew me back to Spain, which in some ways I knew better than my own country—a second homeland to be revisited when I could. Here the past, I suspected, would have been embalmed, and outside influence held at bay in a country absorbed in its domestic tragedy."
  
  Travel writing has beckoned to me with its charms during recent years. Honestly, before joining Goodreads, I thought ‘travel’ books were primarily those little Fodor’s travel guides one would pick up before venturing on an upcoming trip. I really had no idea that there was an entire genre of narrative travel writing that could whisk you away to faraway places simply through the power of beautifully written words. Since this discovery, I have been adding ‘travel’ books to my mountainous pile at a rather swift rate. Voices of the Old Sea is one of those books that lured me in with the promise of a journey to the Mediterranean coast of Spain.
  
  The author, Norman Lewis, was apparently one of the more renowned travel writers of his time (mainly post World War II.) A British journalist who traveled and wrote extensively, Lewis wrote this particular volume based on a period of three summers beginning in 1948, which he spent in the small coastal fishing village of what he called Farol. From what I understand, ‘Farol’ is a fictional name he devised in order to protect the identity of the real community. In any case, Farol was a town steeped in a culture that no longer exists today – rich in history and traditions that were quite interesting. Actually, I found that my visit to this coastal village was more of a travel back in time rather than a destination vacation. Lewis at first had difficulty making himself at home with the fishermen. They didn’t necessarily welcome outsiders with open arms. "The men of Farol hoarded words as their children collected the coloured pebbles on the beach." Eventually he found friendship with another outsider of sorts, a young man named Sebastian who happened to have a link with one of the more powerful women of the community – the Grandmother. Soon Lewis found himself offered hospitality at the local drinking establishment, where he came to learn many of the secrets and customs of the community. He went out on fishing expeditions thus learning of the arduous work involved in this type of livelihood.
  
  The most fascinating part of this piece for me was the rather rapid transformation of this town from that of remote fishing village to that of a fashionable tourist attraction. With the arrival of an influential and likely shady businessman, Farol became the hot spot for French, German, Scandinavian and later English travelers seeking the beauty of a beach retreat. The people of Farol found themselves no longer gaining sustenance from the always fluctuating fishing economy, but to earning a living from the influx of foreign currency. Lewis seems to mourn the loss of the town’s identity while at the same time perhaps recognizing that the people will now have a more reliable source of income. Certainly I can understand both sides, and it is thanks to books like this that remind us of those irretrievable times gone by.
  
  I’ve rated this book 3.5 stars, mainly because I appreciated very much what I learned from it. At times, it felt disjointed – probably due to the author’s back and forth travel to Farol. When I’m reading a travel narrative, I’m looking for the lovely, descriptive prose that paints a picture of the landscape. This better illustrated the people and the metamorphosis of an entire way of life – which is fascinating in itself, but is a matter of expectations I suppose. I didn’t so much travel to Spain but to a place in history. Keeping this in mind, anyone with an interest in such topics could easily enjoy this book. I’m going to try Naples ’44 next, which is Lewis’s masterpiece of sorts.
  
  "One thing is certain. Here we have always been, and here, whatever happens, we shall remain, listening to the voices of the old sea."
• 
  Veronica

  Judging by the scant number of reviews on Goodreads, Norman Lewis is virtually forgotten. Yet he was one of the best travel writers of the 20th century. Here he recounts three summer seasons spent in a fishing village on the Costa Brava just after World War II. Artfully, he uses this device to show us first the poverty-stricken and almost medieval lifestyle of the fishermen and their families. During the second season a local crook-cum-businessman opens a hotel and begins the gradual transformation of the village into a tasteless tourist trap, amid much resentment and resistance; the fishermen continue obstinately to fish the dwindling stocks even when it is pointed out that they can earn far more taking tourists on a single boat trip than in a whole season of fishing. By the third season the rot has set in; the fishermen's wives are working as chambermaids at the hotel, and even Lewis's friend Sebastian has had to quell his wanderlust and become a waiter. Repressive Spanish laws now only apply to Spaniards; foreign tourists can do as they like.
  
  I never knew the Spanish Mediterranean coast before it was covered from end to end with concrete. The Costa Brava is inaccessible enough to be less spoilt than the rest, but there are no fishing villages like Farol any more, and all the village sea-fronts are lined with hotels. Of course, the Spanish are materially far better off, and have far more freedom, than was the case 60 years ago, when near-starvation and repression were the norm, but still, much has been lost.
• 
  Steve Haywood

  In the late 1940s, English writer Norman Lewis travelled to the remote Spanish fishing village of Farol to experience and record the old ways of Spanish fisherman, and witness the passing of an old order that had lasted largely unchanged for centuries. He spent a few months there each year for three years, and witnessed huge changes as the Spanish fishing culture gave way slowly to the onslaught of mass tourism.
  
  The author described two villages rather than one, the village of the cat people by the sea (they keep cats to keep off the rats and finish off the bits of fish left over from their fishing), and the village of the dog people a few miles inland where the people hunt in the forest and grow crops. The two villages need each other and trade together even though they don't like each other very much, but both villages will be equally affected by the changes that are coming.
  
  I like travel books, I like learning about different places and also about different times too. This does both. Some travel books can be quite dry though, full of beautiful description but somehow stagnant without narrative or movement. This is not one of those. The characters really come to life, and even though the story is told over only three years, such a lot happens and it is really interesting waiting to find out what will happen in the next year. This is just one little story, in one small place, but you can really see how there would have been hundreds of other stories just like it up and down the Spanish coast.
  
  I read this book while on holiday in Spain not far from where the book is set (Farol is a fictional name and no one knows exactly where the village was but it was in the Costa Brava region). This really added something to the book for me - I could see and feel the final result of the changes described in this book all around me. I don't see it is either good or bad, but do feel a sadness for what was lost.
  
  This was a really good book, and Norman Lewis is obviously an excellent writer, because as you read it, it makes you feel like you are there, experiencing that time and that place, getting a glimpse of a world that has gone and is never coming back. It is all the more remarkable because though it seems like eons away it really wasn't that long ago, within the lifetime of many people alive today. A really good book, well worth reading.
• 
  Anna

  ‘Voices of the Old Sea’ is a humane and affectionate portrait of life in the obscure Catalonian fishing village of Farol shortly after the Second World War. The tone and content reminded me rather of
  My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell, as it reads with sympathetic amusement and both a simultaneous sense of solidarity and detachment. Lewis is gradually accepted by the villagers over a period of years and goes fishing with them, whilst acknowledging that he will always be an outsider. He documents the environmental disasters that damage the livelihoods of Farol and its inland neighbour Sort. (The villagers are often referred to, rather brilliantly, as the Cat People and the Dog People.) As the forests die and the fish prove elusive, a wealthy black marketeer moves in and tried to turn the area into a tourist resort. The villagers’ affronted and confused responses are both funny and full of pathos. The isolation of Farol cannot survive modern times, so Lewis’ portrait is a bittersweet one. It is lovely to read, though, and like the best travel writing immerses you in a different world.
• 
  Reading

  Completely delightful
• 
  Kubcio Kubcio

  O zmianie, która sprawiła, że zniknęły bezdomne koty i tylko widok w stronę morza pozostał taki sam.
• 
  Paul Read

  Normal Lewis' Voices of the Old Sea is a beautifully told account of the transformations that undergo a small fishing village on the Catalan coast in the late 1940s. What makes the book worth reading is Lewis' skill in capturing the ordinary, the mundane and the changeless existence of the people until tourism arrives one day, and decides to stay. Their initial rejection and ultimate embrace of this new era unfolds with insight and compassion.
  
  For those interested in contemporary Spain, the story is echoed across the whole peninsula as the gradual spread of tourism, like gout or any other infection, spreads down the coast, across to the Balearic and canary islands and finally, from the 1980s onward systematically inland.
  
  Yet despite what on the surface looks to be like a malignant disease, Spain somehow still retains an identity and character undeniably Iberian. Where other cultures would have fallen, subsumed in the tidal wave of the new consumerist religion, Spain continues to maintain much of its tradition and culture despite the forces of invasion. Perhaps because - even after 40 years of democracy - Spain is still a relatively poor country within the EU, and, as Lewis points out at the end of the book: "Corruption doesn't come naturally to the poor as it does to the rich".
  
  So true, so true.
  
  For More on Spain:
  http://www.SpeakingofSpain.com
• 
  Flora

  Could be one of the best travel writers I have read.
• 
  Richard Lynn

  Recommended by Linda, this is a fantastic book. It fits in the same vein as another favorite book, Let It Come Down.
• 
  Sam Schulman

  Best travel writer of the 20th century.
• 
  John

  Lewis' account of his stay over three seasons in a small Spanish/Catalan fishing village in the immediate aftermath of WWII. A lot of local color, and a somewhat bleak view of the rise of tourism in the region (The Costa Brava). Those readers who demand fidelity may be disappointed; outside reading has indicated that the author leaves out some important points (such as that his family lived there with him) and the name of the village is a pseudonym.
• 
  Stephanie

  Classic travel novel - superb!
• 
  Sandra

  Farol, north of Palamos on the Costa Brava, in the late 1940s, was a village of poor fishermen, wild mangy cats and entrenched traditions. Into this isolated community arrives Norman Lewis. Voices of the Old Sea is his account of three fishing seasons spent in the village, from the first sardines in March, the tunny in summer, to the last sardine shoals in October. He witnesses the arrival of tourism and the disappearance of old traditions as the villagers first resist then submit to such overwhelming modernities as a clean beach, new sea wall, hotel rooms with porcelain toilets, and incomprehensible French and German holidaymakers.
  The final sign of acceptance of change is when the fishermen's wives, formerly responsible for raising the village chickens, get dressed up in their finery for interviews as chambermaids at the new hotel. So employed, they earn more pesetas a day than their husbands.
  This is a gentle tale, lovingly told. Moments of sadness and tragedy are mixed delicately with comic stories of the eccentric villagers, who come to accept Lewis with less suspicion. It is a glimpse of a lost time but which still retains traces of modern Spain today. Excellent.
  For more about our life in Andalucía, see
  www.notesonaspanishvalley.com
  Read more about my thoughts on books and writing at
  www.sandradanby.com
  
• 
  Beata

  Piękna opowieść, w którą się zapada jak w wysłużony i wygodny fotel. Rzadko się zdarza, żeby opowiadać o świecie, jego zmianach, zaletach i wadach z tak życzliwym podejściem. Bez chęci uwypuklania własnych ocen, bez pouczania i wartościowania. "Głosy starego morza" to wędrówka pod przewodnictwem wypróbowanego przyjaciela.
• 
  Dunrie

  This book chronicles three summers Lewis spent in an isolated fishing village on the Spanish Coast - where age-old suspicions and traditions morph in response to environmental, social, and economic change.
• 
  Bob

  A beautiful account of a way of life long gone. Very touching, very humourous.
  The part of Spain featured in this fine account, is now the Costa Brava. This chronicles the change through the eyes of a fine observer and master of the written word.
• 
  Maria Gambale

  I loved this book. Plain prose, incisive observations. Excellent timing, being present for the transformation - over the course of only three summers - of an inaccessible seaside town in Spain into a resort destination. Will definitely be reading more Norman Lewis.
• 
  Piotr

  W trzecim sezonie NL chyba już nie miał serca do Farol, wszystko wyraźnie zwalnia, słabnie. Ale nie sposób się dziwić. I tak jest to znakomita opowieść i wspaniała historia, taki "reportaż magiczny".
  A! I wielkie brawa dla tłumacza! Kapitalna robota!
• 
  Manda

  A three-summer elegy for a small fishing village that even in the short space of those three summers becomes unrecognizable from the first to the third.
• 
  Judith Johnson

  I spent quite a few childhood summers in a fishing village near Tarragona, and was reminded of many things by this book. Another superb piece of writing by a real master.
• 
  Catrien Deys

  A stunning literary and heartbraking account of two villages so close to my current home, that have been swallowed up by progress.
• 
  Susie

  this a fascinating read, especially if you have ever been to the Spanish coast.
• 
  Steve

  Amazing writing. Lewis does not mince his words but manages to portray hardship in a straightforward way without melodrama. A portrait of of a lost world not that long ago.
• 
  andrew

  Outstanding account of world forgotten but only recently destroyed. It's humanity shines throughout.
• 
  Joseph Spuckler

  Voices of the Old Sea by Norman Lewis is an account of his time in village of Farol on the Costa Brava in Spain during the 1950s. Lewis is the author of many travel books and was particularly fascinated by primitive cultures in the modern world. He wrote on Indonesia, tribes in India, and the effect of missionary work in Latin America. Lewis spends three summers in Farol and documents his time there. Usually it is fiction that requires you to suspend your disbelief; here it is non-fiction. The reader almost feels like he or she is in a Spanish version of Tortilla Flat or Cannery Row.
  
  Farol is a town that struggles to make a living by fishing. Superstition abounds in the town. No leather was allowed anywhere the fishing fleet, which in itself is barely functional. Motorized boats have been cannibalized to the point that the few boats that run barely do. The boats are named with pagan references that government officials make the fishermen cover up and rename. Farol is a single commodity town and fishing in itself is at subsistence level. So important is the fishing that locals turn to a magician who can smell out the tuna. Animals are not killed unless there is good reason. A man shooting rats because they might carry the plague is told to stop and told once there is plague then the rats could be killed. Killing them for no reason would not be tolerated, but sending a message is different though. When dolphins are snagged in fishing nets, they are not killed; they are wounded and released to show the other dolphins what would happen to them if they decided to get snagged in the fisher's nets.
  
  Cats have the run of Farol, and it is know as the cat village. Sort is an adjoining town, known as the dog town. Sort is on its own hard times with the decline of the cork industry and relies on subsistence agriculture. The two villages have their own feud. Life is further complicated by Muga who want to bring tourism to the Farol. Villagers fear that the foreigners staring out at the water from the shore would ruin the fishing.
  
  Voices of the Old Sea is a fun read. It reads like fiction with nearly unbelievable events and characters so colorful that they seem they could they could only come from the authors imagination. Lewis' growing attachment to the village and the process of his acceptance makes for an interesting read. A very good book for all.
  
• 
  Michael McGuire

  Lewis’s writing is wonderfully descriptive, sometimes magical in the way he explains his sea adventures and the surrounding landscape. (I couldn’t choose a particular passage about his fishing and diving, but: “We were on the roof, savouring the crystalline, razor-edged beauty of a day hovering in the sweet limbo between summer and autumn. The sun had crisped away the last of the stubble from Don Alberto’s land, covering the naked earth with a faint patina, like rust, in which sparse details, a horse trough, a stile, a well-head, were engraved with extreme clarity. The atmosphere had an alpine thinness. We could have almost counted the leaves on a tree a half-mile away, and the intensely dry clicking of a water-wheel turned by a donkey sounded like a solemn tick-tick of a grandfather click deep in the ears.”)
  
  Lewis writes from a distance though. He is presumably in the middle of things, close with several villagers from Farol, but he tells his story (especially the latter half of “Season Two”) like an anthropologist. This made the clash of cultures more amusing at the beginning, as Lewis was indoctrinated into the ways of the village and met the characters who fill it. But the more distance he put between himself and the villagers, the less engaging the story became for me. I wanted to know more of what he and the others in Farol were thinking and feeling as the “old ways” began to be washed away.
  
  Perhaps, as a journalist from afar he didn’t think it was his place to comment or to openly resist the turning tide himself. But his views are made clear in other ways: Muga was the only person in town who was hungry for change, “modernization,” and not simply “resigned” to it. Lewis is the only “visitor” (not a tourist?) who doesn’t bring trouble.
• 
  Charlotte

  This was my first go at a Norman Lewis, several of which we inherited from my mother-in-law. I gave up after about 35 pages, I'm afraid. I think it is most peculiar. I have now seen various reviews suggesting that it is in good part fiction, which makes sense to me, as it had the feel of Magical Realism, but purported to be factual. I was thrown by that odd combination - I like Magical Realism and I like factual travel books, but not, clearly, a mishmash of the two. So it is off the charity shop!