Overview

It was the last chance Guy Fallows would give himself. A stunning 16th-century Provencal dovecote he'd found while hiking had given him both the inspiration and the material necessary to write a new novel. It had also led him to Solange Daubigny who'd inherited that seemingly weightless structure, years earlier. Together they found themselves enveloped in a clandestine affair: each Thursday, the elegant, highly sedate Solange flourished under the pseudonym of Frederique. As their passion grew, so did the tower in Fallows' novel. The dovecote also led Fallows to reconstitute its recent history. For, during the war years, it had been restored to its present glory by an obscure Italian stonemason, Guido Stampelli. How, though, had Solange's mother - who'd commissioned the work - paid for such labour, given that she'd been left penniless by her husband, despised collaborator who'd fled to West Africa? In Gustaf Sobin's consummate narrative one hypnotically absorbing love story reflects another. Like the limestone monument itself his novel soars to a power quite its own. Author of four novels, three of essays on Provence, and many volumes of poetry, Gustaf Sobin lived in Provence for over 40 years.

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9781848619876

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Gustaf Sobin (1935-2005) was an American expatriate poet, resident for many years in Provence. He was born in Boston and, in 1962, moved to France, meeting Rene Char during his early days in Paris, a poet whose work he greatly admired and whose poetry was to have a great influence on his own. It was Char who suggested that Sobin go to Provence, and he settled in a small hamlet in the Luberon, where he was able to purchase an old silk cocoonery, and then to live frugally, while trying to find his way as a writer. It took some years before he was to find his poetic voice but, in the 1970s, his work was taken up by Eliot Weinberger's pioneering magazine Montemora which went on to publish his first two collections. Subsequent collections were published by New Directions and Talisman House. In his later years, Sobin also took to fiction and essays, writing four novels and two remarkable collections of essays on Provence. Dark Mirrors was his second foray into fiction, after Venus Blue.

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