Long Ago In France: The Years In Dijon (Destinations) | 
| Author: M.f.k. Fisher
Publisher: Touchstone
Category: Book
List Price: $12.00
Buy Used: $0.01
You Save: $11.99 (100%)
New (27) Used (56) Collectible (3) from $0.01
Avg. Customer Rating:  7 reviews
Sales Rank: 269161
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 176
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.4
Dimensions (in): 8.4 x 5.5 x 0.5
ISBN: 0671755145
Dewey Decimal Number: 641.092
EAN: 9780671755140
ASIN: 0671755145
Publication Date: February 15, 1992
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: Expedited shipping available
Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: Giving great service since 2004: Buy from the Best! 4,000,000 items shipped to delighted customers. We have 1,000,000 unique items ready to ship! Find your Great Buy today!
|
| Also Available In:
|
| Similar Items:
|
| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
From one of the most gifted writers of our time, a nostalgic account of France, replete with fascinating characters and memorable meals. In this very personal reminiscence, readers glimpse beautiful Dijon against the backdrop of between-the-wars Europe through the eyes, heart and stomach of a most wise and articulate woman.
|
| Customer Reviews: Read 2 more reviews...
 Dijon du Jour June 30, 2006
With her usual wit and style, MFK Fisher brings the food and atmosphere of Dijon alive. It is a fun book, perfect as an introduction to a way of life that is both foreign and dated. The delights of the table set by an eccentric landlady and shared with a variety of characters from the building, are extravegant. Fisher also draws a picture of the town's restaurants, markets, and life.
A good read.
 Enjoyable, tantalizing January 4, 2006
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
This is an enjoyable, tantalizing book, with some dull spots in the earlier chapters. It is an account of Fisher's 3 years in Dijon, where she moved in 1929 so that her new husband could pursue a doctorate. She was 20 years old, bright, pretty, charming, in love, and most of all, enthusiastic. The reader gets caught up in all this, so as to overlook the book's serious drawback. Fisher can write very nicely, but you learn much more about her landladies than her husband. Fisher says of her sister Norah, "she TOO speaks always with reserve" (caps mine). The book is written as if you are already acquainted with Fisher, as no doubt many readers are, but for the rest I would recommend, before starting the book, that they look up M.F.K. Fisher in Google and thereby get to the site about Fisher sponsored by Les Dames d'Escoffier International.
Excellent Memoir and Writing, but not her best January 24, 2005
8 out of 12 found this review helpful
`Long Ago in France' by premier American food writer M.F.K. Fisher was one of her last autobiographical memoirs of life in France. She may not have invented the `American in Europe' memoir exemplified by Peter Mayle's `My Year in Provence' and Frances Mayes `Under the Tuscan Sun', but she certainly helped define the genre with this work as well as `Map of Another Town', `A Considerable Town', and parts of many of her other autobiographical works such as `The Gastronomical Me'.
The events in this book, covering much of the first three years of Ms. Fisher's life with her first husband, Al Fisher, spent in a private boarding house in Dijon while hubby Fisher was completing his doctoral dissertation at the University in Dijon. The period of this book occupies a scant seven pages in `Poet of the Appetites', the biography of Ms. Fisher by Joan Reardon, yet the original book reveals practically nothing about the life of husband and wife Fisher. It certainly does not give any clue to why they ended up in Dijon, since their original intention was to study at the more prestigious university in Strasbourg.
This is the first complete work of M.F.K. Fisher's I have read and I feel just a little disappointment. The word pictures of living and eating in Dijon are certainly illuminating, but there is practically none of the humor you find in the books from Mayles and Mayes. There is also less of the scintillating writing I have sampled in some of her more famous pieces. By the author's own admission, much of this material is also a reworking of material from earlier published works as much as it is new stuff mined from her journals of this period.
The most obvious omission is a sense of the troubling times in which these events take place. The three years covered in the narrative are from 1929 through 1931, yet there is virtually no mention of the great depression as it affects Dijon, let alone how it affects the writer and her husband. Oddly, the same is true of Fisher's life as described by her biographer. Fisher's father was the editor, publisher, and owner of a small newspaper in California who did much to subsidize the student life of the young Fishers and of Mary Frances through several difficult years between marriages. Yet, there is practically no mention of this in the writings by and about Fisher.
This book is essential reading for anyone interested in Ms. Fisher's life and the influences on her writing, as she is easily, in the twentieth century American culinary world, the Wittgenstein to Julia Child's Einstein. That is the much lesser known theorist of culinary desire matched with the incomparable practitioner of culinary technique, both of whom got their inspiration from the food and cooking of France.
Yet, compared to similar works by probably less talented writers, this book is just a bit flat and dusty, befitting its recollections of events over sixty years before in the author's life. The stories of life are illuminating. The stories of people are a little empty, as all characters other than Mary Frances herself are long gone from the stage.
One of the best from America's 1st literary foodie July 24, 2003
18 out of 18 found this review helpful
MFK Fisher holds a special place in the hearts of all `foodie' Americans. She was perhaps the 1st person to see the sense of writing food-based literary books and articles, and of course it's now a genre unto itself. But few have rivaled her beautiful prose, and I recall reading that she once said she considered it a day well-lived if she'd managed to compose one perfect sentence. To consider her just a food writer is to do her an injustice; she is a writer, first and foremost, who happens, sometimes, to write about food.
Long Ago in France is a memoir of her years in Dijon in the 30s, a book full of rich wine, rich ideas, character portraits filled with rich detail. It's about Life, a life filled with joy, experience, food, travel, and memorable people. This book is a paean to a lost era.
Highest recommendation.
A Reader's Feast November 16, 2002
25 out of 25 found this review helpful
Between 1929 and 1932, young M.F.K. Fisher (later a famed chef and memoirist) and her husband Al Fisher lived and studied in Dijon, France. Here she discovered the people and the food of Burgundy, and she describes both with warmth, sensuality, and humor (without becoming overly sentimental: "It was there, I now understand, that I started to grow up, to study, to make love, to eat and drink, to be me and not what I was expected to be." Her writing is crisp and evocative. "He took the apple slices from the bowl one by one, almost faster than we could see, and shook off the wine and laid them in a great, beautiful whorl, from the outside to the center, as perfect as a snail shell. We said not a word. The music trembled in the room." Fisher helps the reader discover the beauty of our appetites. She writes of an old soldier who offers her chocolate: "The chocolate broke at first like gravel into many separate, disagreeable bits...Then they grew soft, and melted voluptuously." Then a doctor offers her bread, admonishing, "Never eat chocolate without bread, young lady!" There is a delicious denouement: "...in two minutes my mouth was full of fresh bread, and melting chocolate, and as we sat gingerly, the three of us, on the frozen hill...we peered shyly and silently at each other and chewed at one of the most satisfying things I have ever eaten..." This was a time of great importance for Fisher, and she generously shares her experiences in a richly satisfying book. It's a small treasure.
|
|
|
