Certainly my favourite of the three Norman Lewis books I've read so far, this covers three consecutive summers in the years post-WWII spent in a pseudonymous fishing village on the Costa Brava, and the effacement within that period of the traditional way of life by easy tourist money. Lewis gradually gets himself accepted by the villagers, joins them on fishing expeditions with line, net, and spear, and writes with his usual effortless grace, precision, and humour of the place and its people.

The cultural oddities of Farol, and its impoverished inland neighbour village of Sort, seem inexhaustible. Farol in general, and its fishermen in particular, are vehemently irreligious, refusing to enter the church or to admit the priest to their houses, their bar, or their boats. Leather shoes are absolutely taboo. In the evenings in the bar, the fishermen recount their days at sea (in Castilian, not their habitual Catalan) in extemporised epic coplas which, as reported by Lewis, are of a very high standard. The itinerant wise man/healer/curandero is relied upon not just for medical aid but for dispute resolution and life advice in general, which he accomplishes with astrology, tarot-readings and a folk-pharmacopeia. The local decayed gentleman retains a quasi-feudal relationship with a few peon families who work his land in return for bread and beans. The poverty is as extreme as the quirkiness, exacerbated by subpar sardine harvests and the decimation of the cork plantations, sole resource of Sort, by disease. Marriages are on hold, sex is only allowed at siesta time, and the curandero's marinated sea-sponge contraceptives are in high demand in an effort to limit the number of mouths to feed.

The book turns at the halfway point, when a local black-marketeer on the make moves in and starts splashing the cash to fit Farol out for the nascent package tourism industry.

The sheer eccentricity of Farol and its characters made for a somewhat bumpy ride despite my well-tuned suspension of disbelief. This, combined with the fact that Lewis wrote the book from notes, three decades after the events in it, and the liberties that he's known to have taken (like actually being there with his wife and kid, not as a lone outsider as per the book) meant that I found it hard to shake the suspicion that he'd (a) made up a bunch of stuff and (b) telescoped the timeline of Farol's touristification. It's hard to credit that the near-total eradication of the old ways could have happened in just three years, but he was there and I wasn't, and anyway the moral of the story — that money is a quick-acting drug and the old ways don't die all that hard in the face of it — holds true. Probably best to think of this as fiction-non-fiction and not get hung up on authenticity. It's packed with character and plot, regardless, and ends on an exquisitely-pitched elegiac note that will soften the flintiest of hearts.