Spanish Lessons: Beginning a New Life in Spain

In the shrewd, comical spirit of Peter Mayle and Bill Bryson, Derek Lambert discovers the charms and idiosyncrasies of Spain as he experiences the rewards and frustrations of beginning a new life there.

Journalist Derek Lambert spent his career as a foreign correspondent covering conflicts around the world while living at one time or another in England, the United States, Russia, Hong Kong, Canada, Ireland, Israel, and Gibraltar. When he decided to settle down to a simpler life as a novelist, he chose Spain, the land that has inspired writers from Cervantes to Hemingway and Michener. Lambert knew Spain was a sun-splashed country with a breathtaking landscape, robust food and wine, and people who have a remarkable zest for living. What he didn’t realize when he and his wife and young son arrived in a vibrant village on Spain’s Mediterranean Costa Blanca was that learning to live in Spain would prove to be an adventure almost as challenging and eye-opening as any of his journalistic assignments.

In Spanish Lessons, Lambert recounts his first year in Spain with affection for the country and its people, an unerring eye for the distinctive traits of Spanish village life, and a wry, self-deprecating wit that lends his story frequent hilarity. After a too-friendly realtor books him into a “hotel” that turns out to be a brothel, Lambert and his wife are shown a moldering white casita in a citrus grove that wins their hearts. Taking charge of the restoration of their new home, Lambert hires a roofer with a fear of heights, a plumber who is confounded by a blocked pipe and a plasterer who can’t work without a blaring boom-box. He also clashes wills with a stubborn-as-a-mule-gardener, faces the region’s first snowstorm in ages, battles a lemon-grove fire, and bumbles through Spanish lessons with a mocking classmate who challenges him to a public arm-wrestling competition.

As he is drawn deeper into the rich texture and relaxed rhythm of Spanish life, Lambert uncovers a Spain separate from the the bullfights, tapas bars and flemenco of tourist brochures–a nation still grappling with its dark history, steeped in romance and festivity, where getting things done can always wait until mañana. Ultimately, Lambert’s greatest lesson is that Spain derives its mystique not from the well-worn clichés, but from the bewitching character of its passionate, eccentric, often contradictory people.

Unpredictable, filled with humorous incidents, and animated by memorable characters, Spanish Lessons presents a delightful portrait of off-the-tourist-track Spain.