A Place in Normandy

Preparing to take up the generations-old love affair with his family’s farmhouse in Normandy, Nicholas Kilmer is beset by enemies – many of whom appear in the guise of friends. Julia, his wife, also objects: “That place…is full of ghosts. I don’t want to go on about it, but all of them are your relatives. And…not one of them picks up after himself”. In 1966, long after the war that devastated Normandy, the body of Kilmer’s grandmother was carried back to France to be buried alongside that of her husband, the American impressionist painter Frederick Frieseke. It was only then that the family realized it still owned the remnants of a large old house, standing amid acres of orchard, woodland, and pasture, in Mesnil, a town almost completely sunken away (to quote a local taxi driver) dans la nature. Thirty years later, sporadic familial attempts to save the property have reached the point where something definitive must happen: the author argues that he should buy the place. One advantage of this solution would be that it would then be clear whose fault everything was. A Place in Normandy chronicles the struggle between the forces of love and sanity, man and wife, nature and civilization, family and identity, past and present – and in so doing touches upon plumbers, owls, cultural collisions, food shopping, the ways of the Norman countryside, laundry, and snatches of the history of the village of Mesnil, going back to the Cretaceous era.