The Time in Tavel

Brewster Chamberlin readily admits one of the great pieces of buona Fortuna in his life was the 14 months he spent with Lynn-Marie Smith in a small village in the South of France just northwest of the old walled city of Avignon. This sprightly memoir is the story of those deeply enriching and adventurous months in a landscape both enchanted and occasionally dangerous, filled with the wildly magical scenes Van Gogh, Lawrence Durrell and other painters and writers have so vividly captured in their Provence-inspired work. Chamberlin’s narrative takes the reader from the couple’s first jaunty but seemingly frivolous thoughts about living in France generated by equal amounts of wine, food and frustration with life in Washington, through the serious matter of actually moving there and living through the vicissitudes of daily life in a countryside and language with which the couple possessed only a shaky acquaintance.

Unable to break into the tenured groves of academe, despite a solid and well-received doctoral dissertation, Brewster Chamberlin spent several decades of his life working as a historian, archivist, university teacher, lecturer, poet, essayist and writer of longer and shorter fictions while living in Manhattan, Germany, France (Provence), Italy, Washington DC and Greece. In 2001 he retired from an executive position at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC to move with his wife Lynn-Marie Smith to Key West, Florida, to concentrate on his writing.