Chasing Dreams and Flies: A Tragicomedy of Life in France by Dorothea Shefer-Vanson; © 2016, books on Kindle; 253 pages.
By Donald H. Harrison
SAN DIEGO – Dorothea Shefer-Vanson is an author and writer whose freelance stories are regularly published by San Diego Jewish World, among other publications. Normally she and her husband Yigal reside in the Jerusalem suburb of Mevasseret Zion, but she often visits central France where her brother chose to live. As children of German refugees, the author’s family grew up in England, so Shefer-Vanson is intimately familiar with many cultures.
In this book, which moves along at a pace as leisurely as that of the retirees who are the novel’s protagonists, Shefer-Vanson tells of John and Sophie from Peterborough, England, who having become fed up with the foreigners who have invaded their neighborhood decide to move to rural France, where they hope to recreate the proper English life denied to them in their own country.
This retired couple are self-absorbed, only minimally interested in the French people and culture, and ever ready to complain about their neighbors or speak superciliously about the workmen who they must engage for work at their house. In short, they become a mirror image of the foreigners about whom they complained in England. From this reader’s perspective, they are a thoroughly unpleasant couple–made only barely tolerable by their enduring love for each other and by their humorous misadventures grappling with French vocabulary.
At first the home they purchase in rural France seems to be all that they had hoped for: nice scenery; a private garden to enjoy while dining outside; monthly expenses well within the limits of their savings and pension. But a neighbor with whom they remonstrate for smoking and fouling the air becomes increasingly hostile and aggressive toward them; making himself impossible to ignore.
A side story in this novel is about another British expatriate, a young woman who was disappointed in love. Julie had decided that getting away to south central France might enable her to write that novel she always had dreamed about. But a well-muscled workman who is a British expatriate like herself carries her mind away from her computer.
That workman, Steve, links the two stories together which occur in different villages. Steve is called upon to build a higher fence between the retirees and their difficult neighbor.
Of all the characters, that of the antagonistic neighbor is the most difficult for us to decipher, perhaps because for the most part, the book’s point of view is that of the retirees. We know that the neighbor fulminates in French, a language neither husband nor wife understands sufficiently. We don’t know what has aroused the neighbor’s ire until near the very end of the book, when author Shefer-Vanson adopts an omniscient voice to help us put matters straight.
This novel strengthens one’s appreciation for the commonsense maximum that when one moves to another country, one must not look down upon the inhabitants, but rather should go out and learn about them and their ways.
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Harrison is editor of San Diego Jewish World. He may be contacted via donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com. Comments intended for publication in the space below MUST be accompanied by the letter writer’s first and last name and by his/ her city and state of residence (city and country for those outside the United States.)