Eighty Days in Corsica

Having spent two hundred pages quarrelling with George Sand about Mallorca, Alexander does the obvious thing and picks a fight with a better opponent.Dorothy Carrington arrived in Corsica in 1948 and stayed fifty-four years. She learned the language. She sat in kitchens in the Niolu listening to old men describe things no reasonable person in London would have believed, and wrote it all down without laughing at any of it. Granite Island is one of the finest books ever written about a small place by someone who came from somewhere else.So the charge is not that she was unfair. The charge is that she wrote an elegy for a world that did not die.Eighty days, from Bucharest overland: trains across Europe, a night ferry from Livorno, and then the island on foot and on the trinighellu, the little trembler, the narrow-gauge railway that has been failing to be closed for a century.Bastia with its back turned. The customs officers' path round Cap Corse. The chestnut country emptying and refilling. Paoli's house. Corte and its students. Filitosa's armed stone men. Sartène and the cross carried barefoot at midnight. Bonifacio's wrong rock. The Niolu in the rain, where a shepherd takes the entire argument apart over two bottles and explains that what died was never the belief, it was the permission to say it aloud.Full of food, feuds, fire, wine, dogs asleep on flat roofs, and fifteen thousand people singing a Marian hymn before a football match.Alexander came to win. Will he?.