Books

Far-away adventures The grapes of peace

Noah Gordon is a writer who does not resort to using a flashy literary style or dazzling imagery. His effective but popular books are firmly based on a good story and richly detailed description

Despite early success in the USA, it is in Germany and Spain that his books have really taken off

The Wine­maker has a plot that fits to­gether as well as the church door that its main char­ac­ter, Josep, man­u­fac­tures. Noah Gor­don ex­plains the prob­lem with the old door, where and how the wood is bought and trans­ported and how the parts are joined and glued. His gift is to make these de­tails of craft and every­day life fas­ci­nat­ing. And then he gives them a twist – in this case, that Josep is not re­li­gious.

Ripeness is all

The church door is one of many cameos, while the main theme, the dri­ving force of this book, is wine-mak­ing. Josep and his neigh­bours in Santa Eulàlia, a fic­tional Penedès vil­lage, are small pro­pri­etors who cul­ti­vate vines on nar­row strips of land. The wine is so poor it's sold straight for vine­gar. Josep, though, dreams of mak­ing real wine.

Gor­don's novel is bal­anced be­tween dis­as­ter and suc­cess, tragedy and com­edy, and not till the end do read­ers know which will pre­vail. It is the story of Josep's jour­ney to ma­tu­rity. Re­turn­ing from French exile on his fa­ther's death, he finds his elder brother Donat has aban­doned their land to earn money in one of the new tex­tile fac­to­ries near Barcelona. Josep buys him out, even though he con­demns him­self to years of toil to pay the debt. Yet he is con­tent, for he has de­vel­oped a pas­sion for the land and its vines.

In Langue­doc he had learned how to fer­tilise the land, prune vines, ap­pre­ci­ate dif­fer­ences in soil com­po­si­tion and va­ri­eties of grape, taste them and wait to har­vest. Wait­ing is a risk: the weather might break and a storm ruin the crop. But Josep waits and waits till the day his taste-buds tell him the swollen grape, shiny with early morn­ing dew, is fully ripe. Josep's pas­sion for wine is the glory of the book.

In a bleak back-story, Josep and other young men from the vil­lage were re­cruited for train­ing as sol­diers. These are the sec­ond sons, who have to seek their des­tiny else­where, as the strips of land can only sup­port the el­dest son. They are se­cretly trained by a mys­te­ri­ous mar­tinet, Sergeant Peña.

It is the time of the Carlist wars and Gen­eral Prim, from Reus and lib­eral Prime Min­is­ter in the First Re­pub­lic, is as­sas­si­nated in an 1870 Christ­mas snow-storm (like Kennedy's death, con­tro­ver­sial to this day). Gor­don ably in­serts this real event into his fic­tion: the young men trained in the vil­lage are lured into par­tic­i­pa­tion in the mur­der.

After Prim's as­sas­si­na­tion, the vil­lage men are them­selves killed so they can­not bear wit­ness. By wits and luck, Josep es­capes and reaches exile in France. The threat of Peña's reap­pear­ance hov­ers over the rest of the story.

There are un­con­vinc­ing parts to this back­ground plot: why were the young men is­sued with re­volvers? Why did Peña not look for Josep sooner? De­spite these quib­bles, the Prim plot works as an ac­tion counter-point to Josep's life tied to his vines.

Sex­ual de­sire, money and wine

The novel's power lies in the de­tailed recre­ation of vil­lage life in this his­tor­i­cal pe­riod. Noah Gor­don does not enter too richly into char­ac­ter nor deeply into po­lit­i­cal prob­lems. Yet he is not bland.

He is re­al­is­tic about sex­ual de­sire. A ho­mo­sex­ual priest and his play­ful peas­ant lover, a mother and daugh­ter sell­ing sex, the bal­ance of lust, econ­omy and good con­duct in sex­ual re­la­tion­ships are all treated with re­fresh­ing nat­u­ral­ness. And he writes of money. The poor al­ways worry about money. In The Wine­maker you can breathe the char­ac­ters' anx­i­ety about money.

Josep is a loner, by tem­per­aent and be­cause he saw his friends killed. Grad­u­ally he is drawn into vil­lage life by join­ing the castellers and into joy by his neigh­bour Mari­mar's son Francesc, who longs to be the anx­aneta (the child who crowns the castell or human tower) for the local castellers.

Noah Gor­don's re-cre­ation of Cata­lan coun­try life 140 years ago is some­thing of a study of by­gone rural cus­toms and man­ners. Ill­ness, a pol­luted well, buy­ing a cart, Sit­ges mar­ket, chicken theft and a huge wild boar dig­ging up vines are just some of the local in­ci­dents. The Wine­maker is not pro­found in phi­los­o­phy or char­ac­ter­i­sa­tion, but Gor­don knows how to send the sen­su­ous feel of vines and the tastes of wine as deep into read­ers' feel­ings as the cave, the bodega, that Josep digs out of the hill-side.


Born in 1926, Noah Gor­don grew up in Worces­ter, Mass­a­chu­setts, in a Jew­ish home in Irish and Ital­ian Catholic neigh­bour­hoods. He tells how he es­caped child­hood poverty with day-dreams of far-away ad­ven­tures. As an ado­les­cent, these dreams were fed by the mu­nic­i­pal li­brary (keep them open!). He learned early he wanted to tell sto­ries like the ones he found on the shelves.

And when he be­came a his­tor­i­cal nov­el­ist, he cre­ated pro­tag­o­nists who are out­siders like his own young self and Josep the wine­maker. His sen­si­tiv­ity to some­one who be­longs to a com­mu­nity, yet stands slightly apart, is one of the keys to his pop­u­lar­ity. He is a best-sell­ing writer, but that does not mean he is facile or sim­plis­tic.

Gor­don was just old enough to serve in the in­fantry at the end of World War II. He then fol­lowed his par­ents' wishes and ma­tric­u­lated at uni­ver­sity in Boston as a med­ical stu­dent, but switched se­cretly to jour­nal­ism. Grad­u­at­ing in 1950 he moved to New York, mar­ried Lor­raine and worked in a pub­lish­ing com­pany and then as a sci­ence jour­nal­ist. By 1959 he was back in Boston as sci­ence ed­i­tor of the Boston Her­ald.

His first pub­lished novel, The Rabbi (1965), be­came a big-seller in the USA. He has fol­lowed it with seven more works of his­tor­i­cal fic­tion, metic­u­lously re­searched and slowly writ­ten. Sev­eral high­light med­ical themes, his favourite sub­ject, he says, be­cause med­i­cine rep­re­sents “the drama of life or death”.

De­spite early suc­cess in the USA, it is in Ger­many and Spain that his books have re­ally taken off. The Physi­cian (1986) has sold some ten mil­lion copies, but only ten thou­sand in the USA. It be­came a Ger­man film (2013) and is now into pro­duc­tion as a mu­si­cal. Un­usu­ally for an Eng­lish-lan­guage writer, but re­flect­ing where his sales are, his most re­cent novel, The Wine­maker re­viewed here, was first pub­lished in Span­ish.

The Cole tril­ogy, con­sist­ing of The Physi­cian, Shaman (1992) and Mat­ters of Choice (1996), fea­tures three doc­tors of the same fam­ily in the eleventh, nine­teenth and twen­ti­eth cen­turies, re­spec­tively. The third deals with a woman's right to choose, show­ing Gor­don's lib­eral val­ues, which per­me­ate The Wine­maker, too. More on him and his books at

www.​noahgordon.​com

The Winemaker Author: Noah Gordon Publisher: Open Road - Barcelona Digital Editions Date: 2012 Pages: 333 A bitter-sweet epic that tells of Josep, a young grape-grower in the Penedès region with an affinity for the soil. Josep makes wine, yearns to marry Teresa, and finds himself forced to fight for survival in the 1870s.
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