It's very special. The number one best book I've ever read is similar, a historian found a bunch of 14th c verbatim court transcripts of the Inquisition of the last of the Cathars, residents of a lost Occitan village called
Montaillou, which disappeared 700 years ago with them. The transcripts had been sitting around the Vatican unread for centuries. In the late 60s or early 70s, Ladurie, the historian of the annales school of history found them and resurrected the village, all its characters, dwellings, occupations, and the Cathar world, which also ended with the execution of the villagers. Previously history had been thought to be the story of 30 white boys in Paris. But the annalistes looked to different sources and infrastructures and records and came up with this absolutely transcendent method of resurrecting a whole universe disappeared in a genocide. (See also IB Singer's short stories, which won a Nobel prize for doing the same.
This one Singer chose to lead his vast collection, to signify his life as a writer, and I cry every time I read it.)
Brits got on to the annaliste way with
Akenfield. in 1969, by Roland Blythe, which chronicled the disappearing agricultural lives that Suffolk villagers had literally lived for thousands of years. They who come, till the soil, and lie beneath -- Tindall quotes this
So Gillian Tindall, lucky for us, did the same for Chassignoles, 12 minutes from Crozon. One of
Celestine's suitors, who wrote one of the letters Tindall recreated their world from, lived in Crozon and so its early 19th c life, and millennia previous, are resurrected a little too. I will precis when I finish, it's important to know the universe Stephanie Jarvis disrespects so heinously, and to pay attention to it. Tindall's bibliography of French histories of the Berry (the disappearance of wolves!!!! The Grande Meaulnes!!!!!) could make you yelp with frustration Jarvis knows and cares nothing. Her stupid Dangerous Liaisons Lalande aristo fantasy is of the old dead school of 30 white boys in Paris history and completely out of whack with the lively culture that's been happening around there for tens of thousands of years.
Oxford educated and functionally illiterate.
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