WINE DINE & TRAVEL MAGAZINE SUMMER FALL 2015 HD.pdf

Susan McBeth’s
TRAVEL BY THE BOOK
“LISETTE’S LIST” by SUSAN VREELAND
Which cities are on your summer travel list? If
you are an art aficionado, perhaps you will
seek out the superb new architecture in Berlin,
the sculptural masterpieces housed in Florence,
London’s multiple antiquities collections, the “Museum
Mile” in New York City, or even San Miguel
de Allende’s colony of art and artists. Of course, no
list of this sort would be complete without Paris and
Provence, birthplace of impressionism and talented
nineteenth century painters like Camille Pissarro,
Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Paul
Cézanne, and Claude Monet.
And if the latter are your destinations
of choice, don’t forget
to compile a complementary
reading list that includes New
York Times bestselling author
Susan Vreeland’s newest historical
novel, “Lisette’s List.”
Bringing to life the beauty,
charm, and art of provincial
France, this richly imagined
love story follows young newlywed
wife Lisette as she is torn
from her sophisticated world as
a Parisian art gallery apprentice
to the small Provençal village
of Roussillon , where husband
André has agreed to move to
care for his ailing grandfather,
Pascal, in the years leading up
to World War II.
As the lovers arrive in Roussillon,
Vreeland simultaneously charms a reluctant Lisette,
as well as the reader, with a sumptuous feast of
the sensorial kind. Her tantalizing descriptions of the
local landscape provide a hint of the inspiration that
drove the great impressionist painters to create such
masterpieces as Cézanne’s Quarry of Bebémus, Pissarro’s
Red Roofs, Corner of a Village, Summer, and
Marc Chagall’s Promenade,
The beauty of art is soon replaced by the ugliness
of war when the Nazis threaten their little village,
and André is called away to the front, leaving
Lisette to care for Pascal.
She plays the dutiful wife role well and, although
annoyed at first, Lisette tolerates Pascal as he share
stories of his former life working in the nearby red,
orange, and golden-hued ochre mines that Vreeland
so deliciously describes, and she is fascinated to learn
that it is these very mines that provided paint pigments
used by impressionist painters.
Her begrudging spirit subsides, and Lisette forges a
bond with the old man, entranced each time he recounts
his interactions with
famous artists like Chagall and
Pisarro. She is also stunned
to learn that the mesmerizing
paintings she had daily admired
in his quaint home (until
he and his grandson hid them
from the Nazis before André
went off to war) are actually
those he acquired in his younger
days as a framemaker, when
he traded frames for paintings
from artists who had insufficient
monetary means.
If you are not familiar with the
novel’s central works of art,
and even if you are, close your
eyes and allow Vreeland to
bring them to life with her rich
visual feast of pictorialization
that connect the paintings to
the surrounding ochre-imbued
hillsides. It is here where Vreeland
shines best, delving into
the mission common to all of
her multiple bestselling novels to acutely depict the
relationship between art and personal connection.
While the novel would have been better served to
omit certain unnecessary connections, like jilted lover
Maxime, it is easy to forgive minor authorial transgressions
when the multi-sensorial banquet provided
by Vreeland, from the “raucous cackle” of roosters, to
the sweet almond confectionery of marzipan, to the
ambrosial terrain of Cezanne’s landscapes, sates so
delectably. Bon appetit, reader!
~By Susan McBeth
Wine Dine & Travel Summer/Fall 2015 89