Romancing Spain

by Lamar Herrin

Does a man fall in love with a country first or the woman he finds there?

And which love is finally the greatest?

In this elegant account of his falling for the Spanish woman he married 30 years ago, Lamar Herrin opens his heart, his natural skepticism, and an American’s awe of history to a complex nation that is both rich in tradition and astoundingly foreign.

Portraying himself as a Quixote in love with Romance, Herrin allows us to watch as he struggles to win the woman who will finally open her arms to him in a world where the Church and Bureaucracy are unwilling to.

By turns comic and moving — and always lyrical — there are beauty and good heart enough in this eloquent book for travelers and lovers alike.

272 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2006

Reviews

[Chris · Rating 2 out of 5]

Part love story, part travelogue with no maps or pictures, this memoir weaves back and forth in time from a recent trip of Spain to the past when he courted his wife. His wife has some sort of illness though, seizures, which is never fully explained. What is hammered home is his frustration with the Catholic Church in the process of trying to get married to a Catholic as a divorced Protestant; and that gets old quickly but won't go away. Herrin does a lot of illusion to Cervantes as he too like Don Quixote is on a quest with his wife to find the perfect small town to retire.

[Charlene · Rating 2 out of 5]

Interesting concepts for the book . . . it is the story of a relationship & marriage, alternating between the courtship and wedding time and then 29 years afterwards, when the couple are taking a long road trip, exploring the whole of Spain (wife is from Valencia, on the eastern coast, where the story begins). Another concept is that the author, who goes on to become a lit professor at Cornell, is in love with and baffled by both the woman and the country. There is an occasional sentence that refers to the marriage itself, to the children, etc., but for the most part the first story is the story of romance with woman and the second with the country.
I stuck with the book, picking it up again and again after finishing something else to read a few more pages, so it took me more than the 3 months to complete. Just didn't quite work as a way to tell a story or describe a country. I came away baffled by the couple, especially the author himself, and not really any wiser about the country.