Books: Corinna Sargood’s The Village in the Valley
Books
A Home in a Foreign Place
By Edward Behr
The Village in the Valley: Travels in Mexico and Italy by Corinna Sargood. Prospect Books, US$20/UK £20/CAN$39 (2021).
A sense of fantasy runs through the work of Corinna Sargood, who first came to be known as the illustrator of The Virago Book of Fairytales. You may also know her drawings from the exceptional Honey from a Weed, about the food in four Mediterranean places, drawings that perfectly evoke the worlds that Patience Gray describes. Sargood, as a writer, is gentler, softer than Gray, more vulnerable, less sure and omniscient, possibly even more attracted to the byways of life and the unexpectedly preserved pockets of the past. There’s a joy in life in Sargood’s art and in her writing.
The Village in the Valley tells of her finding a home in a village, the counterpart to the adjoining town on the hill, somewhere to the west of Mexico City. The town is more affluent; no outsider had ever before visited the village in the valley. (Full disclosure: a couple of small sections of the book first appeared in AoE.) The wealth of drawings goes far beyond the illustration of any normal book — the pleasure of black and white, the style, the fact of lines drawn on paper are all a relief and inspiration to anyone satiated by food photos or wearied by the illustrations produced on a screen. The Village in the Valley may seem like a travel book, but it’s more precisely a book of arrival. Sargood is a fine observer, primarily an artist rather than a cook; this is only peripherally a gastronomic book. A theme is the welcome given to strangers, surely all the warmer because the villagers sensed their kindness and appreciation. “Their,” because this is more subtly a story of a new relationship. Sargood arrives in Mexico with a furniture-maker from England; together they are looking for a place to work. (The relationship proves strong enough to support a marriage.) The two are valiant in their bus travel among humble people, a car apparently never having been part of the plan. Not everything is positive. The rainy season turned the lanes completely muddy: “Walking to the bakers became a major expedition.” The roof leaked, like the roofs of most of the houses; at the wettest moment, the wood shavings couldn’t be lit to make a fire. And there were, for example, the gunshots that flew over the village in the valley each night, never spoken of, never explained.
Sargood places a high value on craft and the work of the hand, such as in the year’s many traditional celebrations. At the market in Oaxaca (a trip away after six months in the village), two days before Christmas, for la noche de los rábanos, “the night of radishes,” there are displays of many sorts: “My favorite came complete with two Marys, Roman soldiers, a nine-runged ladder, three nails, and vinegar sponge on a pole, gaming dice, and a crowing cockerel. Against a pink and white hill full of pink and white flowers, was a tender tableau of Our Lord crucified. All had been made of radishes.”
Food recurs, an inevitable part of almost anything. “On long dusty bus journeys, we kept a sharp look-out for the mango vendors,” so as to experience “the slippery, sensual texture of the mango, coupled with exquisite flavour.” She advises, “The large yellow variety is often available on a wooden stick with an optional sprinkling of powdered chilli. It is cut in a way to make it resemble a rose, and will quench your thirst as well as divert your thoughts from hunger.”
They made friends and their characters become evident. You aren’t clearly anchored in time, but it’s enough to sense that you’re in the near-present. (Well, having read, I happened to glance again at the introduction and found that the visits to Mexico have been going on for 30 years.) Minor warnings are that, here and there, sentences appear not to have been read by a copy editor, and one wishes the reproduction of all the drawings had been equally sharp and on the same scale. The final pages about travels in Italy, though unconnected with the story of the book, are no less a pleasure, not to be missed. ●
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