Iberia [Mass Market Paperback]

"Iberia" is a massive, thousand-page love affair with Spain, part history, part travelogue, and part parador-and-tapa-bar guide. It is not 'merely' a tour guide to Spain, any more than Rebecca West's "Black Lamb and Grey Falcon" is 'merely' a tour guide to Yugoslavia. With the possible exception of his Pulitzer Prize winning "Tales of the South Pacific", I believe this to be Michener's finest work.

My opinion (or prejudice) is based on our unforgettable journey through Spain. Michener took us places we never would have found in the standard tourist guides. We pigged out in his tapa bars-"first comes the seafood--- the anchovies, eel, squid, octopus, herring, shrimp, salmon, five kinds of sardines, five kinds of fish; next come the boiled eggs, deviled eggs, egg salad, potato omelets cut in strips, vegetables, onions, salads; third are the cold meats in great variety, including meat balls, York ham, Serran ham, tripe, brains, liver in a variety of styles, beef, pork and veal; and finally the hot dishes..."

I booked us into many of the paradors that he recommended. Paradors are combination hotel-museums, which serve some of the best food in Spain---"Where practical, the paradors are housed in ancient buildings, such as old convents, monasteries, castles no longer in use, hospitals dating back to the age of the Catholic Kings, or inns in which Columbus may have slept."

In Merida, we stayed in a parador that is housed in the 500-year-old Convento de los Frailes de Jesus (Michener's personal favorite). Then there was the castle-parador, the parador that is built within the Alhambra, and the modern, ski-resort parador on the slopes of Monte Perdido. We stumbled across the last-mentioned resort while lost in the Pyrenees, and had it literally to ourselves (and one other couple), since the season was late spring.

My one regret is that we did not get to attend the ancient horse fair that follows Holy Week in Seville, and is so lovingly described in "Iberia." This fair dates back "two thousand years to the days when Romans came here to buy horses for their generals...If a man likes horses, this rough-and-ready market with no rules and little order would delight him. It is conducted under a blazing sun and has about it a strange and ancient quality. I have attended at three different times and found it difficult to believe that I was in the twentieth century..."

If you are planning a trip to Spain, book yourself into the paradors well in advance of your trip (at least a year in advance if you plan to visit during or immediately after Holy Week), try to attend Seville's ancient horse fair, and above all, buy and read Michener's "Iberia."

Michener sets out with a tale of his first sight of Spain and his first voyages through the impoverished rural lands in the 1930s. He then proceeds to examine Spain, bit by bit, starting with Extremadura in the Southwest and finishing up with a grand pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela in Galicia. Every step of the way, he recounts his experiences in fresh prose, not so much concentrating on major tourist sights, though these are described, but the places, the festivals, and the events of his personal odyssey in Spain that demonstrate something about the land.

Michener describes many important festivals, like Pamplona's famous fería de San Fermin with its running of the bulls. He visits landmarks both well-known, like the Prado, and obscure, like the wildlife preserve at Las Marismas. Most interesting for me, he describes time and again his conversations with the Spanish, and he met a lot of them, from the poorest peasants to one President of Spain and a tertulia, a group of the nation's most distinguished intellectuals. It is in conveying a sense of the Spanish people that this book really shines.

I read this huge travelogue in preparation for a trip that will take me through Spain, and I was consistently impressed by Michener's ability to select anecdotes that demonstrate something important about the land. The further you read, the more convinced you will become that Michener is a brilliant man, able to perceive the things in Spain's art, in its cuisine, and in its music, that make it really spectacular. Only he could have written such a book, and he did it with obvious relish. The result is a brilliant portrait of Spain.

His account of Spain, though dated now by thirty years, made me feel as if I were there travelling side by side with Michener. It is wonderfully detailed and always engaging. There are long sections that are just descriptions of art and architecture, and being the art philistine that I am, these became a bit tedious. Still, my appreciation of these passages came less from the art described than from the obvious passion with which Michener describes them...

This book is a must-read.