Tony Cohan is an American novelist and travel writer from Venice, California. His wife, Masako, is an American-born artist of Japanese origin from San Francisco. They first visited San Miguel de Allende, an attractive hill town in the north of Mexico, in January 1985. By June of the same year they had sold their home near Hollywood, and moved there permanently.
This is Cohan's account of how life in San Miguel rescued them from a spiral of mindless materialism and "burn-out", and restored a human dimension to their everyday life.
Cohan is of the generation that came of age during the late 1960s, and moreover he is a Californian. He is not afraid of sentiment, nor has he apparently heard of overwriting. Almost the entire book is in the present tense, inscribed with a hushed reverence that makes the toes curl: "Deep in July, what does it mean to internalise the sound of church bells, fireworks at six in the morning? Burros' braying, Mexican curses and words of praise? The days and weeks gain rhythm, unfold in time. The cobbled paths we tread become inner landscapes."
Perhaps it should be noted in mitigation that Cohan and his wife had left a neighbourhood of Los Angeles where a series of violent robberies and killings had led them to install a house alarm system with something called a "perimeter defence" and a sign stuck in their lawn warning of "Armed Response".
It takes about 200 pages for Cohan to recover from his initial raptures over San Miguel. Eventually it emerges that he is not such a klutz as his prose style would make one think. After 14 years of residency, including the purchase and restoration of a 250-year old colonial house, Cohan has acquired a welcome world-weariness. He has learnt about the tensions and drawbacks of life in San Miguel, as well as its pleasures.
San Miguel de Allende, noted for its crumbling but beautiful colonial architecture - including over 20 churches - its cobbled streets and clear mountain air, and its picturesque fiestas has long been a favourite destination for Bohemian-minded foreigners, as well as artistically-inclined Mexicans. Neal Cassady, the real-life hero of Jack Kerouac's On the Road, walked to his death on the railway line outside the town in 1968. There are several thousand North Americans and Europeans among San Miguel's 80,000 population, which is being further swelled by middle-class Mexicans fleeing from the capital city. It is like Ballydehob on a much bigger scale, and as far from a typical Mexican village as Kinsale is from a typical Irish small town.
It is possible to live in San Miguel without speaking Spanish, but this is not the option chosen by Cohan and Masako, even though the life he describes is frankly expatriate. Their daily life is spent either alone in the studio, or socialising with their peers. This is far from the real Mexico, described so well by Harriet Doerr in Stones for Ibarra, but Cohan is well aware of that.
In contrast to his lush, overladen prose, his understanding of his precarious status as a foreigner in Mexico is acute, as is his understanding of why most North Americans get Mexico so wrong: they cannot recognise that they are looking at people with a culture and a history far older and more complex than their own. The one thing Tony Cohan has learnt in 14 years is not to underestimate the Mexican: "Aztec, Spanish, Catholic. Pre-Hispanic, civil, religious. A triple cosmology, founded upon the sun god and human sacrifice, rape and conquest, Christianity and the Napoleonic Code. No wonder being Mexican is complicated."
Alannah Hopkin is a writer and critic