James A. Michener's Iberia: Travels and Reflections - Some Quotes from Jim Michener, with My Comments & Thoughts on the Iberia as I am Preparing My Own Book, Homage to Iberia

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On the Fourth of July, 2010, after our visitors, Rozanne Gold and Michael Whiteman, had gone, my spousal equivalent, Kay, and I went to Cold Spring, New York to watch the fireworks.  After the fireworks, we walked up Cold Spring's main street and found a few shops open, hoping to make some sales from people killing time until the traffic cleared out.  

We went into the Mikkonoma antiques-art-books-miscellany shop when I saw a pile of books, including two stacks of James Michener's novels (you can't make this stuff up!) and a paperback Fawcett Crest edition of Iberia: Spanish Travel and Reflections, which I purchased for $3.79 (the original price on the cover was $3.95).  

My hard-bound copy of Iberia is autographed by Jim Michener and some 25 people mentioned in the book, most of whom I had met in Spain because I had read about them in Iberia, which in my early years in Spain was my handbook for exploring the country.  I have read and referred to my original paperback copy so many times that it is falling apart, so I purchased a replacement figuring it would come in handy as I am writing the rest of Homage to Iberia.  

The day after the trip to Cold Spring, I began reading Iberia again to re-acquaint myself with how Michener saw Spain and, since I incessantly underline passages in the books I read, I thought it would be interesting to extract some of Michener's observations and reflections about his travels in Spain and comment on some of them.  My notes (and I will include some of my photographs occasionally to illustrate what Michener is writing about), which will be added to as I re-read Iberia, are below:

July 7, 2010  From the Introduction, p. 17  Burriana (near Castellón de la Plana, north of Valencia).

On the food that Michener got from the bargeman who took him ashore at Burriana from the Scottish freighter he was on, as it was taking on oranges to be made into marmalade back in England.  

"I paid my bargeman for my share of food.  I can taste it yet:  anchovies, which have always been my delight, hard bread, harder cheese, and red wines.  How good it was, how honest in its Spanish quality. . ."

". . . I could rely on the fact that, if only for a moment at the beginning, if only for a moment, I had been allowed to see deep into the quality of Spain.  I saw toiling men, the congenial peasants, the straining beasts (the ocean-swimming oxen that towed the barges of oranges out to the ship-GD), the honest food.  I smelled the salt of the shore, the oranges of the inland fields, the burning chicory that passed for coffee, the sourness of the red wine, the harsh seductiveness of cheap anchovies.  It is this Spain that has been with me through the years, and whenever in subsequent visits I have again come close to that particular vision I have felt at home."