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Formentera was published by New Press in 1972 and has been out of print since 1977.  A few copies are available through antiquarian booksellers and online.  The novel is most likely to be found in libraries.  A French edition translated by Arlette Francière was published by Le Cercle du Livre de France in 1976 in the Collection des deux Solitudes.

Formentera

About the Book

On tiny, primitive, isolated Formentera, smallest of the Spanish Balearic Islands, a clutch of expatriates converges in the mid-1960s.  They come from North America and the United Kingdom, Sweden and Germany, bringing their counterculture values – attitudes toward sex, drugs and alcohol that clash with the island’s traditional peasant culture.  The young visitors are a harbinger of drastic change for an island that will soon be transformed, like neighbouring Ibiza, by mass tourism.

Among the twenty-something invaders are old friends from Toronto, John and Bruce, who share a house in a village. Their friendship is unexpectedly complicated when Bruce falls in love with Deirdre, a Scottish woman having a casual affair with John.  But John becomes more deeply involved with Sylvie, an American engaged to be married back home, who has retreated to Formentera to reconsider her future.  Sylvie, John and Bruce move into the countryside together, reclaiming an abandoned farmhouse.  Soon they all must resolve difficult questions of commitment, forced on them by their personal contradictions and the imminent development of the island by tourist operators.

Formentera is Roy MacSkimming’s first novel, published when he was twenty-eight.  In vivid lyrical prose it evokes a rite of passage for a generation that sought adventure, meaning and eros in Europe.  Above all, the novel celebrates “God’s playroom,” an idyllic island whose beauty and simplicity are threatened by outsiders seeking those very same qualities.

Excerpt

The following passage opens Formentera:

They were cut off again.  The boat had left in the morning as usual but hadn’t returned.  By late afternoon the skies had darkened suddenly, a gale had come up from nowhere, churning the water, and the crew had said no thanks and stayed sitting in their café on the Ibiza waterfront, preparing to spend the night away from home.

At six the rain still hadn’t started, though the wind continued to blow, rattling windows, sending whirlwinds of dust spiraling through the village.  When the storm did begin it would be deafening, implacable, wrapping the island ever more darkly in itself, exempt from the catastrophes repeating themselves endlessly in the world, the revolutions being betrayed.

John left the house and stepped long-legged into the rutted street, one hand holding the basket strap over his shoulder, the other sheltering his eyes.  The wind rattled his jeans.  He walked past the church into the heart of the village, toward the bar of garish light where the violet-black clouds broke raggedly above the horizon.  He loved the sky for its exclusive application to this time and place.  Past the Fonda with its noisy generator and promise of warmth, Pepe pouring drinks behind the bar, two men smoking in the doorway under the burning lightbulb.  He was glad he wouldn’t have to go to the post office and contend with the other foreigners waiting for mail to arrive from the port.

He continued downhill and around the little schoolhouse to Cosimo’s tienda. Crates of oranges, lemons and tomatoes sat outside beside a clutter of cheap hardware. Pausing to consider buying one of the wicker-covered demijohns, and whether to keep red or white wine in it, then inside for the nightly ritual where the air was warm and ruddy from lanterns hung from the ceiling and smelling of a peculiar mixture of petrolio, fish and soap.  Cosimo nodded formally to him, unsmiling.  John was the only customer tonight.  Cosimo’s red-cheeked younger brother served him, showing his white teeth, reaching honey, butter and goat’s cheese off the shelves while John picked out onions and several huge oranges and studied the mysterious varieties of beans in their burlap sacks.  He preferred to pay cash instead of running up a cuenta. This always seemed to please and reassure Cosimo as he accepted the money, no matter how often it happened.  Then John said “Bona nite,” which always seemed to surprise Cosimo, hearing even those simple words in the dialect.

Along the road to the panaderia, a candle burning at either end of the counter. Inhaling the delicious fragrance of recently baked bread and paying five-and-a-half pesetas for a round warm loaf to the baker’s pretty daughter who was always there in the evenings. She smiled shyly at him as he handed her the coins. He smiled back at her, delighted with her dark eyes.  He returned to the now thoroughly black sky, breathing in the foretaste of wetness, feeling alone yet a part of everything he saw, and climbed back up the street with the basket weighing pleasurably on his shoulder, back to the house, back to Deirdre and Bruce, stumbling almost happily over the invisible patches of rock littering his path.