A considerable town

The incomparable M.F.K. Fisher, of whom Auden said, "I do not know of anyone in the United States today who writes better prose," evokes the Marseille she has known and loved for almost fifty years. What she has written, she protests, is not a guidebook; rather, it is an effort "to write something about the town itself, through my own senses." Nevertheless, it is hard to conceive of a guide more fascinating than M.F.K. Fisher as she shares all that she sees and knows and feels about the old port and quays, as she relishes the succulent fruits of the salty soil and the salty sea that embrace Marseille; as she talks with taxi drivers, waivers, concierges, a gabby French doctor, and an Inspector Maigret-like harbor master; as she looks, always, beyond the honky-tonk exteriors of some of the brash modern streets and feels in her bones their ancient sources. The whole human parade fascinates her-the jugglers, the fortunetellers, the pimps, the hollow-chested Pinball Boys, the She-Wolf barkers who intimidate tourists into their fishhouses. Through her eyes we perceive as part of the essential fabric of this cradle of civilization the aspects of the town that so horrify Anglo-Saxons. "Ports are places of traffic," she notes, and since ancient times this port of ports has been trading in everything from olive oil and salt to white slaves and heroin-in fact, "In most of our human commodities since before Protis, the Phocean, went there in about 600 B.C." Mrs. Fisher scans the centuries, evoking the days of the great slave galleys, the horrors of the Plague. But she finds "this collective evil balanced by a wonderful healthiness," and it is to this that she instinctively responds as she probes the indestructible nature of the Marseilles people or glories in the light-blazing basilica of Notre Dame de la Garde on the promontory, "the Good Mother of all navigators." M.F.K. Fisher gives us what is in many ways her most profound and searching book, as she reflects upon and rediscovers this mysterious, indefinable place that has meant so much to her over the years. A Considerable Town will delight, surprise, and nourish all of her readers-those who have long been addicted to M.F.K. Fisher's work, those who have recently discovered her, as well as those who many be making her acquaintance for the first time.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.