Philippe Cabassac is a 50-something, 200 pound plus "solidly built" linguistics professor, whose specialist subject is the dying Provençal dialect; his lectures are "luminous, captivating, memorable. Those who attended invariably fell under his spell." He lives in a dilapidated farmhouse, the family home for eight or more generations. Even though he lives cheaply, his part-time professor's salary doesn't cover his living expenses and so he sells off a parcel of land each year-- just enough to make ends meet.

Philippe belongs utterly to the Provençal country. He goes "truffling every winter, gathering wild asparagus in the spring, flowering medicinal herbs each summer, and a plethora of pale, speckled mushrooms each fall." He belongs there as utterly as his young, recently dead wife, belonged nowhere. Julieta was the most enigmatic of Philippe's students. A tall, raven-haired and aquiline- nosed orphan, she grasped at the Provençal dialect as if trying to graft her own life onto its genealogy, to forge herself an identity and history.

Their marriage was brief, yet for Philippe, idyllic. We meet him two years after Julieta's death, just as he's admitting to himself that those vivid, lucid dreams of Julieta come to him during the night after he's eaten one of the black truffles that he hunts down at first religiously, then, hungry for those dreams that reunite him with his dead wife, fanatically, and to the exclusion of all else.

This is a lyrical, poetic novel (the author is a poet) that packs all of life and death and decay into its 150 intense pages. --Lisa Gee