"Belonging" by Isabel Huggan. [review]

Abstract

"Belonging" is Isabel Huggan’s third book of ‘reminiscences’, A Canadian by birth, an expatriate by marriage, she finds herself settled permanently in the foothills of the Cévennes in provincial France with her Scottish husband Bob. "Belonging" is divided into twenty chapters, the first of which is titled ‘There Is No Word for Home’. Huggan uses this quirk of language deftly to introduce her theme of being ‘both home and not-home’. Interwoven into her narrative of life in France, with floods and storms, friendly, inefficient workmen, and untidy neighbours, are memories of childhood, of years spent living in Africa and the Philippines with Bob, and regular pilgrimages to family shrines in Canada.