Review: "To Prussia with Love" by Roger Boyes

To Prussia with Love by Roger Boyes
English edition first published 2012
★★

I'm always interested in 1) house memoirs and 2) location memoirs that take place in places that aren't written about all that much, and in theory this fits the bill—restoration of a crumbling old manor house in Brandenburg! Yes please. Unfortunately, I forgot that I really can't stand British Male Humour™, and that's...what this book is.

Berlin is a city-state, surrounded by the state of Brandenburg, which covers a geographically much larger area but has a markedly smaller population than Berlin. (For context, Berlin has a population of roughly 3.6 million; Potsdam, which is Brandenburg's biggest city and in some ways functions as a suburb of Berlin, has a population of about 160,000.) Brandenburg was part of East Germany, and even now it's the sort of place that people are more likely to come from than to move to by choice. So when Boyes and his partner found themselves with the opportunity to move to Brandenburg and restore an old mansion, his feelings were—not unreasonably—somewhat mixed.

Boyes paints the experience as something quite slapstick, but I have to assume that there is barely a scene in here in which Boyes has not used extensive creative license to make things funnier, in a British Male Humour™ kind of way. (A quite racist British Male Humour™ kind of way, as it happens.) The bare bones of it is: British man and German woman move to German woman's family house in the sticks; they don't quite have money for reno so he decides that they'll turn it into a BnB; she isn't happy that he's steamrolling over everything, and he can't understand why; very, very, very minor shenanigans ensue and he does his best to blow them into Drama of epic proportions. I expect that most of the conversations in here are either "Well, that's what I would have said if I'd thought of it in time" or "Of course I said that; I thought it would make a funny line in the book I was planning to write about it".

I'm very tired now, and tempted to swear off cis male writers for a while again.