There probably aren’t many city dwellers who haven’t considered – perhaps while sitting in traffic or being accosted by an aggressive panhandler – pitching it all and going to live in the country. Then they come to their senses and resume their urbane, sophisticated lives.

Not so for foodie/author James Chatto and his wife, Wendy Martin. Seduced in the summer of 1981 by a two-line ad in London’s Sunday Times, the two – he 25, she 23 – decided to live a simple, rural, off-the-grid life in the village of Loutses, on the Greek island of Corfu.

The couple, not yet married, rented a room in Corfu for the season and, after a luxurious summer of blue sky, deserted beaches of white sand and friendly, chain-smoking locals, returned to find themselves living in the spartan, concrete high-rise enclave of Toronto’s St. James Town. It didn’t take long before they decided to get married and move back to Greece for good.

The Greek for Love is the story of the couple’s almost four years as modern-day Thoreauvians, except instead of growing beans near Walden Pond the duo renovated an old stone house they bought for about $15,000 (Cdn). They did so while enduring the white heat of Greek summers, myriad language and cultural barriers, quirky neighbours, arbitrary government officials, the panic of giving birth in a foreign land and, later, the tragic death of their second child from leukemia before his second birthday.

As a gourmand and former actor and professional musician, Chatto has a keen awareness of the sensual. From the crispy, salty, oregano-tinged homemade souvlaki grilled up by neighbours to the riotously colourful plants and flowers that surround the stone house they are reclaiming from the land, Chatto’s prose exults in the sensory overload of life in Loutses. Toronto and London, the couple concur, seem drab and colourless next to the brilliant blue of the Ionian Sea and the mountain tops of Albania, both visible from the couple’s property.

The physical work on the house and the subsequent book act as purgatives for the author, who, shortly before his wedding and the trip to Greece, lost his father and two grandmothers. There is catharsis in sweat and toil and building things, the foundation and structure of the old house a metaphor for the rebuilding of the emotional underpinnings of the couple’s life.

On mixing cement: “The pleasures of mixing cement are not always apparent to the uninitiated…. Beyond the obvious satisfaction of physical exercise lies the childish delight in playing with mud and water…. Mixing a good batch of mortar is part building a sandcastle and part making a cake, the whole activity dignified by manly practicality.”

The memoir is lightly peppered with letters written by Wendy Martin, herself a writer, that break up Chatto’s narration. Given that Martin speaks better Greek than Chatto, more of her insights into the Corfians and their occasionally eccentric ways might have added to the book’s nuance and flavour.

One of Martin’s letters includes a throwaway line that is one of the few instances of the grating snobbishness of the former city dweller turned bourgeois country folk. There are “a thousand small things that have to be done, a thousand small problems that have to be solved, but it’s real life – much more so than life in a city – and we are very, very happy.”

Village life may indeed be enriching, but how quickly one forgets that the sale of a London flat gave the couple the seed money to buy the house in Corfu in the first place and allowed them to enjoy the smog-free sunsets and aimless walks through the olive groves without, at first, doing much in the way of income-producing activity.

What’s often at issue in the book is the universal tension between locals and tourists. By “going native,” the couple have clearly become locals of a sort, but when they mention this, one wonders if they are trying to convince the reader or reassure themselves. This is understandable, since they occupy a hard-to-define world well beyond tourist, but something less than natives.

The couple eventually leave Corfu for Toronto, returning regularly for weeks or months at a time. The intervening years, Chatto relates in a sentimental epilogue, have seen many changes in Loutses, not all for the better. Some villagers have died, development is encroaching on the once bucolic life, and young people have left for the coast and the lure of easy tourist money.

Though sadness runs through the latter part of the book, there is an optimistic sense of growth and regeneration, that the rough-hewn life carved out in Corfu is their own, and that the simple life is often anything but.