NONFICTION - March 17, 1996

A COTTAGE IN PORTUGAL by Richard Hewitt (Simon & Schuster: $22; 288 pp.) “In Portugal,” Hewitt and his wife discover, “life centered around the very nobility of living. Extraneous factors such as bills and deadlines, those very entities we based our American lives on, were somehow subliminally filtered out of the mind and forgotten.” This does not, however, turn out to be a Club Med vacation. Like many dreams that are forced into reality by human sleepers, this escape to a better life in Portugal suffers from leaky faucets and a falling roof and foreign bureaucracies. It’s a risk well taken, a story with a happy ending, and its protagonists are good-natured, flexible and porous to the culture of their chosen home. There is little of the now-famous Peter Mayle arrogance that infects this genre, though many of the pitfalls are similar.