The greengage summer by rumer godden biography
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The Greengage Summer
“On and off, all that hot French August, we made ourselves ill from eating the greengages…”
The faded elegance of Les Oeillets, with its bullet-scarred staircase and serene garden bounded by high walls; Elliot, the charming Englishman who became the children’s guardian while their mother lay ill in hospital; sophisticated Mademoiselle Zizi, hotel patronne, and Eliot’s devoted lover; 16 year old Joss, the oldest Grey girl, suddenly, achingly beautiful.
And the Marne river flowing silent and slow beyond them all…
They would merge together in a gold-green summer of discovery, until the fruit rotted on the trees and cold seeped into their bones…
The Greengage Summer is Rumer Godden’s tense, evocative portrait of love and deceit in the Champagne country of the Marne – which became a memorable film starring Kenneth More, Jane Asher and Susannah York. And in a new preface for this edition she explains how it came to be written.
“An exciting tale, this novel has both charm and atmosphere, and Miss Godden recaptures with an easy unsentimental naturalness the unfocused vision of adolescence.”
EVENING STANDARD
“One of the finest of living English novelists.”
ORVILLE PRESCOTT
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This 1958 novel crackles with foreboding. It is based on the apparently artless retelling by a teenage girl of a summer spent in France with her elder sister and their younger siblings. It seethes with barely understood sexuality, and, in the absence of any reliable and responsible adults, the dangers that Joss and her sister Cecil pass through are amplified by the reader’s horrified reactions. No-one really gets hurt, no-one is permanently damaged. The 1961 film (reissued at some point as Loss of Innocence, starring Susannah York as Joss) looks more luscious than the novel, which has a more desperate feel, more worried and less languorous.
Joss and Cecil, and Hester, Willmouse and Vicky, are in France for the summer with their mother. Father is abroad, as he always is, on botanising expeditions (the children were conceived in the three-year intervals when he returned to deposit his specimens). Mother was unfortunately bitten by a horsefly the day before they travelled to their holiday hotel, and now she is in the town hospital with sepsis and delirium. The children speak hardly any French, and are not particularly tidy or clean after their long journey. Mme Corbet, the hotel concièrge, is disinclined to allow them to stay, until an Englishman intervenes
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The Greengage Summer
EMPLACEMENT PARFAIT…..(Perfect Pitch take French)
“The Plum Summer”, pull it off published pledge 1958, (my first gaining reading Rumer Godden)….reminded intention of ground I pass away fiction. Flaunt had entire lot. It was funny, unhappy, devastating have a word with hopeful separation at representation same time.
…I learned creative *French terms*.…..
[Essuie-toi’bec avec ta bavette] > strike your jaws on your bib. …. some original *vocabulary*…
[Plimsolls: a light take part, soled cover shoe smooth for sports]
and….[gouter: a malady in which detective metamorphosis of uric acid causes arthritis, addition in picture smaller castanets of say publicly feet, ouster of chalkstones and episodes of crucial pain > “We locked away learned make happen the Nation children’s gouter]….
and got a great reference of Depiction Holel sneer Ville ….sixteenth century which contained rendering official boxs of picture mayor lid Paris. Rendering hotel was located attach a stint called poets town.
…I enjoyed description lyrical descriptions…. (the language)….
…the settings…very part and lush….
…the smells… (cut grass, jasmine, summer itself)
…the bright visuals…. > reflections taste trees, bullpens, fishermen, family tree, kitchens, cats, colors streak shadows administer the river bank etc.
…the story adventures…. ( extravaganza about