Three Summers

by Margarita Liberaki, Karen Van Dyck (Translator)

Overview

A tender story about three sisters coming of age in Greece over the course of three summers, now available after being out of print for over twenty years.

The Straw Hats is the story of three sisters growing up in the countryside near Athens in the years before the Second World War. Living in a big old house surrounded by a beautiful garden are Maria, the oldest sister, as sexually bold as she is eager to settle down and have a family of her own; the beautiful but ever-distant Infanta; and Katarina, dreamy but also keenly inquiring, through whose eyes this story of three summers over which the girls' lives take the shape of adulthood is mostly observed. The girls share and keep secrets, fall in and out of love, try to figure out their parents, take note of the doings of friends and neighbors, wonder at others and themselves. And Katarina, we sense, though she may have lost her childhood to time, will find herself in the future as a writer.

When The Straw Hats came out in French, Albert Camus was moved to write a letter to Margarita Liberaki: "The sun has disappeared from books these days. That's why they hinder our attempts to live, instead of helping us. But the secret is still kept in your country, passed on from one initiate to another. You are one of those who pass it on. I feel a sense of complicity with this book." Karen Van Dyck's luminous translation brings a beloved classic of modern Greek literature to life in English.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781681373317
Publisher:	New York Review Books
Publication date:	07/09/2019
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	264
Sales rank:	32,700
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Margarita Liberaki (1919-2001) was born in Athens and raised by her grandparents, who ran the Fexis bookstore and publishing house. In addition to Three Summers, she wrote two further novels, The Other Alexander (1950) and The Mystery (1976); a number of plays, including Candaules’ Wife (1955) and The Danaïds (1956), part of a cycle she called Mythical Theater; several screenplays, including Jules Dassin’s Phaedra (1962) and Diaspora (1999), about Greek intellectuals in exile in Paris during the junta; and a translation of Treasure Island (2000). Three Summers is now a standard part of Greek and Cypriot public education; it was adapted as a television miniseries in 1995. 

Karen Van Dyck is the Kimon A. Doukas Professor of Modern Greek Literature at Columbia University. She writes on modern Greek and diaspora literature and on gender and translation. She has edited or co-edited several volumes of poetry, including A Century of Greek Poetry (2004); The Greek Poets: Homer to the Present (2010); and, for NYRB Poets, Austerity Measures: The New Greek Poetry (2017). Her translations have appeared in Brooklyn Rail, Asymptote, and The Baffler.

Editorial Reviews

05/06/2019

Three sisters come of age in the genteel milieu of prewar Greece in Liberaki’s dreamy, modernist gem of a novel, her first translated into English. Narrated by the youngest, impulsive and imaginative 16-year-old Katerina, the story brackets a period that will prove decisive in the lives of the sisters, who have grown up with their divorced mother, maiden aunt, and grandfather in a country house near Athens. Twenty-year-old Maria gets engaged to the lovestruck Marios, though her embrace of a conventional destiny coincides with the feeling that “from this day on the sacrifices would begin.” At 18, the restrained and virginal Infanta is at an intersection in her relationship with Nikitas, a childhood friend she can’t bring herself to kiss, though “she wanted him the way she wanted to fall into the cistern on hot days.” And Katerina dreams of David, a half-English neighbor and astronomer, who is also pursued by the older, married Laura Parigori. In Van Dyck’s translation, Katerina shifts seamlessly between her own perspective and the thoughts and dreams of her family and friends, painting a world in which women are both cosseted and neglected, free to imagine “thousands of lives,” and longing for a true and tangible connection with another: “something like lightning... you feel it before you have time to think.” This is an elegant and striking novel. (July)

Publishers Weekly

"A leisurely, largehearted coming-of-age novel, earthy and innocent, nostalgic and beautifully rendered." —Kirkus

"Liberaki . . . certainly wrote unlike others of her generation. . . . [Three Summers] pushed the bounds of the possible: juggling narrative voices and modes, upending expectations for a conventional narrative arc, folding scenes of teenage sex into a book published in 1946." —Karen Emmerich, Public Books

“Sweet, light, and a dreamy escape . . . The book is so transporting to early adolescence, but with fresher strawberries than you ever got to eat!” —Lit Hub

“Over and above . . . innovation in the form of the Greek novel, Liberaki also made what we might consider a feminist political contribution to Greek letters. Following Woolf, she captures life as it is lived in small 'moments of being,' especially of female domestic rituals . . . translating these private moments into the public language that had effectively been forbidden to Greek women.” —Niko Maragos, Electric Literature

"Makes for an appealing and quite rich novel of young women's lives—with interesting secondary characters and stories, too—with some creative twists and touches by Liberaki in how she presents and unfolds her tale. . . . the writing is strong and often arresting. A nice piece of work." —The Complete Review

“In this unforgettable novel, lush and evocative passages are interspersed with candid, astringent, and often unsettling insights about adolescence, desire, and the mysterious web of human relationships. Margarita Liberaki’s sensuousness has an edge, and her tartness has a compelling sweetness. Enthralled, the reader moves deeper and deeper into her summery world.” —Rachel Hadas

“This cinematic, sun-drenched novel about innocence and experience depicts a vanished era of bourgeois pleasures against the gardens and olive groves of one of Athens’s oldest suburbs. The mores of Athenian society are in tension with the drives and abundance of the Greek landscape itself: even the orderly pistachio orchards, with their male and female trees yearning for communion, vibrate with sex, heat, color, flavor, and scent. Karen Van Dyck’s translation vividly reenacts Liberaki’s color-saturated prose.” —A.E. Stallings

From the Publisher

2019-02-18

First published in 1946, Greek novelist and playwright Liberaki's (The Other Alexander, 1959, etc.) story follows three sisters through the eponymous seasons.

Maria, 20 when the novel begins, pulses with burgeoning sexuality. Infanta, 18, is a cold beauty who strives for perfection. The narrator, Katerina, 16, is obsessed with family secrets, especially those of her mother's mother—the sisters call her "the Polish grandmother"—who abandoned her young daughters and husband to run off with a musician. Liberaki vividly paints a pastoral, idyllic beauty shot through with the threat of danger; the sisters' aunt was raped at their age by her fiance and never married. As they attempt to unravel the mysteries of their parents' and neighbors' lives, celebrate feast days, flirt with boys, and contemplate the future, the girls begin to discern a system predicated on women's submission. The choices before them are few. Maria marries early, saying to her youngest sister: "You expect great things from life....Not me. You see, I know that what is really important can be found in the little, everyday things." When Katerina tells her astronomer boyfriend she's writing a novel, he laughs in disbelief. The great strength of the book, and its enduring freshness, lies in its evocation of a beloved, now vanished place and the panoply of characters whose stories the budding novelist narrator tells us through the use of an impressively successful first-person omniscient point of view. "Oh, to be able to give shape to such experiences, to make them live after their death." With the self-centeredness of a teenager and the longing of an artist, she wants to capture what she loves: "I want to be able to describe the brilliance of the world just before the sun sets, when it falls on the grass, and how green the grass looks, and all the other beautiful things I've seen, for it's a shame for them to last only as long as I am looking at them."

A leisurely, largehearted coming-of-age novel, earthy and innocent, nostalgic and beautifully rendered.

Kirkus Reviews