A SUMMER READ ABOUT THREE SUMMERS
Margarita Liberaki's Three Summers is a a boring, yet lovable, summer read, like a vacation that's truly restful.
I began reading Margarita Liberaki’s Three Summers on my flight to Florida. Translated by Karen Van Dyck, this Greek novel was originally published by Liberaki in 1946. Nothing much happens in Three Summers. Yet everything does. This little novel revolves around the life of a Greek family and its three children. The three sisters discover themselves as they find themselves taking in the birds and the bees around them. The novel is called a “perfect summer read” by reviewers but I would not take it on vacation. It’s like a painting of a perfect day with not a cloud in sight in which nothing of consequence seems to happen. Which of us actively seeks boredom?
When I go back to my own summers in India’s Kerala spent in the company of my sibling and cousins in my grandparents’ home in Paravoor and Palakkad, I remember the same sort of thing, that little actually happened. We ate a lot, played I spy on the verandah and between houses, went down to the river or the pond led by an adult and thrashed about among the fish, and finally, weeks later, returned home to Chennai by overnight train. In the middle of those summers, a cousin got her period and it remained a mystery to the rest of us who desperately wanted to get whatever she had but didn’t know how to go about it. Sometimes an older cousin got betrothed to another cousin we had met at a wedding in the extended family. On and off, I observed—without really comprehending any of it—that an uncle’s eye or hand lingered a little too long on our growing bodies.
On one of those many visits, my maternal grandfather chased after my cousin to give him the most memorable hiding of our lives. I still remember my fear of getting swept away by the fierce puzha (river) in Palakkad. I can hear the sound of thrashing on the rocks on which people whitened their clothes. Of course, on every summer visit to Paravoor, we awaited our share of jackfruit fritters frying in the outhouse. As I said earlier, nothing of great import happened on those visits but it’s only in retrospect that we can attribute value of those little happenings in the summers during which we tended to grow such a great deal.
Liberaki’s protagonist is Katerina, the youngest of three sisters who’s curious about the world. Her eldest sister Maria is always looking for love. She loses her virginity even before she knew whom she might want to marry. The opening page of Three Summers describes this excitement of the life of three sisters with the description of their three hats. It’s a simple sensual detail giving voice to the beauty of expectation. It’s also a commentary on the feminine condition; we are riddled with the same insecurities as we grow up.
“That summer we bought big straw hats. Maria’s had cherries around the rim. Infanta’s had forget-me-nots, and mine had poppies as red as fire. When we lay in the hayfield wearing them, the sky, the wildflowers, and the three of us all melted into one.”
Infanta, the middle sister, goes horse riding with a young male friend with whom her relationship seems platonic for the most part. While she’s inscrutable, she is the most graceful of them all, with her long and sculpted neck and her thin face. Katerina, too, has many suitors but she wants to take her time to decide whom she should choose; she is most like the grandmother they’d never known, her mother’s mother. Katerina, as the youngest, is privy to the angst of almost everyone, and, naturally, she’s the narrator.
I read in the introduction by the translator that she’s most like the author herself, observing the world around her and drawing conclusions about her place in the world. One day, we see her hiding in the bushes, gleaning, along with us, that love and passion can take many forms, both in nature and among human beings. She sees how a marriage can be like a balloon from which air leaks out unseeingly or, sometimes, in a flash, just as her own parents’ marriage that ended years before the first summer when her father was repeatedly unfaithful.
The charm of Three Summers lies in the kernel of truth hiding inside it, that all of us have back stories and secrets that may forever remain undisclosed. The girls’ aunt Teresa remains mysteriously unmarried after something happened to her inside a cave. No one knows why the girls’ grandmother deserted her children when they were 5 and 7. The blood of that grandmother is coursing through Katerina’s veins, and she feels an affinity to her but her mother, abandoned by her own, will not hear of it and is frightened that there should be any resemblance at all.
By the end of the first summer, Maria is married to Marios, the man she loves and Katerina holds a torch for David, the son of a Jewish woman who lives in a turreted home that Katerina used to visit as a child.
Karen Van Dyck’s translation conveys the sensuality and warmth of this Greek classic that was widely read in Greece and in France in the middle of the 20th century. I found the book captivating and a bit boring, like a great long summer vacation in which reality never quite matches anticipation. Three Summers reminded me of all those adolescent years when we hovered between childhood and adulthood, when we knew little, imagined a lot and waited breathlessly for what might happen to us in the future.