"Immer wieder, während des ganzen heißen Augusts in Frankreich, überaßen wir uns an den Mirabellen." - Rumer Godden, "Unser Sommer im Mirabellengarten"

Cecil und ihre vier Geschwister reisen mit ihrer Mutter in die Champagne, in ein in die Jahre gekommenes Hotel. Alles könnte perfekt sein - das Hotel ist herrschaftlich, der Garten verwunschen, die Temperaturen hochsommerlich warm - doch schon auf der Hinfahrt erkrankt die Mutter schwer und die fünf Kinder sind im Hotel auf sich allein gestellt. Sie verbringen dort magische wie seltsame Tage - und nicht alle sind, wer sie vorgeben zu sein...

"Unser Sommer im Mirabellengarten" von Rumer Godden erschien bereits 1958 und wurde 2021 im Kampa Verlag in der Übersetzung von Elisabeth Pohr in dieser wunderschönen Ausgabe neu herausgegeben. Das Buch ist ein typisch unterhaltsamer Klassiker, sehr dramatisch, sehr detailreich und - was mir sehr gut gefallen hat - sehr sommerlich. Die Autorin fängt die Hitze und den französischen Sommer in diesem alten, prächtigen Hotel mit seinem bezaubernden Garten wunderbar ein, was den Roman zu einer perfekten Sommerlektüre macht.

Der Roman benötigt einige Zeit, um Fahrt aufzunehmen, er ist auch nicht auf jeder Seite spannend und verliert sich an einigen Stellen etwas in der Geschichte, was mich beim Lesen manchmal ein bisschen ermüdet hat. Auch arbeitet die Autorin für meinen Geschmack mit ein paar Stereotypen zu viel. Gegen Ende entwickelt sich das Buch aber fast zu einem Kriminalroman und lässt die Lesenden dann doch regelrecht durch die Seiten fliegen.

"Unser Sommer im Mirabellengarten" ist ein einfach zu lesender Klassiker, perfekt für warme Sommertage mit Protagonist*innen, die viele Eigenheiten aufweisen und deshalb umso liebenswerter sind. Nicht unbedingt ein Pageturner, aber durchaus für eine kleine Zerstreuung gut!

Hinweis: In der Übersetzung wird das Z- und I-Wort verwendet.

It's difficult for me to decide what I think about The Greengage Summer. It's a book I had looked forward to reading for a long time, and while I can't say I really enjoyed it, there was something about it that was quite engaging. However, Godden's writing style really put me off. It was very jumpy, with little smoothness to the narrative and dialogue and this was probably made worse by the large amount of French. The whole premise of the story is weird, and more than a bit creepy, too, and aside from the five children of the Grey family, there was very little explanation of who the various characters were. They just appeared. I often had to go back to try to figure out who was who and what they were doing in this strange story. Willmouse, the seven year old boy in the Grey family, was the most memorable character, and probably the reason I'm giving the book a three star rating. Otherwise it would be a 2. It is a bit of a mystery as to why this is regarded by so many as a classic.

So evocative, with beautifully drawn characters and poignant scenes. Loved this

Größter lifehack bei schlechtem Wetter ein Sommerbuch zu lesen

I lost interest - again it might have charmed - twenty or more years ago - I just can't enter the required level of 'suspension of belief'.

Age and life experience really seems to determine where your interests lie - I'm looking for subtlety and sophistication and I expect to hear or feel something new. That's the deal isn't it - the more you read, the more you expect.

4.5*

One of the things that makes a book special for me, is if the author successfully captures the atmosphere of his or her setting, and does it so well that I feel transported to the time and place in which the story takes place.

I feel that author Rumer Godden perfectly describes the French hotel, Les Oeillets, the atmosphere of the beautiful countryside that surrounds it, and the sunshine and warmth of that post WWII summer when four English children find themselves stranded there, when their Mother is taken ill during their holiday, and must spend time in hospital.

Mademoiselle Zizzi, the owner of the hotel isn’t too keen to take on the responsibility of the Brothers and Sisters....especially as there is little hope of her being paid, but she’s persuaded by Eliot, her somewhat enigmatic lover, to let them stay, and he takes on the role of chaperone and friend.
There is a very interesting cast of characters in this story.....some of who have secrets, some who have ulterior motives, and some of who are rather odd....add to this lots of tension, the jealousies of a woman no longer in the first flush of youth, and the wiles of a sixteen year old girl experiencing the conflicting emotions of changing from a girl to a young woman, and you have all the ingredients needed for things to spiral out of control.

This book is very character driven, and every character, mysterious, quirky, interesting, endearing or threatening plays a part in this very well written story.

I watched the movie version shortly afterwards....it was good, but the characters weren’t all as I’d imagined, and I found the book much better.

Oh, where to begin? This is a charming, gentle and heart-warming book – on the face of it. In fact it is a deep, wonderful, thought provoking, emotional rollercoaster of a book that will suck you in, stroke your fur, feed you strawberries (and greengages) and Champagne, warm you like the sun, and then slap you round the face and make you cry; then start all over again.

The Greengage Summer is a coming-of-age story set in 1923, about four children whisked off to France by their mother, against their will, to see the battlefields of the Great War, which she hopes will make them stop being selfish introverts and make them appreciate the sacrifices of others. They can think of no more boring way to spend their summer holidays but, when mother becomes ill, they are largely left to their own devices. They build relationships of different kinds with the hotel staff and local people, and begin to see what life is really about – and some of it is ugly.

The story is narrated by Cecil (actually Cecilia) and the writing is gorgeous; it really is as though a thirteen-year-old girl wrote it, in terms of her thoughts and emotions, anyway, although the words are more sophisticated than that. Her descriptions of places, events and emotions feel genuine and heartfelt, and very powerful. The characters are well described and feel like real people, and I am sure this is down not only to the cleverness and skill of the author in remembering what it was like to be a teenager but also because much of what happens really happened to her and her family.

I won’t say more. Read the book, it’s brilliant, and I can see why it has never been out of print since it was published in 1958. I have the Folio Society version which is beautifully illustrated. If you read that one, you can read the short Foreword written by the author’s daughter, but don’t read the Introduction by Jane Asher or the author’s Preface until after you have read the book, or it will spoil it for you. I loved this book and would give it six stars if I could.

It's a long time since I read this, and I had forgotten how gruelling it is. Five children and their mother set off for a holiday in France, against the advice of their uncle. (The children range in age from 4 to 16, I think.) Their mother develops a severe leg infection and has to be admitted to hospital as an emergency more or less straight after they arrive at their hotel. The hotel doesn't want to allow the children to stay without their mother, but a man who is also staying at the hotel and is a friend of the owner volunteers to be responsible for them until their mother recovers. This is the story of their developing friendship with that man and others in the hotel and of the events that happened thereafter.
As with all of Rumer Godden's books, this one really makes you want to find out what happens. The characters are interesting and the plot certainly keeps you reading.

Children are everywhere, like insects. They can know anything.

In an attempt to have a less structured approach to my reading this year, I decided most of my choices would be based on the appeal of the moment. Having started off with three fairly serious reads, I was looking for something light when I read the excellent review of my friend, Megan, for The Greengage Summer. It sounded so delightful and so what I was needing, that I rushed off, found a copy and dove in.

If this book is any indicator, I am going to enjoy this year of random reading very much. What a sweet, calm, intriguing read this was! Told to us by an adolescent, this is the story of five British children stranded in France at a hotel. While on vacation, the mother experiences an illness and needs to be hospitalized, and the children, the oldest of which is sixteen, are left in the care of a male stranger, who also happens to be British, at the French hotel, Les Oeillets.

This is a coming of age story, a bit of a mystery, and a great deal of good fun. There are French passages, but I found, even with only my schoolbook French (and that very long ago) to fall back upon, I could follow the French conversation almost as well as the English.

Unsupervised by a mother, the children are able to wander about and partake of many adult doings that they would normally not have witnessed, and as children so often do, they blend into the background, are discounted, and know much more than any of the adults about what is going on around them. Our narrator, Cecile, is charming and very realistically painted, so that seeing the story unfold through her eyes is ideal. And, as children also do, the emotions they exhibit are perfect and pure–they love completely, they rally loyally, and they understand with their hearts more than their heads.

I already had Rumer Godden’s In This House of Brede slated for reading this year. I am now very excited to get to it, as I have a sneaking feeling that Ms. Godden is going to be one of those authors for which I cannot leave any of her works unread, and OMG she wrote 60 books.

Because this book was first published in 1958 & my edition was a Puffin Plus Reprint I was expecting a 1950s style teen book - & this book quite definitely wasn't.

It is like serving yourself a bowl of muesli, expecting a healthy breakfast & finding it has been heavily sweetened.

Or going to a movie expecting a new version of The Sound of Music & discovering it is more like Last Tango in Paris.

Great products, but you feel mislead by the packaging.

n  

n    n      n    n  

n

Greengage Blossoms

A mother takes her five children to experience life in France - basically because the oldest two -Joss & Cecil (in spite of the male names, these are teen girls)- are becoming obnoxious & selfish. The mother,has a horse fly bite which has become infected, is very sick indeed before they even arrive at the hotel & ends up hospitalised. I can't understand any mother, no matter how ill, choosing to entrust her children to the care of strangers, rather than sending for their admittedly judgemental Uncle William. Joss is the oldest and matters worsen when she also becomes ill. I can understand the hotel proprietor Mademoiselle Zizi feeling this is not her problem, but her lover, the enigmatic Elliot takes pity on these poor waifs - or does he?

To say any more would be to spoil the story (which we see through 13 year old Cecil's eyes) For me the only good thing that happens is the feasting on greengages. I have now found out that they are a type of very sweet green plum.

n  

n    n      n    n  

n

This is an excellent book, very well written & every twist & turn was a shock for me. It reminds me strongly of Bonjour tristesse, published four years earlier. Also with a young protagonist, also not a YA book.

In spite of these quibbles, I highly recommend this book & I'm expecting it to be one of my top reads of 2019.

n  n    n  n

https://wordpress.com/view/carolshess...

Lowkey heartbreaking. Though not at all in the way I expected. Sure, I've been misled by the movie, with a poster with a beautiful young girl reclining on the grass, and its title translated to Portuguese as something like loss of innocence. It certainly was one, although not the one I thought, even if its menace seemed to hover over the story (I'm just trying to avoid spoilers here, but you can guess).
Once I realized where the story was headed (and that was only close to the end, even though I knew some of it from the preface) it was an agony watching the children knowing what would happen and completely helpless. It was easy wanting to blame Joss (as she did herself), who was the eldest and should have known better, except you know she couldn't know better. Maybe because Cecil is the narrator, and seems forced to grow up to care for her siblings. It's very telling when they assume Joss is the one who knows French, and underestimating Cecil allows her to gain more knowledge (also interesting in the language department: in a key moment she realizes she no longer notices if people are talking in English or French, which is both about learning as fitting in). It's helpless, though, because they're still children: they may have power, but they don't know how to use it, and if knowledge is power, power without knowledge is no power at all. And I guess that's the tragedy of growing up: when you don't know you can't help doing something you'll regret, but once you do it, you know, and it's too late.

Rumer Godden’s The Greengage Summer is a book which I’ve wanted to read for years. I have enjoyed quite a few of the author’s books in the past, but still have a good number outstanding; excellent news for those days when I want something entirely engrossing, which has the power to transport me to a different time and place.

First published in 1958, The Greengage Summer takes place away from India, the setting of many of Godden’s novels. Instead, this semi-autobiographical story is set during a stifling summer in France, among the ‘faded elegance of Les Oeillets, with its bullet-scarred staircase and serene garden bounded by high walls.’ The Greengage Summer is described as Godden’s ‘tense, evocative portrait of love and deceit in the Champagne country of the Marne.’

The edition which I read includes a preface penned by Godden herself; she writes that the novel ‘is true, or partly true’, before going on to explain that when she was 15, she and her family travelled to France over the summer. She comments: ‘It is difficult… to know what I remember as happening, what is transposed in the novel, and what is overlaid by the film; each seems to shimmer through the others.’

The primary characters of the novel are the Grey siblings; our narrator is the earnest Cecilia, known as Cecil. There is also a cast of interesting people whom the children mix with at the Hotel des Oeillets, and who take care of them whilst their mother is indisposed in the local hospital, and their botanist father is on a collecting expedition in Tibet. Of their family dynamic, Cecil explains: ‘Three years separated each of us children – Father’s expeditions usually lasted three years – but Joss and I had always been the Big Ones, as Willmouse and Vicky were the Littles, with Hester in a no-man’s-land between.’

Cecil describes their family being somewhat at odds in their sleepy seaside town back in Britain: ‘For one thing we were much poorer than the people we knew… we had this curiously absent father while other girls’ fathers went to offices and caught trains and belonged to the Sussex Club… We were odd, belonging and not belonging, and odd is an uncomfortable thing to be; we did not want to belong but were humiliated that we did not.’ She later notes: ‘How inferior we were; our family had never been anywhere at all and did not know anything.’ Their mother, thinking her two eldest daughters ‘abominably selfish’, decides to take the whole family to the battlefields of France, ‘“So you can see what other people have given… for your sakes; and what other people will do in sacrifice… You need to learn… what I cannot teach you.”’

From the outset, Godden captures so much of the splendour of summer, along with the close heat and abundance it brings. The Greengage Summer opens: ‘On and off, all that hot French August, we made ourselves ill from eating the greengages. Joss and I felt guilty; we were still at the age when we thought being greedy was a childish fault, and this gave our guilt a tinge of hopelessness because, up to then, we had believed that as we grew older our faults would disappear, and none of them did.’ Her descriptions are beautiful, and sensual. As they arrive at their lodgings, Cecil comments: ‘I could smell a summer smell of cut grass and, near me, some flower scent that was heady and sweet; a white flower, I thought, jessamine or syringa. After the city and train my skin was cinder-dry and the air was gratefully cool against my face. I was filled with a sense of peace; all the fears and ignorance of the day seemed to drop away. This was the Hotel des Oeillets, real, not the mirage we had held in front of us through the travelling; we had arrived.’

I very much enjoyed this coming-of-age story, which is peppered with both lovely, nostalgia-inducing scenes, and those which are much darker and colder. I appreciated the sense of naivety which shone through in Cecil’s narration; for instance: ‘… copying a big Frenchman in the corner, I dipped my own croissant in the dark bitter coffee and ate it like that. It tasted nasty, but at least it was French.’

As I have often found with Godden’s work, The Greengage Summer contains beautifully observed attention to detail throughout. The characters are all so different, and hold such interest; the ‘most earnest’ moment in young Vicky’s day, for instance, is when she gets to choose a treat from the local patisserie, and Willmouse, the only boy of the family, is obsessed with tailoring, sewing, and couture. The adults who populate the hotel, and take charge of the children, are complex constructions. I found The Greengage Summer to be incredibly well executed, vivid, and absorbing, and would highly recommend it to anyone looking for a little escapism.