12/22/2023 0 Comments It might be a long summerThere were no helicopter parents then – they couldn’t wait to get rid of us. I do very vividly remember the feeling that summer would go on forever and that we were utterly free. My family would rent a house on Martha’s Vineyard for some of that time. “In America, school summer holidays are 10 weeks long. “The thing about summer, particularly for children but not exclusively, is that it’s a time when there is a sense of escape,” says Rosoff who now lives in London but is from Boston. The story ends – apart from a brief wrapping up – as summer ends. The first-person narrator (unnamed and ungendered, although Fleabag star Andrew Scott is reading the audiobook) is the eldest of four children, and will fall for Kit Godden, the handsome boy who his or her younger sister – the 16-year-old “sex goddess” Mattie – is in love with. Rosoff’s The Great Godden – an echo of The Great Gatsby in the title – opens at the beginning of a family’s summer holiday at their beach house. That time when you say goodbye to your friends, that sense of autumn in the air, of life changing.” “The thing that I held in my head was actually a Pulp song called David’s Last Summer which is about the last summer of your childhood. You need to have that September moment – the changing season.” However, Nicholls says the biggest influence on his novel wasn’t a book at all. A story about a couple who quite happily for 18 years and have a really nice time doesn’t really work. “And that’s a very poignant notion in a love story, the idea that its end is built into its beginning. “I think built into the notion of summer is the idea of something fading, temporary, transient,” he continues. And the atmosphere of Alain-Fournier’s Le Grand Meaulnes was very much in my mind an atmosphere of regret and nostalgia, and a sense of something coming to an end. “I was thinking of, for example, The Go-Between, which is a memory book – a book about looking back. “When I was writing Sweet Sorrow I had a list of books that I wanted to aspire to and they all had that kind of lost summer feel,” Nicholls tells BBC Culture. Naturally, the course of true love does not run smooth. Ian McEwan’s Atonement – heavily influenced by The Go-Between – sneaks in because of its first part, set on an oppressively sultry day in the middle of a heatwave.Īnother instance is David Nicholls’s 2019 bestseller Sweet Sorrow, about a 16-year-old boy living in a small Southern England town who falls for his first love as they rehearse an am-dram production of Romeo and Juliet. “A classic example that springs to mind is André Aciman’s Call Me By Your Name which displays all of the tropes: the beautiful summer setting, the sexual awakening, the brilliant sense of nostalgia,” says Carvalho. Examples might include LP Hartley’s The Go-Between, Alan Garner’s The Owl Service, or JL Carr’s A Month in the Country. “Most readers can relate to a long, lonely school break, a family holiday, or a summer romance.”Ī summer novel doesn’t necessarily need all of these factors but it does need some. “I think the main appeal for this kind of novel lies in its ability to play into readers’ nostalgia,” says Waterstones fiction buyer, Bea Carvalho. The narrator is looking back with a twinge of wistfulness on the events of a summer long ago, the effects of which might still be rippling out. And sometimes the story is told in the form of a recollection. Often there is a sense of unreality, “the feeling of being in a dream” as Rumer Godden said of the real-life experience that inspired her classic of the genre, The Greengage Summer. There should be a feeling of transition one part of life’s journey is coming to an end. Ideally, there will be a love story – maybe young love, maybe unrequited – and possibly a sexual awakening. It just seemed like our personal miracle.”Įlements of the experience found their way into her new book, The Great Godden, a coming-of-age love story which spans a summer holiday in England, and is being marketed as a “summer novel”. It was the Perseid meteor shower, which happens every year, though I didn’t know it then. I remember us swimming late one night and then lying on our backs on the sand afterwards looking up at the sky which was suddenly full of shooting stars. “It was the most romantic thing in the entire world. “He would just show up and then we would go off at night to these completely deserted beaches,” recalls Rosoff. – The most perfect sentences ever written She had met a boy who was also spending summer on the island, and she was mad about him. She was 16 and on holiday with her family on Martha’s Vineyard, off the coast of Massachusetts. Novelist Meg Rosoff has an indelible memory from a summer in the early 1970s.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |