Three Summer Reads

When I first moved to London, I visited a Sorolla exhibition at the National Gallery. London that day was living up to its reputation for horrid weather. The day was dreary, the sky leached of all colour. Through the drizzle, the dark bulk of the Gallery felt ominous.

On entering the first room of paintings, the grey shattered. Scenes shimmering with vibrant light splashed across the mute walls. Girls chasing each other on an open shore, their dresses flaring, the waves glowing. A family restoring a sail, light and shadow dimpling across their faces. Each canvas was drenched in undulations of sunlight. The warmth and the summer breeze were almost tangible. I had the luxurious sense of bathing in the Spanish sun. Each painting felt like a fresh portal to a haven where the sun was an unrelenting constant.

Below are some books that did the same for me as Sorolla's paintings: they shattered the grey and ushered in the sun. They capture facets of summer. Here are three reads that bring the sun and sea to you.

A Theatre for Dreamers (2020)

“There is nowhere in the world where you can live like you can in Hydra, and that includes Hydra.” - Leonard Cohen

Erica is young, directionless, and itching for adventure beyond dreary London. Her chance of escape comes via an invitation to stay the summer with her dead mother's old friend, Charmian Clift. Along with a group of fellow drifters, they arrive at Hydra, a Greek island that harbours a bohemian cluster of artists and poets. One such writer is a young Canadian called Leonard Cohen.

So begins for Erica an island existence in the company of wandering artists. She haunts Charmian's kitchen bustling with her barefooted children. She inhales smoke from George Johnston's cigarettes. She moves into a decrepit house at the top of island. Their table at the village bar breeds gossip surrounding mysterious figures that flit in and out of their peripheries. Axel Jensen has abandoned his baby to chase the newest hot arrival. Alone in the distance is a blonde girl with a baby at her hips. Her name is Marianne.

Samson paints irresistible scenes of life on Hydra, this haven for dreamers. Beneath the blazing sun, we settle into the rhythms of rural life, where hazy days melt into the next. The novel is imbued with the textures of island life. The bursting tomatoes and the comforts of moussaka. The smell of goat shit. The homeliness of fresh bread. The lack of running water. The handpicked flowers and handmade lace. The hikes of ragged stone steps. Naked dips in the sea.

As Erica delves deeper into the community, cracks appear in the sunny facades. Erica stumbles on lover's spats and uneasy betrayal. She finds herself trapped in the role of a mute muse and provider, trekking for fresh water in the morning and lone trips to the market while resisting her own itch to write. Erica's journey runs in parallel with power struggles between Australian literary icons Clift and Johnston. It's a skilful exploration of the friction between artist and muse, the struggle of women artists to create in the shadow of the male ego.

It's a sophisticated and intoxicating portrait of an artist's haven. The freedom of the summer is held together by casual ties of love, sex and art, without drowning in nostalgia. Reimagining the pursuit of art under the Mediterranean sun in the '60s, A Theatre for Dreamers offers a delicious escapism while flirting with darker themes of artists and their demons.

Hot Milk (2016)

I launched into Hot Milk on the tail of A Theatre for Dreamers, wistful for a lost Hydra, looking to prolong my Mediterranean escape. Behind the azure blue, sun-swept cover, what awaited me was instead a brilliant and sizzlingly psychological tale. 25-year-old Sofia Papastergiadis and her mother, Rose, journey to the south of Spain to seek medical treatment for her wheelchair-ridden mother. From the start, she is shattered and distressed:

"Today I dropped my laptop on the concrete floor of a bar built on the beach...My laptop has all my life in it and knows more about me than anyone else.

So what I am saying is that if it is broken, so am I."

Under the relentless sun, Sofia's Mediterranean stay is defined by pain and a detached sense of malaise. The open sea is infested with medusas and she is plagued with jellyfish stings. The barks of a tortured dog drown out the waves. Rubbish line the beach. She frets over the waste of her anthropological studies and her dead-end cafe job in London. She calls her mother 'Rose'.

Threaded through Sofia's internal dialogue, there is an unknown voice observing her, obsessed with her. A dislocated second perspective on Sofia's roiling yet stifled interior life.

At the novel's core is Sofia's uneasy bond with her hypochondriac mother and the lingering damage left by an absent father. Viewing the world through an anthropological lens, she makes attempts at human connection with distant strangers on the shore. She sees the world in clipped phrases. We delve with her into a deep into her 'pathetic, miniature, life' where every page may throw up the unexpected.

Hot Milk is a summer 'anti-vacation', taut with tension and cling-filmed with angst. Between the bare phrases and tortured psyches, the Spanish sun hums. It doesn't fit, it shouldn't work. But in Levy's masterly prose, the Mediterranean becomes the obvious setting for a familial drama. Hot Milk delves into the discomfort of becoming one's own person while languishing under a blistering sun. It's an edgier, more cerebral summer read that probes the underlying questions of the forces that make us who we are.

The Summer Book (1972)

The Summer Book opens on a scene with a grandmother poking amongst the rocks on the shore, in search of her teeth. What follows are playful, wise, and comforting vignettes of life distilled into the span of one short, Finnish summer. Each chapter is a small window into life on an island on the Gulf of Finland and the tender bond between a grandmother and her grandchild, Sophia.

Like its title, the book is stripped yet elegant. In sentences like brushstrokes, Jansson sketches portraits of wild things: a savage landscape, an impetuous child, a mischievous grandmother. They speak of God and heaven and how things are and how things should be. In one story, they break into a new neighbour's house. In another, Sophia adopts a cat. One particular memorable story is delightfully called 'The Enormous Plastic Sausage'.

These are stories of ordinary things through cheeky lenses. Infused through squabbles and tender moments between a child at life's dawn and a granny at its dusk are life's small joys: flowers, the moon, the idea of Venice. Sophia experiences life in extremes, as only children can. There are outrageous, surprising moments that made me snort laugh. Woven throughout the stories are the woods, rocks and the sea. These stories are lessons in crafting adventure within the cradle of nature.

This iconic gem of a book encapsulates the wonder of a childhood summer, complete with gunk beneath fingernails, impromptu naps, and brine up noses. Shot through with mischief, hilarity, and deeply humane and pithy lessons, I was reminded that life is always unexpected, always brimming with small discoveries. That flickers of magic surround us if only we care to look for them.

P.S. A couple of other books that evoke slow-burning summers that are constantly deferred in my ever-growing I 'have-yet-to-but-plan-to' read pile. They're supposed to be pretty good, too.

1. Call me by your name by André Aciman

2. Bonjour Tristesse by Françoise Sagan

(P.P.S: Please also send through your choice summer reads!)