"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
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.