Three Summers by Margarita Liberaki is a Nostalgic Goldmine

“Perhaps…we will long for the time when we all lay around in the hay and our desires were so fluid and uncertain that they were no longer our own. They became the air we breathed; a thought of Maria’s became mine and mine Infanta’s — a kind of unearthly communion.” (135)

From the opposite shore of the last century, Margarita Liberaki’s coming-of-age novel reconjures a lost world. When Three Summers was published in 1946, its idyllic Attic landscape and quiet affairs had been swept away by half a decade of fascist occupation. But Liberaki is not interested in a sweeping commentary or a gripping plot. Instead, she seeks to rescue a handful of moments from the Lethe.

Her narrator, Katerina, proves a suitable vessel for memories. Neither as boy-crazy as her eldest sister Maria nor as isolated as the artistic Infanta, she observes the quiet drama of her rural milieu with adolescent curiosity. The novel follows her as she and her family discover love, heartbreak, and their own troubled history. Neither she nor Liberaki insist that the story progress with any haste.

But they have no reason to hurry. For a Greek girl in the late 1930s, growing up means marriage, confinement and unforeseen occupation. The most important men in the story are frequently absent and Katerina’s older female relatives bury themselves alive in nostalgia. She and her sisters escape domestic doom by embracing a Romantic image of girlhood: fierce pride, sisterly rivalry, communion with nature, and a flirtatious detachment from the boys who might disrupt their youth. Only when Katerina becomes infatuated with an older astronomer does a foreign gaze penetrate the lush coming-of-age ramble. The dynamic that develops is funny, sweet, and as painful as any between an outsider and a girl with a wild imagination.

“As I stared at my body it was as if David were the one looking at me. ‘So that’s what they mean when they talk about the devil,’ I said. And although I could see the devil I was no longer afraid” (144)

Devil or not, David can only linger on the periphery of Katerina’s world. As she matures, her focus turns to the women around her. Each character, from Maria, who trades her freedom for a comfortable attachment to a doctor’s son, to the sisters’ mysterious Polish grandmother, has depths concealed by the myopia of youth or the dullness of age. Each, without Liberaki, would be forgotten.

Reading Three Summers feels like spending a few hours with your great-grandmother and her friends. While they may fuss about the tablecloth or reminisce about bygone liaisons, the careful listener may discover they have more in common with their company than the difference in years implies.