Wild Olives: Life in Majorca with Robert Graves - Hardcover

Graves, William

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0091791529 ISBN 13: 9780091791520

Publisher: Hutchinson, 1995

Synopsis

As a five-year-old child, William Graves is taken in 1944 from England to a mountain village in Majorca, where his father, the poet Robert Graves, had returned with his new family to the place where he had lived before the war with Laura Riding. Young William grows up in the writer's shadow, while experiencing the ways of life of the Majorcans which have hardly changed for hundreds of years, and participating in the day-to-day activities of the village. In this book William Graves conveys the texture of life in Majorca - the food, the pattern of the season, the camaraderie and rivalries within the village, and the growing sense, from the Sixties onwards, that his fragile paradise was under threat. The book is also a portrait of Robert Graves, his "Muses" and his entourage, and a study of how the son of a famous father finds his own identity.

About this title

Product Description:

Used book

Review:

"An excellent short memoir, recalling the magic of his childhood on Majorca, but also showing how hard it is to live with such a father." (Derwent May, European)

"William Graves's forthright memoir not only gives a sharp account of Father's foibles but offers a fuller evocation of the swiftly changing scene at Deyá and Palma than in Robert's sketchy Majorca Observed." (London Magazine)

"In Wild Olives, William, the eldest son of Robert Graves's second marriage, has given us a delightful, personal account of life with father after the family's return to Majorca - all the local intrigues, litigation and gossip interlaced with vivid descriptions of the mental processes by which Graves imagined himself back into the past or made mercurially intuitive connections like some kind of literary Sherlock Holmes" (Times Literary Supplement)

About this edition

• Publisher: Hutchinson
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 0091791529
• ISBN 13: 9780091791520
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 95