Summer in Europe (at Home)
Bonjour Tristesse by Françoise Sagan
Cécile, Bonjour Tristesse’s main character, is seventeen and spending the summer on the French Riviera with her father Raymond and his newest girlfriend Elsa. Raymond is somewhat of a lothario, but he and Cécile get along, and though Cécile finds Elsa a bit dull, she likes her well enough. Cécile is content to spend her summer flirting with their neighbor Cyril, getting sunburned on the beach, and swimming in the sea, but then Anne arrives. A close friend of Cécile’s late mother and somewhat of an enigma, Anne threatens to upset Cécile’s languid summer of love and destabilize her entire future. Though Bonjour Tristesse is only 100 pages, its plot is almost cinematic in its twists, turns, and moments of drama (it was actually adapted into a film in 1958).
The most shocking thing about Bonjour Tristesse is that it was published in 1954 when Françoise Sagan was only eighteen. The book feels far more self-aware and sophisticated than Sagan’s age would suggest, and I highly recommend it.
The Beautiful Summer by Cesare Pavese
The Beautiful Summer has been sat on my shelf since Penguin republished it in 2018 as part of their European Writers series. It was originally published in Italian in 1949, and like Bonjour Tristesse features a young woman on the cusp of adulthood. In the summer in 1930s Italy, Ginia is sixteen and in search of friendship and a good time, but she’s encumbered by her own fears and hesitations. She befriends a woman named Amelia who is a few years old and who works as a life-model for male painters. Amelia introduces Ginia to Guido and Rodrigues, and the four make up a fraught group of friends. Ginia and Guido strike up a fleeting summer romance, the imminent end of which causes Ginia much trepidation.
Both Bonjour Tristesse and The Beautiful Summer feature summer romances, but in both books it struck me that the most interesting and consuming relationship was actually between the young women and another woman. Cyril and Guido are minor characters in both the novels and, it felt like, in the lives of Cécile and Ginia. The real texture of both books plays out in the conflicts the young women have with these older women. Anne and Amelia are very different characters, but they challenge Cécile and Ginia to grow up in ways that are both liberating and uncomfortable. Given that I’m comparing them already, if I had to recommend one book it would be Bonjour Tristesse. Aspects of The Beautiful Summer felt stilted and awkward, and I have the impression the quality of the translation from Italian is the cause. It appears Penguin didn’t update the 1955 English translation when the book was republished in 2018, which seems like an odd and unfortunate choice.
The Offing by Benjamin Myers
Published in 2019 but set just after the Second World War, Benjamin Myers’ The Offing is a beautiful portrait of an unlikely friendship between sixteen-year-old Robert and an eccentric older woman named Dulcie. Robert comes from a long line of miners, and in the summer before he is meant to follow his forebears underground, he sets off to walk the northern English countryside. Just outside Robin Hood’s Bay, Robert follows a winding path to a little cottage with an overgrown garden. There, Robert meets Dulcie, who introduces him to poetry, smuggled wine, and fresh lobster dipped in butter. In return, Robert restores an old studio left in disrepair on Dulcie’s property and takes her dog Butters on long walks. Over the course of the summer, Robert and Dulcie find that they have much to teach each other about embracing the world with an open heart and mind.
The Offing is a much more heartwarming coming-of-age story than Bonjour Tristesse or The Beautiful Summer. Though the book deals with grief and is set in the post-war period, its main characters develop a bond that really tugs at your heartstrings. Myers also describes the English countryside with the skill of a nature writer, and he brings to the fore the moments of quiet pleasure that make summer such an enchanting season: an unexpected downpour on a hot day, an evening spent drinking wine outside until well after the sun has set, or a nap in a field after a day picking berries.
The Summer Book by Tove Jansson
Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book has been a classic summer novel ever since it was first published in Swedish in 1972. Jansson is most known for her Moomin series for children, but she wrote a number of novels and short story collections for adults, including The Summer Book. Loosely based on the relationship between Jansson’s own mother and niece, The Summer Book centers six-year-old Sophia and her elderly grandmother. They spend each summer together on a tiny island in the Gulf of Finland, and find kinship in their attempts to fill the day with exploration and attention to nature. They’re fiercely protective of their oasis on the island and their love of the place takes center stage in the book.
I appreciated that Jansson allows the relationship between Sophia and her grandmother to have an adult kind of complexity. They love one another deeply, but they’re also getting in constant disagreements and often find themselves exasperated with one another. Sophia’s grandmother speaks to Sophia as if she’s a peer, and I really appreciated that though Sophia often has childlike moments, her entire character isn’t defined by her being a child. Jansson’s experience as a writer of children’s books seems to have influenced how she wrote Sophia, and she’s done a much better job crafting a young character than writers of books for adults usually do. This aspect of the book reminded me of Philip Pullman’s novels that center children, and it just so happens that Pullman said of The Summer Book that it is “a marvelous, beautiful, wise novel that is also very funny.” I very much agree.
Heat Wave by Penelope Lively
Penelope Lively’s Heat Wave is one of my favorite books on this list. Pauline is a middle-aged copyeditor spending the summer at a cottage called World’s End somewhere in the English countryside. Staying in the adjoining cottage are her daughter Teresa, her son-in-law Maurice, and her two-year-old grandson Luke. As the summer unfolds, what began as an idyllic getaway turns increasingly sour. Pauline is wary of Maurice, a self-involved writer closer to her own age than her that of her daughter. The book jumps back-and-forth in time, from Pauline’s young adulthood to the present, and Lively handles these time shifts skillfully. Maurice begins to remind Pauline of her own ex-husband, and she sees in his relationship with Teresa reminders of her past heartbreak. As Pauline watches her own daughter parent her young son, she rethinks what it means to be a mother and why it is she and her daughter both ended up with men whose attention is always elsewhere.
Summer by Edith Wharton
I know I said this was a post about summer in Europe, but I’m also quite sad about not being able to visit my family in New England this summer, so I’ve also read two summer books set there. The first is Edith Wharton’s Summer, published in 1917. Summer revolves around Charity Royall, who is seventeen and feeling increasingly cloistered by the tiny New England town in which she lives with her adoptive father. When a young architect named Lucius Harney visits the town for the summer, Charity becomes swept up in a furtive romance that at first promises excitement and escape, but that quickly devolves in the face of a number of destabilizing complications.
Summer touches on similar themes as Bonjour Tristesse and The Beautiful Summer: coming-of-age, sexual awakening, social class, gender roles, destructive relationships, and youth rebellion. Like the young women in those books, Summer’s Charity vacillates between devil-may-care recklessness and complete paranoia about every move she makes. She exhibits a youthful tendency to fail to anticipate the consequences of one’s actions, and she becomes increasingly torn between the pursuit of personal pleasure and the social approval of her tiny New England community. The book is unique in many ways to turn-of-the-century America, but the inhibiting and destructive force of social pressure endures, as does the teenage desire to fly in the face of those norms and expectations.
Summer Solstice: An Essay by Nina MacLaughlin
Nina MacLaughlin’s Summer Solstice is one to read while lying in the grass in a field, preferably with a pint or a plastic cup filled with bubbly. It’s a short little book, but it really captures the heady atmosphere of summer, from walking barefoot on the grass on a firefly filled night, to eating hotdogs and drinking beer at an evening baseball game. The book is lyrical and evocative, with sentences like, “I have murdered generations of fruit flies in my kitchen” and “The faded smell of grill smoke and sunscreen in the air.” Summer’s long daylight hours and sluggish heat warp our understanding of time, a theme MacLaughlin plays with throughout the book. She writes, “An atmosphere of, I’ll get to it but right now, a beer before dinner and warmth on bare legs, and everything can just go a little slower for a moment. The light lasts forever, life lasts forever. Do you feel young? I promise, the start of summer whispers, you are young.”
