Three Summers

Three sisters come of age in the genteel milieu of prewar Greece in Liberaki’s dreamy, modernist gem of a novel, her first translated into English. Narrated by the youngest, impulsive and imaginative 16-year-old Katerina, the story brackets a period that will prove decisive in the lives of the sisters, who have grown up with their divorced mother, maiden aunt, and grandfather in a country house near Athens. Twenty-year-old Maria gets engaged to the lovestruck Marios, though her embrace of a conventional destiny coincides with the feeling that “from this day on the sacrifices would begin.” At 18, the restrained and virginal Infanta is at an intersection in her relationship with Nikitas, a childhood friend she can’t bring herself to kiss, though “she wanted him the way she wanted to fall into the cistern on hot days.” And Katerina dreams of David, a half-English neighbor and astronomer, who is also pursued by the older, married Laura Parigori. In Van Dyck’s translation, Katerina shifts seamlessly between her own perspective and the thoughts and dreams of her family and friends, painting a world in which women are both cosseted and neglected, free to imagine “thousands of lives,” and longing for a true and tangible connection with another: “something like lightning... you feel it before you have time to think.” This is an elegant and striking novel. (July)