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A POWERFUL NOVEL OF ELEMENTAL LOVE AND FURY ON A DOOMED, ENCHANTED ISLAND WORLD?.In the cradle of civilization, rocked by the waters of the blue Aegean, lies the tiny, barren island of Kalymnos. It is cloaked in antiquity and rich with the vibrant life of a proud and passionate people who have stubbornly endured the ravages of man and nature for three thousand years. And yet Kalymnos is dying, its means of survival crushed beneath the juggernaut of progress. Here is a moving story of this doomed, enchanted island, of a strong man and a strange, haunting woman who lived there, of a tormented girl who fled there, and of a wanderer who came, seeking...It is a story of unique power and simple splendor, a fiction rooted deep in truth.… (lisätietoja)
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In a restaurant in Crete, Australian Morgan Leigh casually mentions that he is in Greece looking for something to write about. “Go to Kalymnos,” says an American stranger. “Everywhere is changing, but most places you can’t see it. Too many things moving at once, too much clutter, everything too gummed up with too many things. But you can see it in Kalymnos. Past, present . . . All there right in front of your eyes. The world changing.”
Thus Australian writers George Johnston and Charmian Clift introduce three of their main characters in their novel, The Sea and the Stone—Australian Morgan Leigh, the American Telfs who befriends him, and the Greek island Kalymnos that is in the throes of change caused by the decline in its sponge-diving industry. Morgan Leigh becomes the observer for us. He wraps himself in the unique Kalymnian culture, learning about it but never really stepping inside it. He always is what he is—a witness to a culture’s passage into another era, a study of an economy in transition.
I found The Sea and the Stone to be a bit slow to engage my interest and often frustrating with its history and geography lessons holding up the progress of the story. I’ve read other work by each of these authors individually, and think I recognize their individual contributions to this joint effort. Johnston is a stunning writer; he is among a choice few with a decidedly unique gift for description. Clift, too, is superb in her own way. I am not so dazzled by her descriptions, which never smother the story, but only paint a backdrop.
The story here is strong enough that wading through the descriptions (which I attribute to Johnston) can feel more like a hindrance than the writer’s delight that they are. It is tempting to attribute Clift with only the story, but that would definitely be selling her short. I’ve read her memoir of Kalymnos, Mermaid Singing, and she can seamlessly bring life to landscapes and lifescapes like no one else. Perhaps that is what distinguishes the two: the one gets lost in the landscape; the other balances them seamlessly.
Clift and Johnston have brought us a tale of society in transition, the power of culture in the lives of people who have lived the same way for hundreds or thousands of years, the natural human resistance to the inevitability of change, the noblesse oblige of a wealthy business aristocracy, the importance of meaningful work, and of relationships that are simply a product of time and place. There’s more—a rich assortment of the eternal truths of human experience. And the promise of the experience of change contained in Telf’s advice to Morgan, “Go to Kalymnos,” is fulfilled, even though one of the themes may be said to be “the more things change, the more they stay the same.”
In the end, I’m glad I read it, slow-moving, rabbit-trail descriptions and all. I’m surprised that I can find so many little scabs to pick, when I have been left with a deeply satisfied feeling. ( )
Tiedot englanninkielisestä Yhteisestä tiedosta.Muokkaa kotoistaaksesi se omalle kielellesi.
For the KALYMNIANS
Ensimmäiset sanat
Sitaatit
Tiedot englanninkielisestä Yhteisestä tiedosta.Muokkaa kotoistaaksesi se omalle kielellesi.
Perhaps they were content in the knowledge that while they were at sea they were working, and it was this work, however hazardous and inhuman, that stretched a rope of security back to the women and the urchins of the island town. While they were away their credit was good in the shopkeepers’ books, their wives and children could eat; they had a sort of embittered accepting pride that was denied to those who had stayed behind to loiter in the summer streets, workless and hopeless and hungry. Their word for work, Morgan remembered, was thouleiá, and that was the word for slavery, too. And it was their work that enslaved them; it obsessed them and oppressed them; it surrounded them like a great, imprisoning wall, blocking out the light, standing between them and any real contact with soft, warm things. They could talk of nothing else.
Viimeiset sanat
Tiedot englanninkielisestä Yhteisestä tiedosta.Muokkaa kotoistaaksesi se omalle kielellesi.
A POWERFUL NOVEL OF ELEMENTAL LOVE AND FURY ON A DOOMED, ENCHANTED ISLAND WORLD?.In the cradle of civilization, rocked by the waters of the blue Aegean, lies the tiny, barren island of Kalymnos. It is cloaked in antiquity and rich with the vibrant life of a proud and passionate people who have stubbornly endured the ravages of man and nature for three thousand years. And yet Kalymnos is dying, its means of survival crushed beneath the juggernaut of progress. Here is a moving story of this doomed, enchanted island, of a strong man and a strange, haunting woman who lived there, of a tormented girl who fled there, and of a wanderer who came, seeking...It is a story of unique power and simple splendor, a fiction rooted deep in truth.
Google Books — Ladataan...
(3.5)
1
Thus Australian writers George Johnston and Charmian Clift introduce three of their main characters in their novel, The Sea and the Stone—Australian Morgan Leigh, the American Telfs who befriends him, and the Greek island Kalymnos that is in the throes of change caused by the decline in its sponge-diving industry. Morgan Leigh becomes the observer for us. He wraps himself in the unique Kalymnian culture, learning about it but never really stepping inside it. He always is what he is—a witness to a culture’s passage into another era, a study of an economy in transition.
I found The Sea and the Stone to be a bit slow to engage my interest and often frustrating with its history and geography lessons holding up the progress of the story. I’ve read other work by each of these authors individually, and think I recognize their individual contributions to this joint effort. Johnston is a stunning writer; he is among a choice few with a decidedly unique gift for description. Clift, too, is superb in her own way. I am not so dazzled by her descriptions, which never smother the story, but only paint a backdrop.
The story here is strong enough that wading through the descriptions (which I attribute to Johnston) can feel more like a hindrance than the writer’s delight that they are. It is tempting to attribute Clift with only the story, but that would definitely be selling her short. I’ve read her memoir of Kalymnos, Mermaid Singing, and she can seamlessly bring life to landscapes and lifescapes like no one else. Perhaps that is what distinguishes the two: the one gets lost in the landscape; the other balances them seamlessly.
Clift and Johnston have brought us a tale of society in transition, the power of culture in the lives of people who have lived the same way for hundreds or thousands of years, the natural human resistance to the inevitability of change, the noblesse oblige of a wealthy business aristocracy, the importance of meaningful work, and of relationships that are simply a product of time and place. There’s more—a rich assortment of the eternal truths of human experience. And the promise of the experience of change contained in Telf’s advice to Morgan, “Go to Kalymnos,” is fulfilled, even though one of the themes may be said to be “the more things change, the more they stay the same.”
In the end, I’m glad I read it, slow-moving, rabbit-trail descriptions and all. I’m surprised that I can find so many little scabs to pick, when I have been left with a deeply satisfied feeling. (