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Immortelles | 
 enlarge | Author: Mireille Marokvia
Publisher: MacAdam/Cage
Category: Book
Buy New: $17.50
New (3) Used (2) from $16.62
Rating:  3 reviews
Sales Rank: 925674
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 300
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.7
Dimensions (in): 7.8 x 5.4 x 0.9
ISBN: 1878448722
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9781878448729
ASIN: 1878448722
Publication Date: September 10, 1996
Availability: In stock soon. Order now to get in line. First come, first served.
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| Editorial Reviews:
Amazon.com Review
"A young friend who visits often asked me one day to explain what my book is about. 'It's about the child I was,' I said, 'about ghosts ... and about things that last." These are the first words of the epilogue to Mireille Marokvia's luminous memoir, Immortelles, but they could serve as the prologue just as well. Writing at the end of a long and fascinating life, Marokvia, who was born in France in 1908, survived World War II in Germany as a Frenchwoman married to a German citizen and immigrated to the United States after the war. She chooses to concentrate on more intimate, if not less cataclysmic, events of her early childhood. To a child, small events can be intensely meaningful; Marokvia describes the overwhelming rage and sense of betrayal she felt when the family doctor, who had assured the 5-year-old Mareille that he would marry her, brings his fiancee for a visit. When she hears later that the doctor and his bride-to-be had suffered a minor automobile accident--in just the place that Mareille had imagined such an event occuring--she is savagely, ecstatically pleased. It is this utter lack of sentimentality about childhood that makes Immortelles so memorable. Marokvia writes about the savagery of children matter-of-factly--Mareille's pleasure in the doctor's accident; the two little girls who want to burn her at the stake as a heretic.She also straightforwardly details the habits of adults, which children often see more clearly than their elders.
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| Customer Reviews:
lilting, lyrical memoirs July 16, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
This dear little book, written in such a lilting, lyrical manner, had me enthralled with the first sentence. Born in 1908, the author tells of growing up in the environs of Chartres, France. This handsome little book is studded with family photos. It's such a pleasure to see people dressed in their regional dress, in the days before globalization and plastic surgery! The grandmother's starched white cap bespoke her origins. The memoirs talks of which flowers grew where, what vegetation abounded where...and her maternal grandmother's last dying word was..."geranium" ( because it suddenly bloomed out of season on the day the grandmother died. ) Mireille kept it secret for awhile, out of childish spite, not telling her mother until years later. The white dog, Toto, the cat, who came and stayed for about six months each winter, the hypochondriac and depressed mother, the amiable father...and what did poor Odette, her best friend die of? Reading this memoir was such a treat. The next book she wrote didn't have as good reviews, but the writing in this was so good, I had to order the next. If you like to be transported to time and place, and have characters come alive, you cannot help but love this little book. It's one that will stay with you for a long, long time, and probably even dredge up some of your own memories from a different time and different place. Incidently, the title "Immortelles" is a pun in French. One meaning is, of course, "the immortal (females)"; the other meaning is that "immortelles" is the colloquial name for what we call "straw flowers", which were thrown on the tops of coffins after they were lowered into the ground.
Immortelles:Memoir of a Will-O'-The Wisp June 29, 2000
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
This is one of the best books I have read for a long time. Its simple and innocent--a hard find in todays hard core literature. If you are looking for something gentle, serene and real, something belonging to the world gone by almost a century ago then this is it!
Wonderful July 4, 1997
3 out of 4 found this review helpful
Profoundly moving in a pure spirit of a world no longer existing. Reminds me of starched clothes and hand-carried water pails
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