Gratuit avec l'essai de 30 jours
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The Summer Friend
- A Memoir
- Narrateur(s): Charles McGrath
- Durée: 4 h et 21 min
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Description
Alive with the intoxicating magic of summer in New England, former editor of the New York Times Book Review Charles McGrath’s evocative memoir looks back at that sun-soaked season, at family, youth, and a singular bond made at a time when he thought he was beyond making friends.
“Sun-drenched and deeply touching.”—The New York Times
“Positively aches with beauty and loss.”—Richard Russo, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Empire Falls
It was early evening and a new acquaintance had come to retrieve his daughter from a play date. Instead of driving up in a minivan, he arrived by water, tacking his sailboat smartly across a squiggly channel in the marsh, throwing a rope overboard, and zipping back home, his gleeful daughter riding in the wake. Who knew you could do such a thing? And how could you resist befriending a man such as that?
Over the course of this rich memoir, McGrath recalls with a gimlet eye the pleasures of summers past: amateur lobstering, 9-hole golf, family costume charades, bridge-jumping, and a friendship forged between two men from different backgrounds who came together late in life.
Recounting the vagaries of summer with such precision and warmth—peeling long strips of sunburnt skin from your shoulder as if “shuffling off your own cocoon,” the outdoor shower curtain blowing open in the breeze, an M80 firework in the mailbox—The Summer Friend is simultaneously a potent evocation of the rhythms and rituals of summer and a stirring remembrance of a friend found and then lost.
Ce que les critiques en disent
“Sun-drenched and deeply touching...I loved McGrath’s snapshots of the dilapidated nine-hole courses he likes to play on, which he describes with a deadpan relish reminiscent of Bill Bryson… McGrath eulogizes his summer friend in the very first chapter, then brings him to life on the subsequent pages with such vividness and palpable affection that the reader forgets his fate for long stretches ... When the end finally comes, in a chapter simply called ‘Dying,’ it lands like a gut punch…. McGrath’s book is an act of love, a fitting tribute to his old friend and a poignant reminder to all of us to squeeze every last drop out of the summers that remain.”—Tom Perrotta, The New York Times
"[An] affecting memoir...The book’s prevailing spirit is wholly life-affirming. It is in the fullness with which things large and small are rendered...in all their humorous specificity that makes memorable what might be called the moral of the tale—that “summer can happen almost anywhere.”—William H. Pritchard, The Wall Street Journal
“[An] ode to friendship and nostalgia...McGrath's memoir is as much about his childhood summers as it is about his summers as a grown-up, and he moves back and forth seamlessly between second person...and first person. That shift keeps the tone intimate but not overwhelmingly self-centered. These things I'm writing about, McGrath seems to say, are things we all understand... The poignancy of the final chapters is genuinely touching. Anyone who has lost a friend will understand.”—Laurie Hertzel, Star Tribune