Immortelles: Memoir of a Will-O'-The Wisp

By Mireille Marokvia

"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... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1878448722
• ISBN13: 9781878448729
• Release Date: January 1996
• Publisher: Macadam Cage Pub
• Length: 197 Pages
• Weight: 0.76 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.0" x 1.0" x 5.3"

Customer Reviews

lilting, lyrical memoirs

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

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

Profoundly moving in a pure spirit of a world no longer existing. Reminds me of starched clothes and hand-carried water pails