Tea on the Blue Sofa : Whispers of Love and Longing from Africa

By Natasha Illum Berg and Natasha IllumBerg

A passionate, bittersweet memoir of a love cruelly cut short, set in the splendour of East Africa. Natasha Illum Berg is secretly in love. As she waits for her married lover in her beautiful house in... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0007178697
• ISBN13: 9780007178698
• Release Date: January 2004
• Publisher: Fourth Estate
• Length: 144 Pages
• Weight: 0.60 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Undeserving

Tea on the Blue Sofa is a beautifully written memento mori to a murdered love. The author Illum Berg is incredibly talented. Her prose is lyrical, magical, evocative. So engrossing, one can almost smell the acacia woodsmoke, the flinty red dust of East Africa and taste the heady rich tea of which she writes. Her grief and pain and loss are all too apparent in every word, seemingly carved in acajou. Her memoir - it isn't even really that, more like a collection of moods and moments in her life with her love and after his death - wander from the bush in Africa, taking baths outside the tent in a tub, washing away the dust, to the wan sunlit days of Sweden where she grew up. Not knowing anything else, one can share in her grief, mourn the loss of this unique man, who, when murdered, she laid down in the dust next to his body, putting the dark heart blood of his fatal wound to her lips, feel his absence in her life as sharp as shards of breaking crystal.. However, my knowledge of the circumstances denies me this POV. What brings the whole, lovingly sculpted castle of lofty love and loss down to earth for me, is that nowhere in the book does the author mention her lost love was married. She waxes lyrical about the clever and meaningful things he said to her, how deeply he knew her, how sincere and true their love was. In words about her love, Illum Berg's memories come across like a completely infatuated schoolgirl. She was still in the blush stage of their romance. She believed everything he told her. She considered his words deeply profound and meaningful. Despite the fact the man was married, lived a mile a way with his - undivorced - wife and children, she seems completely taken in. She ignores that the man had recently renewed his vows with his wife, that according to all at the ceremony, had gotten down on his knees in front of his wife and told all and sundry how she was the most important thing in his life. Everything Illum Berg cherished about her love - his charisma, passion, meaningful gestures - had been used to the same effect with another woman - his wife. In a way, however lovely, this book could be a poison pen letter from a would-be 'other woman' to the wife, for Illum-Berg writes mournfully about being unable to grieve for her love openly - apparently his wife didn't want her at the funeral - go figure - but she managed to buzz the funeral anyway when friends flew her in a plane over the graveside. Gratefully, her friends flew her very high over the grave site. She talks about doing this gently, mesmerizingly, but what she was really doing was crashing his funeral for her own purposes, leaving those below to twist before the service, wondering if she was going to cause a scene in front of his wife and her love's grieving children. This act speaks of selfishness more than grief, IMO. So for all her poignant, lamenting about being unable to be open about her loss and love, publishing a book and detailing the c

Whew

What a beautiful book. She has a tremendous command of the language and a very flowery style. To be honest there were times I was temporarily lost-wondering if she was being literal or figurative. But it always became clear. A story of a truly adventurous spirit who opens her heart up to a lover who is unexpectedly killed, and the trama that engulfs her. Living in a pop culture of monosylabic dumbed-down dialogue, one forgets how beautiful english can be. What a pleasant gaze through a window into another world this book gives us.