The Rose Café: Love and War in Corsica

by John Hanson Mitchell

Book Overview

In 1962, while he was a student in Paris, John Hanson Mitchell spent a luminous six months on the Mediterranean island of Corsica at the Rose Caf?, in Ile Rousse. Twenty-two, Mitchell spent his idyll hours there observing the lives of the people who frequented the place. These included a group of local card players (some with possible underworld connections) who visited each night, as well as colorful continental types and a younger crowd at play...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 158243445X
• ISBN13: 9781582434452
• Release Date: November 2008
• Publisher: Catapult
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 0.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.4" x 8.1"

Customer Reviews

I love this book

I was so sad when this book ended. It is a beautiful book how it draws you into the place where it is set, an auberge during a summer in Corsica. You get to know all the people that come and go, and the landscape, and the culture. It is like really taking a summer in Europe, which you can't always do in real life! The writing is gorgeous. And you are drawn in, not wanting to put the book down, which is a rare thing with travel-type books.

Cafe Society

At the highest literary level for a personal memoir. After the passage of decades, a gifted American writer looks back on a formative period of months he spent on Corsica when he was twenty and at a time when the emotional scars arising from World War II were as yet unhealed. Clear, precise prose on the goings-on associated with the small, isolated but ever-interesting Cafe Rose. Aspiring writers would especially benefit from receiving this book as a present -- if not buying it themselves. (I sadly admit to being unaware of John Hanson Mitchell prior to reading this fine work.)

Warm and Rosy

This is a great summer read! Or, perhaps even better, if you read it in winter, it will warm you up! The author is best known for his deep explorations into an eastern Massachusetts square mile tract, known as Scratch Flat, but he's wandered away from his known territory in recent books. The Rose Cafe, his latest and, I think, his best, takes us to the sun-drenched island of Corsica in the Mediterranean where Mitchell lived for nine months in the early 1960s. It is, in part, a memoir of a pivotal time in his youth that launched him into his writing career. In his typical lyrical style, Mitchell weaves a magic spell as he introduces us to the breathtakingly beautiful, sensuous, and fragrant land of Corsica, where an odd collection of local types --- dreamy, eccentric, troubled, lovely, even some from Corsica's underworld --- frequent the charming, somewhat isolated cafe/auberge where he worked. In keeping with the subtitle, Love and War in Corsica,there is a lot of love in this book and a lot about the remnants of wars, World War II in particular; and you'll relish reading about delicious Corsican food and how it is prepared. Wild nature and local history serve as a rich metaphorical backdrop for this delightful book.