Wild Olives: Life in Majorca with Robert Graves

New
Paperback
2001
$12.38

In 1944, at the age of five, William Graves was taken from England to the delightful mountain village of Deya in Majorca, where his father - the poet Robert Graves - had returned with his new family to the place he had lived with Laura Riding before the war. Young William grew up in the shadow of this great writer in the Englishness of the Graves household, while experiencing the ways of life of the Majorcans, which had hardly changed for hundreds of years. Wonderfully observant, and full of feeling for the locality, this book is also a fascinating portrait of Robert Graves himself, his 'Muses', and his entourage, and a revealing study of how the son of a famous father finds his own identity.

Synopsis

In 1944, at the age of five, William Graves was taken from England to the delightful mountain village of Deya in Majorca, where his father - the poet Robert Graves - had returned with his new family to the place he had lived with Laura Riding before the war. Young William grew up in the shadow of this great writer in the Englishness of the Graves household, while experiencing the ways of life of the Majorcans, which had hardly changed for hundreds of years. Wonderfully observant, and full of feeling for the locality, this book is also a fascinating portrait of Robert Graves himself, his 'Muses', and his entourage, and a revealing study of how the son of a famous father finds his own identity.

$12.38

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More Information

Format: Paperback
Pages: 272
Edition: New edition
Publisher: Pimlico
Published: 02 Aug 2001
ISBN 10: 0712601163
ISBN 13: 9780712601160
Book Overview: William Graves' memoir about growing up with a famous father and living in Majorca through the middle of the twentieth century.

Media Reviews

An excellent short memoir, recalling the magic of his childhood on Majorca, but also showing how hard it is to live with such a father. * Derwent May, European *
William Graves's forthright memoir not only gives a sharp account of Father's foibles but offers a fuller evocation of the swiftly changing scene at Deya and Palma than in Robert's sketchy Majorca Observed. * London Magazine *
In Wild Olives, William, the eldest son of Robert Graves's second marriage, has given us a delightful, personal account of life with father after the family's return to Majorca - all the local intrigues, litigation and gossip interlaced with vivid descriptions of the mental processes by which Graves imagined himself back into the past or made mercurially intuitive connections like some kind of literary Sherlock Holmes * Times Literary Supplement *

Author Bio

William Graves is Robert Graves's son and Literary Executor. He still lives in Deya, but earns a living as a geologist consulting to the oil industry. He is married with two children.