BITTER SEA ( )

Para Charmian Clift, Grecia era la Tierra Prometida. En 1954, ella y su marido, el famoso reportero George Johnston, abandonaron el gris Londres de posguerra y partieron hacia el mar Egeo con dos máquinas de escribir y dos hijos pequeños. Planeaban pasar allí un año, pero acabarían quedándose una década. Cantos de sirena es la crónica de su accidentada aclimatación a Kálimnos, una pequeña isla poblada por taciturnos pescadores de esponjas y mujeres fuertes y supersticiosas. En sus páginas, llenas de personajes inolvidables —con su fiel escudero local, Manolis, y su inflexible asistenta doméstica, Sevasti, a la cabeza— y paisajes de una belleza casi milagrosa, la perplejidad ante una sociedad primitiva y patriarcal convive con el descubrimiento de un modo de vida puro, sencillo y libre, previo a la invasión del turismo de masas.

Estas memorias, escritas desde el punto de vista de una mujer de treinta y un años que registra con inteligencia, humor y calidez los detalles íntimos de su vida cotidiana y las costumbres de un mundo en vías de extinción, apenas recibieron atención al publicarse en 1956. Con el paso del tiempo, Cantos de sirena se ha convertido en un clásico de la literatura de viajes y del género autobiográfico, y nos permite descubrir a una de las escritoras más talentosas y vitalistas del siglo pasado.

"Charmian Clift no es la Sylvia Plath australiana", El País 16.08.2022: https://elpais.com/cultura/2022-08-16/charmian-clift-no-es-la-sylvia-plath-austr...

1950s Greek island living - descriptive and humourous 😀

Charmian Clift welcomed me into a colorful Old World community, where a man could not marry until his sister was married, where an entire family slept together on a sleeping shelf, where poverty was the rule and simplicity the key to life, where men and women led nearly separate lives.

For centuries the men of Kalymnos had been sponge divers. For as long as six months out of the year, the men were at sea, harvesting the sponges that (with the exception of a few small shops, taverns, and coffee houses) were the only means of income for the community. At home, women reared children, prayed, and waited for their men to come home from the sea—and every year men died or returned crippled by decompression sickness.

Though the world of Kalymnos seemed to be about men’s work, Clift describes a society where women were considered mysterious and powerful: women owned the property; men were their servants, expected only to be virile and hardworking. Here, the notion of dowry stems not from a woman contributing her share, but rather a woman’s family gifting her with the means to establish herself as the center of a new, young family. The goal of all men was to attract the eye of a likely woman who would find them worthy.

Clift is a superb writer. Her memories from the year she and her young family spent on the Greek island of Kalymnos in the mid 1950s is engaging and packed with careful detail of daily life in a small community whose primary rituals of weddings, funerals, and christenings had changed little for centuries. Mermaid Singing is as suitable for an anthropologist as it is for the avid travel reader or fan of memoir. Clift is known in her native Australia as an essayist of unmatched talent. The same may be said for her memoirs. I have no doubt her fiction will be as satisfying. ( )