Over the Threshold

Three Summers by Margarita Liberaki

Another patient, long-suffering title has earned it’s place among the devoured on my bookshelf—this time, Three Summers by Margarita Liberaki. When August’s days were waning, it felt like the right thing to pick up. August is Women in Translation Month (I learned in August of this year), so it felt even more right. Well, dear reader, I’m happy to report that it was right!

This novel tells the story of three sisters over the course of three late-teenage summers. Maria is the oldest, followed by Infanta, and finally Katerina, who is sixteen the first summer, and who serves as our narrator. Structurally, the book is divided into three parts, one for each summer, and the winters are skipped over, except in memories and short summaries of missed action. In adolescence, it’s the summers that really count anyway.

The three sisters are close and not close at the same time. I think Liberaki does a great job of showing how being an island unto yourself does nothing to weaken the unique bonds of understanding that tie sisters together. When we meet them, they all lay in the hay together and tell secrets. Maria, being the oldest, tells Katerina that babies don’t come from storks. Also being the oldest, she is the first to flirt and the first to want love. Not the last though.

The girls all want love in very different ways. Maria wants restlessly, full of desire, and disappointment, and uncertainty, until she settles into calm, decided devotion. Infanta suffers from intense nervousness and suppression, exacerbated by a nervous and suppressed aunt, who singles her out as kindred favorite. Katerina isn’t interested until one day she is very interested, so much so that it almost pushes her over the edge of sanity. All of these portraits of love are so recognizable, and treated with such tenderness and humor.

Love is always the first thing that I look for in a book (and the first thing that I want to write about), but this novel is also about more. It’s a coming of age story, though I don’t really think that terminology captures it exactly right. One does simply not come of age in the course of three summers, and the coming is definitely not finished with at age eighteen (if ever, according to reports I’ve heard). Nonetheless, this novel does center on an important threshold. Or at least a threshold that feels incredibly important at the time. Those two things might actually be the same.

Undeniably, this threshold is a sexual one. The pervasiveness of this shift is captured well by Liberaki. It goes much further and deeper than learning that the storks don’t bring the babies. Accordingly, the imagery is bursting at the seams with sexual energy. The fertilization processes for various flowers, and plants, and trees is described in detail, often verging into the anthropomorphic. At moments it’s a bit on the nose, but never gratuitous. The external stimuli align with the mental and physical landscape of a teenage girl—these teenage girls.

It’s important to note, the focus on sex isn’t always purely sexual. I know that probably doesn’t make total sense, but I guess what I mean is that Liberaki takes a wider lens. Sex is power. The potential dangers tied to sex—particularly for a young woman—are not ignored, but in the right contexts, sex is freedom. That too is a captivating idea in the mind of a teenage girl.

After all, sixteen to eighteen are thinking and dreaming years, and in Katerina, we have a true thinker and dreamer. When Maria observes that Katerina wants to “live two lives,” the confident response comes: “Not just two, but thousands, Maria, or one which could be a thousand.” She wants something great and big, but she has no conception of what it will be or how she will get from point A to glorious, glorious point B. I remember feeling that way quite acutely in high school, and I still feel that way sometimes now.

I must come face to face with the fact that I enjoyed this book so much because I relate to Katerina. Lunatic that she is. And I type that in an indulgent, winking tone.

Her nosiness and her melodrama. Her desire in crisis to shut herself up in her room for a week, not seeing anyone or anything, just to get her mind right. She’s totally unreasonable and nonsensical, but she’s also so charming. Or as her mother would say, she’s impossible! I’m sure (though I know she would deny it) that my mother has said the same about me. In fact, I found her relationship with her mother quite relatable as well. The infuriating fight-picking and moodiness so confusing when it’s happening, because really all that’s underneath is a consuming love and protectiveness. And the desire to have a lap to lay in.

There was some initial floundering on my part to adjust to Liberaki’s flitting, dream-like style, not to mention the sheer number of Greek names to remember. Though Katerina is the narrator, there are moments when all of a sudden we are kind of in someone else’s head, and those instances were a bit disorienting. All said and done, I ended up loving Liberaki’s sentence fragments—her hops and skips—along with the longer, flowerier ribbons weaved throughout.

Within this dreamy style, so many beautiful images stand out—Katerina in her secret bower, Infanta soaring on her horse, their mother sitting at the piano, playing restrainedly, Maria and Marios in the kitchen making pudding, Mr. Louzis knocking the tree branches with his cane as he walks up to the house. The lavender! Oh my god, and Infanta by the window watching the fire on the mountain. These are all very good, but that last one is probably the best.

Even with all the eccentricities, Liberaki’s writing was perfectly suited to all of it. And besides, it becomes increasingly clear that Katerina is not only our narrator but also our active storyteller. In some of the moments where the imagery felt a bit much, or description of the natural world got a bit heavy-handed, I remembered that Katerina was writing to me. At one point late in the book she even claims to be writing a novel about three sisters. If true, that’s the first the reader hears or sees of it, aside, of course, from the evidence of the pages they hold in their hand.

It all makes a bit more sense when she begins telling us how often she lied as a little girl, making up fantastical stories. But she grew out of that. Then she ends her tale with an entire chapter that was nothing more than a dream. Then she says that she has tried to faithfully reproduce her memories. She has tried. It all makes sense. The girl who wants to make one life into one thousand lives could not possibly write an ordinary story, objective and true to fact. So there it is.

Though it’s September now, and fall is right around the corner, don’t be fooled by the title into thinking that this is not a seasonally appropriate read. It’s just as much about the end of summer as it is about the beginning. To employ a tried and true cliche, it’s about how the end is actually, of course, a beginning in and of itself.

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