Gay Life (The Côte d'Azur Stories During Jazz Age)

Set in the Côte d'Azur, Hilary and Angie Moon have to live on their wits and her beauty. This novel is a light satirical take on the residents and guests of a Hotel on the French Riviera who have their own strength and flaws and must come to terms with their lives, age and romance over the course of a typical summer. E. M. Delafield (1890-1943) was a prolific English author who is best known for her largely autobiographical works like Zella Sees Herself, Provincial Lady Series etc. which look at the lives of upper-middle class Englishwomen. Excerpt: 'Maman, j'ai raté l'autobus!' The shimmering heat-haze of the afternoon seemed to quiver as the shrill, lamentable announcement of this disaster broke into the silence that lay over the deserted terrace of the Hotel.' (The Gay Life)

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Set in the Cte d'Azur, Hilary and Angie Moon have to live on their wits and her beauty. This novel is a light satirical take on the residents and guests of a Hotel on the French Riviera who have their own strength and flaws and must come to terms with their lives, age and romance over the course of a typical summer.

E. M. Delafield (1890-1943) was a prolific English author who is best known for her largely autobiographical works like Zella Sees Herself, Provincial Lady Series etc. which look at the lives of upper-middle class Englishwomen.

Excerpt:

"Maman, j'ai rat l'autobus!" The shimmering heat-haze of the afternoon seemed to quiver as the shrill, lamentable announcement of this disaster broke into the silence that lay over the deserted terrace of the Hotel." (The Gay Life)

Auteur
Alexandra Fuller was born in England in 1969 and in 1972 she moved with her family to a farm in Rhodesia. After the civil war there in 1981, the Fullers moved first to Malawi, then to Zambia. She now lives in Wyoming and has three children.

Résumé
Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulnesstells the story of the author's mother, Nicola Fuller.

Nicola Fuller and her husband were a glamorous and optimistic couple and East Africa lay before them with the promise of all its perfect light, even as the British Empire in which they both believed waned. They had everything, including two golden children - a girl and a boy.

However, life became increasingly difficult and they moved to Rhodesia to work as farm managers. The previous farm manager had committed suicide. His ghost appeared at the foot of their bed and seemed to be trying to warn them of something. Shortly after this, one of their golden children died. Africa was no longer the playground of Nicola's childhood. They returned to England where the author was born before they returned to Rhodesia and to the civil war.

The last part of the book sees the Fullers in their old age on a banana and fish farm in the Zambezi Valley. They had built their ramshackle dining room under the Tree of Forgetfulness. In local custom, this tree is the meeting place for villagers determined to resolve disputes. It is in the spirit of this Forgetfulness that Nicola finally forgot - but did not forgive - all her enemies including her daughter and the Apostle, a squatter who has taken up in her bananas with his seven wives and forty-nine children.

Funny, tragic, terrifying, exotic and utterly unself-conscious, this is a story of survival and madness, love and war, passion and compassion.

Échantillon de lecture
CHAPTER II
Table of Contents (1) The rocks, to which Mrs. Romayne's new and superb Buick conveyed the party at break-neck speed, formed a small bay where a section of the Mediterranean splashed gently and tidelessly.

Buckland pulled the car up by the side of the road, and everyone got out and began the descent, which was steep and necessitated climbing.

The children, already in bathing-suits, negotiated it easily. Patrick Romayne hung back, and put out his hand doubtfully to help his mother.

"Don't touch me," she screamed. "I shall overbalance if you do."

"I'll go first," volunteered Denis Waller, clinging in a most uncertain fashion to a ledge of red rock, and inwardly terrified lest he might be going to make a fool of himself by slipping, and breaking the glass of his wrist-watch. It was a new wrist-watch, set in a broad gold band, and it helped to bolster up his deficient self-assurance, because he secretly felt that it lent him individuality.

Mrs. Romayne screamed again, this time with derisive laughter.

"There wouldn't be much left of you, if I fell on you," she said crudely but accurately.

Waller privately winced. He was sensitive about himself in every possible aspect, but perhaps most of all where his small and skinny physical appearance was concerned.

Buckland, big and strong and hairy, thrust himself forward.

"Come on," he ordered masterfully. "I've got you."

He grasped Mrs. Romayne by the arm-the shoulder-the ankle-anywhere-half pushing and half lifting her down.

Denis Waller gritted his teeth.

He disliked Buckland intensely, and thought him a cad; nevertheless he envied him.

Why couldn't he have some of Buckland's self-confidence, his loud efficiency, and his easy success?

Denis slipped a little further down the rock, glanced round surreptitiously to see if anyone had noticed it and was despising him, and continued to slither, slowly and carefully-for he was rather frightened-in the rear of the party.

As he went, he comforted himself with a series of phantasies that had sustained him, varying hardly at all through the years, ever since his little boyhood.

The assumption on which most of these phantasies rested was to the effect that Denis Hannaford Waller had, in a past existence, been one of the world's Great Teachers-(which of them, he hardly liked to formulate even to himself, although he had his own secret convictions on the subject). Deliberately, on returning once more to earth, he had elected to embrace humiliation, an insignificant position, a frail and unimposing physique. Through the medium of these disadvantages, he would not only attain to a higher spirituality, but would continue his mission to humanity.

It was a large, indefinite mission, that embraced general understanding, and helpfulness, and service, and soon after attaining his seventeenth year, Denis had found that all these could be offered to, and welcomed by, girls of his own age or rather younger, of an intelligence slightly inferior to his own. Often and often these alliances of the spirit had landed him in difficulties, but he sincerely believed, on each occasion, that the difficulties had only been occasioned by the unworthiness, fickleness, or weakness, of the people whom he had tried to help. His own integrity he felt to be intact, and indeed morally-in the common acceptance of the term-he had remained impeccable, for he was both undersexed and inclined to a physical fastidiousness that he mistook for spirituality.

Mrs. Romayne, coarse-tongued and flamboyant, repelled rather than attracted him, but it was so essential to Denis Waller to be approved, and if possible liked, by all those with whom he was thrown into contact, that he always behaved exactly as if he admired and respected her very much. Dimly, he excused this insincerity to himself wh