Cantos de sirena

For Charmian Clift, Greece was the Promised Land. In 1954, she and her husband, famed reporter George Johnston, left gray post-war London for the Aegean Sea with two typewriters and two young children. They planned to spend a year there, but would end up staying a decade. Siren's Songs chronicles her checkered acclimatization to Kalymnos, a small island populated by taciturn sponge divers and strong, superstitious women. In its pages, full of unforgettable characters -with his faithful local squire, Manolis, and his inflexible domestic help, Sevasti, at the helm- and landscapes of an almost miraculous beauty, perplexity in the face of a primitive and patriarchal society coexists with the discovery of a pure, simple and free way of life, prior to the invasion of mass tourism. Written from the point of view of a thirty-one-year-old woman who intelligently, humorously, and warmly records the intimate details of her daily life and the customs of a dying world, these memoirs received little attention when published in 1956. With the passage of time, Siren Songs has become a classic of travel literature and the autobiographical genre, and allows us to discover one of the most talented and vitalist writers of the last century.