Featured Reading Group Title
O verão selvagem dos teus olhos (The Wild Summer of Your Gaze)
A re-telling of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca from Rebecca’s point of view – beyond the grave. Atmospheric and evocative, the novel shifts between first-person and third-person narrative and between Rebecca’s memories of her relationship with Max and her current jealousy and bemusement at the arrival in the house of a new young woman, the new Mrs De Winter.
This is Rebecca’s turn to give her version of events. She starts by recalling her first meeting with Max, when she and her father visited Manderley as tourists, and how she met him again later, quite by chance, in Madrid, and fell in love with him there and then. The novel is beautifully written and a delight for fans of Rebecca and people who haven’t read the inspiring novel. This book’s title is taken from Yeats’ poem ‘The folly of being comforted’ in which the poet mentions his love as a younger person, when ‘when all the wild summer was in her gaze’.
More Information
- O verão selvagem dos teus olhos is featured in our Portugese Reading Group for Autumn 2011
- Translation sample by Margaret Jull Costa from The Wild Summer of Your Gaze (93)
I’ve started reading the novel and, so far, completely agree with Margaret Jull Costa’s recommendation.
Wonderfully atmospheric. But not vague, it gets the details right too. For example, ghost Rebecca’s jealousy is also so well drawn. As a ghost at Manderley, she can see Max and his new wife’s relationship at painfully close quarters. She sees him crush an azalea petal into his new wife’s palm and smell the scent – something he had done with Rebecca. ‘And that gesture seemed like a worse betrayal than his passing the night in her bedroom.’