Wild Olives: Life in Majorca With Robert Graves

(Paperback)

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Description

As a five-year-old child, William Graves is taken in 1944 from England to a mountain village in Majorca, where his father, the poet Robert Graves, had returned with his new family to the place where he had lived before the war with Laura Riding. Young William grows up in the writer's shadow, while experiencing the way of life of the Majorcans which have hardly changed for hundreds of years, and participating in the day-to-day activities of the village. William Graves conveys the texture of life in Majorca - the food, the pattern of the seasons, the camaraderie and rivalries within the village, and the growing sense, from the 1960s onwards, that his fragile paradise was under threat. The book is also a portrait of Robert Graves, his "Muses" and his entourage, and a study of how the son of a famous father finds his own identity.

Reviews

An excellent short memoir, recalling the magic of his childhood on Majorca, but also showing how hard it is to live with such a father. * Derwent May, European *
William Graves's forthright memoir not only gives a sharp account of Father's foibles but offers a fuller evocation of the swiftly changing scene at Dey and Palma than in Robert's sketchy Majorca Observed. * London Magazine *
In Wild Olives, William, the eldest son of Robert Graves's second marriage, has given us a delightful, personal account of life with father after the family's return to Majorca - all the local intrigues, litigation and gossip interlaced with vivid descriptions of the mental processes by which Graves imagined himself back into the past or made mercurially intuitive connections like some kind of literary Sherlock Holmes * Times Literary Supplement *

Author Bio

William Graves is Robert Graves's son and Literary Executor. He still lives in Deya, but earns a living as a geologist consulting to the oil industry. He is married with two children.