This was an interesting read if you want to know about what life is like living on a Greece island in the 50s and 60s. I loved comparing what life was like now and then. I finished this book in one day as the author kept my attention throughout. I learnt quite a bit from reading this book. There were great snippets of history throughout this book. I definitely recommend reading this book. Many thanks to the author and publishers for bringing us this interesting and informative book.
Put review on goodreads, bookmory and storygraph

Part travelogue, part sociological study and part memoir this wonderful re-issue of a book was a pleasure to read. Ms. Clift weaves her fish-out-of-water tale of moving to Greece with the care, gentleness and wonder that is felt by the reader on every page. I throughly enjoyed this book and cannot wait to read its follow-up.

I apprecitate the publisher allowing me to read this book. I found this a really interesting read and the characters are quite engaging. it kept me reading until the end. I highly recommend.

What a find, its reissue has found a new generation of readers. I was particularly fascinated to read about the way if life on the island. The lack of privacy would drive me crazy as would everyone sleeping together on a sleeping shelf. An interesting fact was the status if women on the island, that property hoes through the female line. A wonderful read, I am now reading Peel me a lotus.

In 1954 Charmian Clift and her husband George Johnston decided to exchange their stable careers in journalism and active social life in Sydney for the Greek islands where they planned to spend all their time on their own novels. Clift’s two autobiographical books of travel writing, Mermaid Singing and Peel me a lotus cover this bohemian, colourful and challenging time in the couples lives and presents a snapshot of the islands they inhabited during that time.

Full review of both Mermaid Singing and Peel me a lotus available here: https://westwordsreviews.wordpress.com/2021/06/29/mermaid-singing-peel-me-a-lotus-charmian-clift/

It's beginning of the 50s. A married couple, both writers decide to leave the post-war London to live on a small Greek island with their small children. They plan to get a living only by writing and to live a simple life under sun. Kalymnos is one of the Greek islands, and its people depend on sponge diving (a very dangerous profession) for living. As they are the first foreigners arrived to live there, this is big news to the whole island.
This is a memoir of settling the family in their new home, getting friends and living among the islanders who are more than eager to help, up to the point never to leave them alone.
Charmian Clift describes the family's experience to the reader from different perspectives; she tells us the stories of the people closer to the family, the way of living on the island, daily life, seasonal activities, religious practices and festivities, etc. She also tells us about the topics usually left out of memoirs, such as the lives of children in a poor remote island, including her own children's eventful lives, women's place in this community, and household practices.
This first book gives the detailed chronicle of the year they spend in Kalymnos, and it tells about the good times and the bad times, their struggles and small triumphs. Chapter by chapter, Clift takes us back in time, when Greek islands were not invaded by travellers and tourists, and gives an authentic account of living on an island in the middle of nowhere with little money as a foreigner.
It's an enjoyable read, especially because leaving big cities behind is still a hot topic. The world has changed a lot since this book was written, but it still resonates with us.
Thanks to the publisher and NetGalley.

'And at the foot of the mountains was a town, an improbable town that from across the wild sea had the appearance of carefully arranged matchboxes - a doll's town to amuse a child on a wet afternoon. Beyond the little cubes of white and blue and yellow ochre a hill rose out of a valley with a ruined wall and three round towers; and below the houses a forest of matchstick masts tossed on what would ultimately prove, no doubt, to be a nursery bowl filled with water from the bathroom tap.'

Writer Charmian Clift and her journalist husband, George Johnston, moved from London to the Greek island of Kalymnos in the 1950s. This book is a memoir of their time on the island, where they went to live a simpler life and focus on their writing.

The couple and their two children arrive on the island and are immediately found accommodation in a large yellow house on the seafront. In the book, Clift writes about their lives, the local characters, landscape, superstitions, festivals, religious beliefs, the role of women, and various other topics, in prose that brings everything to fragrant and descriptive life.

The island's main industry is provided by sponge diving, which takes place off the coast of Africa, for around seven months a year. The work is incredibly dangerous and several divers end up crippled.

Clift and Johnston's old life, in London, sits in stark contrast to their island life. Here, everyone is sociable and they cannot move or even eat without the accompaniment of friends and neighbours. Going for a walk by themselves is impossible and any hope of privacy is soon quashed; however, the islanders are kind and hospitable, bringing food and even pets to the family.

The consolation is the island itself, with its many small settlements, bays and views, and simple way of life, all of which Clift describes in a way that makes you want to visit.

'Perhaps there is neither time nor room for the trivial emotions that lay the marks of disfigurement on the city face, not here in lives where joy and sorrow are scaled to the mountains and the wind and the eternal beat of the sea.'

I was captivated by the writing and look forward to reading more in the companion volume, 'Peel Me a Lotus', where the family moves to the island of Hydra.

I was sent an advance review copy of this book by Muswell Press, in return for an honest appraisal.

This is the first of two books Charmian Clift wrote about her life in Greece with her husband, George Johnston, and her two children. The artists’ colony that grew up around them on Hydra, which included a young Leonard Cohen, was the inspiration for Polly Samson’s A Theatre for Dreamers and features in the sequel to this book, Peel Me A Lotus. Mermaid Singing, though, focuses on their time in Kalymnos, for what was then intended to be a stay of a few months, while Clift and Johnston collaborated on a book.

There was a time in the early 2000s when there was a glut of this kind of book (and corresponding TV programmes). Fuelled by cheap flights and freedom of movement, everyone dreamed of starting a sunnier, simpler life on a mountain or by a beach. The books could be aspirational and humorous as they described their authors’ struggles to adapt but at their worst they could turn every anecdote into a “funny foreigner” story.

Mermaid Singing, first published in 1958, was well ahead of this trend and avoids that pitfall. Clift writes with great compassion and curiosity about the people of Kalymnos, neither ridiculing them nor accepting uncritically their way of life. What for Clift is an opportunity to live cheaply in a stunningly beautiful location — both mountain and beach — she appreciates is a challenge for its residents.

The island is in a period of transition. The whole economy is based on the sponge divers who undertake dangerous and demanding work, sailing away for the summer and not returning till the autumn. Many of them are killed, those who are injured are condemned to a kind of twilight, finding work where they can, shunned by their former comrades as representing the fate they may face. Despite the terrifying nature of their work, the loss of it feels worse. Demand is already falling as synthetic sponges become more widespread. Many men are trying to emigrate, other families on the island are reliant on those who have already left.

There is also poignancy when they visit a convent and their friend-cum-housekeeper talks wistfully about being a nun. They are surprised initially but then Clift thinks about the demands on women on the island — married at a young age, producing babies year after year, keeping the household together while their husbands are away for months on end.

Clift’s writing is lyrical, capturing the unique atmosphere of the island, its festivals, the sociability of the islanders, the food — or its lack. She can also be acerbic in her observations, such as on the low status of women and the flipside of the gregariousness of her neighbours — the fact she and Johnston can never be alone.

She also writes movingly about the change it has meant for her own family. I can’t help a wry smile when she talks of the tyranny of the evening news (what would she have made of Twitter!). Other concerns are unchanged – she thinks of how confined her children’s lives were in London and how much energy she expended on keeping them entertained during the school holidays. In Kalymnos they roam free all day, only returning for meals (and not always then).

Clift’s writing is beautiful, and she draws on more than her observations, peppering her writing with history and myth, both focused on the immediacy of life in the island and seeing its place in the wider world. There is a sensuous immersion as vivid as the light and landscape of Kalymnos.
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I received a copy of Mermaid Singing from the publisher via Netgalley.

I love travelogue and I loved this well written and entertaining book.
It was like travelling back in time to a different place and feeling the sun on your face.
Excellent style of writing and storytelling.
Highly recommended.
Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this ARC, all opinions are mine

When reading Gerald Durrell you can learn a lot about the Greek nature, its landscapes, flora and fauna. When reading Charmian Clift, you will learn a good deal more about its people and their way of life in the midst of the 20th century.
While living on Kalymnos together with her husband and two children, Clift becomes part of the island’s community, with its simple, traditional and often inconvenient (for a Londoner) Mediterranean life.
She immerses herself in the Greek traditions, celebrations, mournings, stories and tragedies. Clift is very observant, her skill to notice tiny details and changes in one’s behaviour makes the characters alive and breathing. Though her new neighbours don’t have a lot to share with, they give the author’s family all the affection and friendship they can. Writing about these people, Clift finds the essence of Kalymnos’ life, without trying to embellish it, which makes this book very sincere, heartwarming and engaging.
I started reading this book when moving from Russia to the Mediterranean myself, so I related to it deeply. Two main things I enjoyed about these memoirs were Clift’s ability to stay open to everything new and her genuine concern about everyone she meets. We never come back from other countries being the same person, because new experiences, places and people we run into on these journeys change us bit by bit. Clift changes, too, and I’m here for it continuing reading her memoirs with “Peel Me a Lotus”.

This is a reissue of a lovely book written by Charmian Clift about her family’s move to the island of Kalymnos in the 1950s. It’s such a realistic and lovely description of Greece in that time after the Second World War and after the devastating Greek civil war. It captures the harsh, stark yet beautiful life on this remote island. The language is lyrical and the author’s observations and vignettes about the locals are warm and fond–finding both the humor and the pathos in this tight-knit community that takes her family in. Detailed narratives on the landscapes, island hierarchy, the dangerous and devastating life of the sponge divers and their families–Clift weaves these into the story of her family and does not spare the reader the realities of the abject poverty, entrenched patriarchy, capricious callousness of the sponge divers line of work. But Clift also reveals the generosity, the pride, the rituals and traditions of the inhabitants of this small island and how her family made it their home. From counting her own blessings and acknowledging a new found gratitude for their own family’s circumstances, to how the children immersed themselves into and adapted to the island society, to the ways the sexist attitudes were steeped in rigid patriarchal traditions but somehow did not extend in censure or negativity to the author herself–the book gives a multifaceted and richly documented look at a moment in time of modern Greek history. It’s written in such an engaging, personal, empathetic manner. I am looking forward to the second book by this author. You can feel the heat of the Greek sun, visualise the landscapes and whitewashed island vistas, conjure up snapshots of this world from the vividness of the writing. Highly recommended.

My thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for this ARC.

Delightfully Written...
Beautifully descriptive memoir of life on the tiny, sunny and traditional island of Kalymnos in the 1950’s. Delightfully written with larger than life characters and an often moving read. The follow up of life in Hydra is documented in ‘Peel Me A Lotus’.

I had thought that I liked travel memoirs. And I do - I can enjoy a good 'and then we went here and experienced that' story. But I've eventually realised that what I really enjoy is what I choose to call 'domesticity in the exotic'. Exotic is a loaded word, but I use it here to evoke a sense of difference that I don't think 'foreign' really captures; and I'm just as including a Brazilian or Nigerian writing about moving to Melbourne as I am a Londoner moving to Provence (I think Romulus, My Father arguably fits neatly into my category).

Before A Year in Provence or Under a Tuscan Sun came Mermaid Singing, by Australian Charmian Clift.

Its most obvious parallel is My Family and Other Animals, and the rest of the Corfu Trilogy. Indeed, they were originally published in the same year, 1956. But 'parallel' is right: they seem to start similarly and go in the same direction - family moves impetuously to Greek island, experiences with Greek locals don't always go as expected, genteel poverty etc - but they are fundamentally separated stories. Where My Family is written two decades after the events, Mermaid is contemporaneous. Where Durrell was the spoilt youngest son of the family and was off having adventures and occasionally going to school, Clift is a writer and a mother and a wife; while she has adventures, they're not the focus, because she has the cares and concerns of an adult: both for her own family and the way she views the people around them.

My Family is a fond recollection of a childhood dream, /something something the world before World War 2 blah blah. Mermaid Singing is part 'domesticity in the exotic', but also a rumination on the hardship of Kalymnos life, and the difficulties of being a woman in the 1950s trying to forge and continue a career alongside motherhood.

Clift writes beautifully, and evocatively. Kalymnos is an island that largely relies on about 10% of its population going out on sponge-diving expeditions for 7 months of the year - a dangerous occupation and one that's bringing back less revenue as, in the 50s, artificial sponges are taking over the market. It's also an island still, in Clift's experience, in the grip of patriarchal attitudes (and Clift herself is part of this as she notes she has no right to comment on whether someone has beaten his wife at the end of a drunken week). The whole reason for moving here is for Clift and her husband to collaborate on their third novel, this one to be about the sponge-divers. And they do manage to do this, in between drinking a lot of retzina and being closely observed by all their neighbours and seemingly endless rounds of engagements and baptisms.

This is no day-by-day account of life. Like A Year in Provence it follows a year, observing the changes to life as the seasons come and go. Clift observes moments: a friend giving birth, experiences in the taverna, the experiences of her two children during Carnival.... As a gifted writer, she uses these moments to reflect on life itself - and death; and she conjures a wondrous view of Kalymnos. Is this likely to reflect the lives of the people who lived there their whole lives? Perhaps not. Perhaps they would recognise some aspect of their lives but be confused by an emphasis or examination. It does seem like a genuine reflection of Clift's experience - an an ex-pat Australian, a writer, a woman who didn't quite fit the expected mould of womanhood on the island.

My thanks to Muswell Press and NetGalley for a review copy of this one.

In the 1950s, Australian writer Charmian Clift and her husband George Johnston (with whom she also jointly wrote books) decided to leave grey, dreary London (where George was working on Fleet Street) to move to a Greek Island with their children and live by their pen—not being of the other persuasion of journalists who apparently take to pig-farming. Mermaid Singing is the first of two volumes of her memoirs, this one of the year the family spent living on the impoverished island of Kalymnos. (The other, of their life in Hydra is Peel Me a Lotus, which I’ll have a separate review of). At the beginning of each chapter are pen and ink illustrations by Cedric Flower—these I think are new.

Beginning with their rather uncomfortable boat ride (after hours of air travel) to the island, experience finding a house and settling in, we are taken through various facets of the family’s life there—the different people they met and interacted with, things Clift observed--from nature to human nature, the children’s experiences and the adults’, to other aspects of island life--taverns, customs, meals and celebrations. Kalymnos was an island of sponge divers—the men went by ship to the African coast each year to dive for sponge while their wives and children remained on the island. Life was hard and the fact that synthetic sponge was being preferred to natural meant the divers’ livelihoods were under threat. (Interestingly around the time I was reading the book, I happened to chance upon a short TV programme on Greece which also discussed the livelihood problems the sponge divers are facing in the current context, half a century or so since this volume). The society was very traditional and strongly patriarchal, but there were women that spoke their mind and questioned the limitations they had to live under (like their domestic help Sevasti). Clift and her family were the only foreigners but there were also Greeks who had been brought up in England or elsewhere but now lived in Kalymnos. Life there was completely different from anything they had known or experienced, yet rich and much more satisfactory and fulfilling. And it is this, from small everyday experiences (like leaks in their house when their first moved in) to little adventures (like getting the children the pet they were promised, or ‘the small animus’ as a Greek friend called it) and trips they took (on which they are never left alone), to larger issues like that of gender that we see in this book.

When I started this book, what immediately captured my attention was Clift’s wit and humour. For instance, ‘There is some mysterious affinity between a journalist and a Berkshire sow, that to me is completely unfathomable, but then I married into the island persuasion of journalists’. Perhaps there are more downright funny observations at the start than later but her writing is great fun all through. Clift was a keen observer and gives us vivid descriptions with great detail about each facet that she is writing about, be it a person or occurrence or scene. Reading the book, one could well be sitting with her and her family watching events unfold or gazing at the landscape.

Considering how full their life seemed with just the events described, she does point out that amidst all that she and George did write the book they were there for, and she would have been writing this one as well. So certainly as she writes, on the island away from modern entertainments and distractions, they had the time to work, spend with their kids, and enjoy the life that it offered to the fullest. Yet reminders of their old life (an unpaid gas bill that follows them) are kept on as their link with that other life.

Reading about island life and culture, especially the patriarchal set up, I was somewhat surprised by how much was similar to other parts of the world—early marriages and dowries (or at least their equivalent), strict (and unfair) gender roles, and of course the misogyny. Charmian stands out and perhaps shocks residents by dressing in pants, swimming with (and faster than) men, and drinking in taverns which were the realm of men alone.

Charmian and her family’s life isn’t necessarily the idyllic island life with picturesque scenes (though there are those) and lolling about in the sun—the characters are rich, there is a great deal of colour but there are also tragic and melancholy stories and gory details (Clift doesn’t shy of describing the butcher’s shop or the fate of the poor spring lambs)—besides work, of course.

This was a really enjoyable read for me, one I could be lost in. So glad to have come across this on NetGalley since I hadn’t heard of either Clift or the books before.

Charmain Clift's reissued book Mermaid Singing from 1952 shows why she is one of the most revered Australian writers. Her writing is often elegiacal and always evocative. Her prose is powerful, descriptive, and rich with detail. Her understanding of and fondness for the Greek islanders who become part of her family's world is extraordinarily perceptive and vivid. Her descriptions of the physical island of Kalymnos and villagers' lives there are especially useful for those readers who have always wanted to travel to Greece: food, drink, flora, fauna, cultural ceremonies, religion, dress, dwellings, and all other aspects of daily life are compellingly described and propel the reader from page to page. While reading this book I found myself thinking of Nikos Kazantzakis, Gerald Durrell, Dido Sotiriou, George Seferis and other writers whose connection to Greece is indelible. Clift's affection for Greece and its people is strong and enduring, and her strong, incisive, and gifted writer's voice gives clarity to her remembrances, What a pity that she didn't have more years to put her words on the page.

Wanderlust! After spending over a year in lockdown, this was a beautiful way to while away a few hours on a remote Greek island in the 1960's. Realistic, un-romanticised descriptions of village life painted an authentic picture of what their time in Greece was like for this young family.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for an advance copy in return for an honest review.
I was not familiar with this novel, the authors or anything about them. I was intrigued though as there was a quote from Leonard Cohen on the synopsis, and from the quote I thought it would be wine, fun and laughs.

The writing is lovely, and a very simple life, quirky life on a remote Greek Island in the 1960 is wonderfully painted. This is particularly relevant as this is not a memoir of a family backpacking out to Greece and having the time of their life. This is a story where life was simpler, but the toilet did not flush, and an unpaid gas bill followed them out to Greece. The journey over to the Island was tough and their house was not what they were expecting.

But they get help and they make friends, and the writing depicts this beautifully.

Sometimes I think when I read books on a kindle, I miss things though. I have never been to Greece and have never heard of Kalymnos so would loved to have seen some photographs, and I felt that this would have preferred having the actual novel that I could dip in an out of, rather than a kindle.

It’s a lovely travel read though, an escapism to the simple Greek life from the pressures of the third Irish lockdown.

Mermaid Singing – Charmian Clift
I absolutely adored this book. It gave me such a genuine feel of being part of a move to a remote (at the time) Greek Island. The family make such a huge effort to be part of island life and really fit in with the locals and the way Charmian writes as though events are happening around you as you read makes you feel such a part of their world. It is wonderful. The descriptions of Easter and some of the other religious celebrations are both colourful but honest and give true insight into the importance of these activities for the community. The focus on how the move and the environment impacts of the whole family is also magical. How the children adapt and accept their new lives is inspiring.
I also enjoyed the historical interest and knowledge learned about the sponge diving. Once again imparted in such a relevant and accessible way, it doesn’t feel like an history or a geography lesson but I came away knowing much more than I started with. I cannot wait to get onto the second book in this series.

Having devoured A Theatre for Dreamers by Polly Samson which was loosely based on the lives of writers Charmian Clift, her husband George Johnston and their children's move to a tiny Greek Island called Kalymnos and then latterly to Hydra. I found the memoir interesting with some funny moments and it has a real Greek flavour. Would recommend.

An enjoyable read, a travel book about a family who move from Australia to a Greek island. The writing is enchanting and you feel you get to know the family and all the other villagers.