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55
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
30/100Critics
81/100Scholars
Author:
Marina Warner
Publisher:
New York Review Books
Date:
June 14, 2022
Esmond and Ilia follows Marina Warner's beautiful, penniless young mother Ilia as she leaves southern Italy in 1945 to travel alone to London. Her husband, an English colonel, is still away in the war in the East as she begins to learn how to be Mrs. Esmond Warner, an Englishwoman. With diamond rings on her fingers and brogues on her feet, Ilia steps fearlessly into the world of cricket and riding. But, without prospect of work in a bleak, war-ravaged England, Esmond remembers the glorious ease of Cairo during his periods of leave from the desert campaign. There, they start a bookshop, a branch of W. H. Smith's. But growing resistance to foreign interests, especially British, erupts in the 1952 uprising, and the Cairo Fire burns the city clean. This memoir resurrects the fraught union and unrequited hopes of Warner's parents. Memory intertwines richly with myth, the river Lethe feeling as real as the Nile.
What The Reviewers Say
At first, Esmond and Ilia could be a fairy-tale romance.
[Warner] went on a treasure hunt, mining a dragon’s trove of letters, diaries, photographs, newspaper clippings, clothes and other relics that retained talismanic force.
Warner is an expert on all facets of myth, legend and fairy tale, whose writings have explored everything from Ovid to the Brothers Grimm to the Arabian Nights. As such, it makes sense that even a personal work recounting eight years of her parents’ life should be envisioned as a story of the power of narrative, the clash of cultures and the role of the heroine, told by means of lore, symbols and allegory.
... a book of desire and its frustrations: the excitement of romance but also its curdling; the archival fever that takes over, that enlivens and maddens the historian.
