The Summer My Mother Had Green Eyes

“The Summer My Mother Had Green Eyes” came to me through a friend's recommendation. She told me it was a strong book, one I had to read, that it was very necessary for me to read it because of its portrayal of complicated families and tense family relationships.

That made me wary, because there are doors that are always frightening to open, but picking it up, with some hesitation, like someone touching the steel of the iron with a fingertip to check whether it's hot yet, I began it and discovered it absorbed me so much that I'd finished it within three days.

It is easy literature thanks to its very short chapters and a very direct, bare style, without great linguistic detours or artifice, perhaps to reflect the way this story is narrated from the perspective of a lower-middle-class man at the start of his adulthood (let's place him at eighteen).

He belongs to a broken family of Polish immigrants living in the British capital, and everything drives him to flatly reject whatever leads him back to his origins, of which he is ashamed for their precariousness, their roughness and their failure to fit into the society he wants to belong to. As usual, the main target of all this ends up being an irrational hatred and a fierce contempt for the mother figure.

But his mother asks him to spend a summer with her in a small village in France, just the two of them, somehow to reconnect and strengthen their bond. That trip will change forever the perception each has of the other, analysing almost surgically everything that separates them, as well as what unites them.

This is one of those books that hurt in order to heal. Written with a very strange sensitivity, in a direct, relentless language, it will catch you judging and forgiving on every page, and will surely leave in you that residue of learning in which you'll wish you could call your mother to tell her, simply, that you love her.

Don't miss it.