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Iliennes (Islanders: Memories of Holidays on an island) by Armelle Guemas: book review

 



Iliennes: Souvenirs de vacances sur une ile bretonne (2013, French edition) – Islanders: Memories of Holidays on an Island – is set on a French island from 1925 to 1968 - the island of Hoedic in Brittany in the north-west of France.

 

The author had three aunts – sisters Marie, Esther, and Eléonore. Esther and Eléonore lived together – one thin, the other big; one joyous and the other serious. Beautiful and intelligent Marie lives with her husband and five children.

 

It was a time before electricity, make-up, and anti-wrinkle cream, when everyone lived a simpler life. When mail took three days to arrive. For their holidays on the small island, they could be together, listening to the jazz records of Louis Armstrong, Billy Holiday, Django Reinhardt, and the unrequited love songs of Edith Piaf.

 

Over 40 years of holidays, the story focuses on her aunts with little reference to men – but they are there, in the background – the fishermen and their boats. The author’s parents, too, are peripheral. The cow gets more attention. And one year, there were hordes of marine scouts (with a mention of cow dung!). And later, when tourists arrived on the island, the locals organized a fair for the 14 July Bastille Day holiday with lots of music and dancing (and mini skirts in the 1960s).

 

In their old age, in the 1960s, the sisters worried about ‘modernity’ and ‘were reluctant to accept what they considered to be ‘unbelievable luxury.’ For the first time, they saw the ‘wire of electricity dancing in its glass bubble’ [it’s a lightbulb]. But under this bright light, they could also see the dust and spider webs in each room. With the arrival of electricity, life on the island changed little by little: such as the arrival of television and ‘the moustache of Clark Gable!’

 

The holidays ended in 1968 with the death of the oldest sister, Marie, at the age of 83. 

 

This is a delightful look back at a previous time, a time of beautiful nostalgia. 


 












MARTINA NICOLLS

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MARTINA NICOLLS  is an international human rights-based consultant in education, healing and wellbeing, peace and stabilization, foreign aid audits and evaluations, and the author  of: The Paris Residences of James Joyce  (2020), Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

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