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Catalan writer Mercè Rodoreda’s 1967 novel Garden By the Sea, set in the 1920s, spans six summers spent in a lush seaside villa, occupied by a young, rich, amusement-thirsty couple and their likeminded friends. Debauchery everywhere. They have a pet (quite bored) lion in a cage custom-designed by a local blacksmith. They drink an ocean’s worth of liquor and splash endlessly in the ocean outside their door.
You think you’re here for the summer season parties, but you stand corrected. You’re here for the restrained, precise narrator: a widow who has tended to this garden in the villa for several decades. He has a godlike eye and a deferential manner of the Archetype Gardener. And he sees what his lusty, hungover clients cannot: the crash coming for them all.
Is it an extended geopolitical metaphor? Oh, who could say! Certainly not me. But the feeling of impending darkness closing in: even a myopic party girl can feel the sun covered up by an eclipse.
It’s the season: a sip of pickle juice every time you pass the fridge. Replenish those salts.
And it’s official, my summer has a theme and the theme is: “Summer of Horns”. Here are two in-the-works playlists, one for your general “Summer of Horns” soundtrack and one if you’re having a “Summer of Horns” party and need to hold off on the “Hips Don’t Lie” until Hour 2 Mark and you can’t be messing around with a 27-minute Miles Davis saunter to there-and-back-and-back-again.
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