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Cider with Rosie

Laurie Lee

Start date: May 1, 2020

Finish date: June 30, 2020

Discussion: Non-Fiction Classics

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Oct 23, 2016 Chrissie rated it really liked it

Shelves: audible-uk, life-stages, classics, england, bio, 2016-read, poetry

This is not merely a biography or description of a special time and place (the Cotswolds the years after the First World War), it is prose poetry. It is the lyrical fashion in which it is written that is its outstanding element. The story unfolds not chronologically but rather by theme. There is a chapter on summer and winter. A chapter on festivals. A chapter on school. A chapter on sexual awakening. A chapter entitled "The Kitchen" which is the center of a home, and here we hear of his family, This is not merely a biography or description of a special time and place (the Cotswolds the years after the First World War), it is prose poetry. It is the lyrical fashion in which it is written that is its outstanding element. The story unfolds not chronologically but rather by theme. There is a chapter on summer and winter. A chapter on festivals. A chapter on school. A chapter on sexual awakening. A chapter entitled "The Kitchen" which is the center of a home, and here we hear of his family, his mother and father and half-sisters, half-brothers and brothers. His father departed at the age of three. His mother waited for years and years and years for his father's return. She waited and waited, raising the kids from both his marriages, until his father's death made clear he was never to return. Laurie Lee's mother and his half-sisters shaped what was to be “his home". The essence of "home" is not just described but felt. His mother's essence is not just described but felt too. You leave the memoir knowing well not just Laurie Lee but his mother and his sisters too. You leave the memoir feeling the passage of the old Cotswolds into the new. Horses replaced by cars, songs and tales by candlelight in the evening to the wireless. Life in the village to life out there in the beyond. The girls married and gone. The absence of pigs. Laurie Lee draws contrasts vividly - then and now, summer and winter, quiet and bustle, presence and absence.

Laurie Lee narrates this, his own book. His voice quavers, but it is full of emotion. I went from disliking it in the beginning to thinking it was perfect by the book's end. In the middle I disassociated myself from what I was hearing by repeating the magnificent lines in my head. Then my need to do this suddenly stopped; I began to love the narration.

The book covers only his childhood and teens. It is the first of a trilogy which covers the later years of his life. See this: https://www.goodreads.com/series/1802...

If you love lyrical writing, read this book.

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*Down in the Valley: A Writer's Landscape 3 stars
*Cider with Rosie 4 stars
*As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning 4 stars
*A Moment of War TBR
*A Rose for Winter TBR ...more

53 likes · Like · see review

Feb 24, 2013 Laura rated it really liked it

Shelves: british-literature, hf-world-war-i, memoir-biography, audio-books, fiction-20th-century, 1001-books-you-must-read-before-you, read-2014

From BBC Radio 4 Extra:
Dramatisation of Laurie Lee's account of growing up in a remote Cotswold village in the 1920s. With Tim McInnerny and Niamh Cusack. ...more

7 likes · Like · see review

Jun 06, 2011 Kate rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Shelves: england, read-in-2015, autobiography

"Cider With Rosie puts n reord the England that was traded for the petrol engine. Realling life in a remote Cotswold village some fifty years ago, Laurie Lee conveys the semi-peasant spirit of a thousand-years-old-tradition.
~~back cover

I was a bit disappointed with this book, as I found it written in a way that seemed to me to obscure a good deal of what was actually happening. Lyrical descriptions seemed to mask the actual events in most instances. I had hoped for a more prosaic description of ...more

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