The Rose Cafe: Love and War in Corsica - Hardcover

Mitchell, John Hanson

3.63

38 ratings by Goodreads

9781593760953: The Rose Cafe: Love and War in Corsica

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1593760957 ISBN 13: 9781593760953

Publisher: Counterpoint, 2007

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In 1962, while he was a student in Paris, John Hanson Mitchell spent a luminous six months on the Mediterranean island of Corsica at the Rose Caf�, in Ile Rousse. Twenty-two, Mitchell spent his idyll hours there observing the lives of the people who frequented the place. These included a group of local card players (some with possible underworld connections) who visited each night, as well as colorful continental types and a younger crowd at play — all spellbound by the lush charms of the island.
In the polished prose that has made his other books so distinctive and well-loved, Mitchell captures the rhythms and intrigues of a life lived elsewhere, bringing us an insider's portrait of the light and dark shadows that loomed over postwar Corsica. He reveals in the process the island's magic at work on his own life — how it cultivated the bloom of his writing talent and shaped his sense of place.

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From Publishers Weekly:

Starred Review. Avoiding military service in Vietnam, American author Mitchell spent six months working in the kitchen of the Rose Caf� on the French Mediterranean island of Corsica, a season of which he recollects in this powerful memoir. A restaurant "at a remove from the village ... where any local could retreat," the Rose Caf� is populated by a great number of characters-including owners Jean-Pierre and Micheline, Mitchell's love interest Marie and a wealthy, mysterious foreigner called "Le Baron"-who don't do a whole lot: eat, drink, play cards, swim, argue, fall in love and share what they know of the island's history. What makes this story remarkable is the way Mitchell allows each character to reveal their experience of World War II, ended just 15 years before; some nights, Mitchell hears "a terrible scream from one of the upstairs rooms, a guest awakened by the all-too-real nightmare of the past war." The tale of a lone Nazi shot down in a friend's garden makes for one searing anecdote; others involve entertaining if dubious tales from French resistance fighters (as one Corsican woman tells him, " 'after liberation, all of a sudden half of the males in France were in the resistance' "). The juxtaposition of the beautiful island's vitality and the horrors it so recently survived are captured well in Mitchell's precise and evocative prose, making this well worth reading for fans of memoirs, Old World European culture and WWII narratives.
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From Booklist:

Say the name "Corsica" and images of inscrutable spies, nefarious gangsters, and internecine warfare taking place within a sultry island setting come to mind--and with good reason, as Mitchell so vibrantly conveys in his Graham Greene-like memoir of his days spent as a young college student exploring the unfathomable intricacies of life in the polyglot culture of this shadowy Mediterranean haven. The time was 1962, and as an American student abroad, Mitchell was keenly aware of the looming military crisis in Southeast Asia, while around him, Europe was still tentatively reeling from the aftereffects of World War II. Taking a job as a busboy-cum-cook at a local restaurant, Mitchell capitalized on his fly-on-the-wall status to observe and consider the kaleidoscopic cast of characters that used the cafe as a safe harbor from the exigencies of the outside world. With an acute sense of character and precise flair for dramatic detail, Mitchell's picaresque memoir renders this seductively vaporous world in crystalline prose. Carol Haggas
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