from the book jacket: "Spirited audacity is perhaps the closest approximation to an accurate description of Ursule Molinaro's newest novel. Introducing us to a failed painter, his wife (a simultaneous translator at the United Nations), and her seventeen-year-old daughter by her first marriage, during a few summer days at an island resort, she allows us to observe the real and imagined sexual lives of these three, in their own household and among other people on the island. That the two major actions in the story are death, by lightning, of a lifeguard and the murder of a homeless, tail-less cat, give some indication of its nature. In Sounds of a Drunken Summer Miss Molinaro manages to move her readers while she is amusing them and to demonstrate, once again, that there is no one writing in English quite the way she does."
Author
Ursule Molinaro (1916, Paris -10 July 2000, New York City) was a prolific novelist, playwright, translator and visual artist, the author of 12 novels, two collections of short prose works, innumerable short stories for literary magazines and dozens of translations from the French and German. She lived and wrote in French in Paris until shortly after World War II, when she came to New York in 1949 to work as a multilingual proofreader for the newly formed United Nations. Just a few years later, having realized that she would stay in the United States, she made the decision to systematically retrain herself not only to write, but to dream, think, and speak, in the language of her new soil. In the latter part of her life, she developed a method for teaching creative writing that relied wholly upon the oral and taught creative writing at several universities and in her home until her death in 2000. (from Wikipedia)
