In the mid-twentieth century, when she was already in her fifties, the writer May Sarton bought a ramshackle 18th-century cottage in the town of Nelson, New Hampshire. This decision, as unusual and courageous as it was, and all the experiences that followed, are the literary material she used to write Desire for roots, a book that now reaches us in Catalan, thanks to the translation by Núria Parés published by Amsterdam.
May Sarton, poet, author of children's books and several novels, was the daughter of an English mother and a Belgian-American father. Her parents lived in Cambridge, in a wonderful house in Channing Place that for the young writer was "the house to which she could return from all her trips".
In 1950 her mother died, after a long illness, and six years later, unexpectedly, her father died. May Sarton, who lived in America, emptied and sold the house in Channing Place and only kept her parents' old Flemish furniture in a basement, which she did not dare to sell. The need to be able to have this furniture with her again was the trigger for her to look for a new home: "If home can be found anywhere, how can it be searched for, where can it be found?" she writes.
While house hunting, she thought that the decision could be compared to that of marriage: no woman over forty can afford to marry the wrong person, she muses. It was by chance that someone told her about the Monadnock region of New Hampshire and an old, rather shabby country house with thirty acres of land bordered by a stream. And, as if driven by love, May Sarton decided that this would be her home.
The old Flemish furniture was installed in an American country house in a strange and, precisely for that reason, unique combination.
Desire for roots It is the story of rebuilding a house and building a home. May Sarton reflects on loneliness, on the life of a writer, on the beauty of the countryside and the importance of the aesthetics of a house, on uprooting and roots.
While making the decision to stay in the house in New Hampshire, Sarton explains: "I was trapped, just as a poem that has not quite taken hold traps you and haunts you at night. First I had to dream of the house alive inside me." Finally, the writer ignores the reflection of a friend who tells her that she has bought a beautiful house but that it will never be heard at home because no one she loved has died. May Sarton, with her parents' antique furniture and the portraits of her ancestors, achieves a great milestone: "Here the deceased are not so much presences as part of the fabric of my life: they are a living part of the whole." As she herself says, it is not a nostalgic look at the past: it is bringing the past into the present.
Those who have a place they always want to return to, those who do not have one but hope to get one, or those who had one and have lost it will find friendly company in this reading. You will feel at home.
