The Lovers [Hardcover]

Vendela Vida's relatively short novel, The Lovers, packs a big wallop. It is a multi-layered story about Yvonne, a widow, who returns to Turkey where she and her husband once honeymooned. She believes that by returning to the same place where they had been together early in her marriage, she will feel closer to him. Her husband Peter was recently killed in a hit and run car accident in their hometown of Burlington, Vermont. Yvonne has rented a large home, sight unseen, for a couple of weeks until she is scheduled to meet up with her son and daughter and their partners on a boating trip.

Yvonne is an aging woman who is a history teacher. Recently, she has had some troubles in the classroom. For instance, she presented a class about Cromwell twice in the same week. She knows that she is floundering, that her center is gone, but she does not know how to get it back. Perhaps, she thinks, this trip to Turkey will help her.

While in Turkey, odd things happen to her. Yvonne is renting a home that belongs to her landlord's lover. Ozlem, the wife of Ali, the man from whom she is renting, appears one day and begins a friendship with Yvonne. Ozlem is fraught with her own problems. She is not sure whether she wants to leave Ali and she is violently jealous of Ali's affair. Ozlem is also pregnant but not sure if Ali is the father.

Yvonne has two children, Aurelia and Matthew. Matthew has been good at everything since she was a child and Aurelia has been a drug addict, in and out of rehab a good many times. This trip they are all planning to take is to be a pre-wedding trip for Matthew and Yvonne is fearful that some catastrophic event will happen with Aurelia before the trip commences. Aurelia's drug addiction had caused a lot of friction between Yvonne and Peter during their marriage.

Yvonne likes to drive to the beach. While there, she meets a young boy who sells sea shells. Yvonne strikes up a friendship with him and commissions him to find shells for her. She looks at him as one would a new-found possibility, a friendship or child that is a tabla rasa. She begins to endow him with qualities that he doesn't really possess but that she needs him to have.

Throughout her time in Turkey, which is fraught with panic, eerie circumstances, and darkness, Yvonne looks back on her marriage and tries to find the truth of what it really was. As she progresses in finding the truth, she becomes first weaker and then gains strength. She realizes that her marriage was not what she thought it was and that she is not really the woman she thought she was in her relationship. She sadly realizes that "these were two of her strengths: changing the subject and feigning ignorance." She also realizes how very strong her love for her daughter is.

I found the book mesmerizing. The plot alone is enough to carry the book along but the atmospheric suspense makes it even more present and portentous. This book is a sensory experience, at times subtle like watching fish swim in a small pond. At other times, it feels like you are in the eye of the hurricane.

It's been over a month now since I've read this book and I am still thinking about the ending - in fact, about much of the book. It's not very long; I read it in one or two sittings straight on through.

Because I am enthralled with Turkey and love reading books set there (a reflection of my longing to revisit), I was immediately drawn to The Lovers by Vendela Vida. The premise of a woman going on vacation to a village by the sea and the title suggest that this story might romanticise travel (and thus might be a good beach/vacation read). Instead, The Lovers is a character driven, psychological study of a woman burdened by memories and guilt, who is trying to navigate the world after her husband's death. Traveling alone to a foreign and bewildering country becomes a metaphor for how one survives loss of a loved one and eventually, how to find one's self.

The narrative is tensely drawn and, just like real travel, is tinged with the possibility of danger at every corner. Will she be taken advantage of? What are the hidden motives of those she meets? Here, Turkey is depicted as beautiful, run down in some places, strange, and slightly threatening. This is not a lighthearted book that celebrates travel - rather it makes one uneasy.

You know something profound is going to happen to Yvonne, possibly something tragic. Vida builds the psychological suspense so effectively that the unforgettable ending threw me off completely. I am still mulling over it and can't decide exactly what happened. Which doesn't mean it wasn't satisfying, more unexpected.

Oh, Vendela! You write so well, your characters POP right off the page fully formed, your setting description - wow.

Ack, but the ending! You've pained me, Vendela, stuck me through with a sword. I bleed! I want my afternoon back!

But anyway.

When The Lovers begins, 55-year old Yvonne has lost her husband, Peter, in an unexpected and violent way, at a particularly low point in their marriage. Their daughter - Aurelia - had been fighting an on-again, off-again battle with drug and alcohol addiction, putting a strain on their formerly happy marriage, sending their lives into chaos.

At the point of Peter's death their hopes for their daughter were slowly rising, though cautiously, but things were still on shaky ground. Losing Peter at such a critical juncture in all their lives - including that of Aurelia's twin brother Matthew, the perfect child - left Yvonne with even more pain, knowing everything ended before they had a chance to find a resolution and come back to each other.

Still unable to come to grips with her loss a couple years later, and tired of being treated as "that poor widow," Yvonne heads to exotic Turkey, where she and husband Peter spent their honeymoon roughly 25 years before. She's rented the second home of a rich Turkish businessman (one with kinky sex habits, by the way, though this isn't intrusive in the main plot), and begins exploring the countryside.

Driving a rented Renault, she stumbles upon the town of Knidos, in which Peter had taken her photo in front of ancient ruins so long ago - a photo he'd kept on his desk at work, symbolizing a joyful honeymoon. Because of the pleasant memories she begins spending all her days at Knidos, swimming and lounging on the beach, soon meeting a young boy named Ahmet. Although neither speaks the other's language he manages to convey to her that he's selling shells he's collected. Because she feels motherly toward the very sweet, courteous boy she gives him a more than generous amount of money for a shell. Every day after Yvonne visits the beach, and every day she grows to know Ahmet more and more.

Then tragedy strikes, an unthinkable, particularly painful tragedy. And Vida does tragedy pretty well, thankyouverymuch. She's sneaky that way. She really knows how to nail it, to build suspense and raw emotion. Girl can WRITE!

I can't reveal where things go from here without giving away too much plot, unfortunately. I also can't reveal that blasted ending, the one that ruined the beauty of the whole rest of the book for me. The one that made me lose a bit of respect for my former literary icon Joyce Carol Oates, as well, for her revoltingly cloying praise of the "utterly unpredictable ending."

Well, Joyce. It's "unpredictable" because it's so damned STUPID. It's as if Vida's editor was standing over her, tapping his watch and snapping his fingers so she'd wrap it all up, already, never mind if it ruined an otherwise beautiful book.

ARRRRRRRRGH! My God is that frustrating. To get 99 % through a mostly lovely book (okay, there were a couple stumbles, but they were minor) only to find the world's most unbelievable and did I mention STUPID ending? I felt robbed! Cheated! I spent my afternoon with Vendela, split between her book and loads of laundry! And she does this to me?

Ecco/Harper Collins, I know you've already published the book. I didn't reach you soon enough to IMPLORE you to do something about the way things wrap up. The terrible, horrible, and did I mention STUPID denouement (a very pretty French word for a very ugly ending).

As such, I can't recommend the book. I don't want other readers rushing out to spend precious time on something that ends so, so badly. How could I, in good conscience? Sure, misery loves company, but not when it comes to recommending - or not recommending - a book.

So close. Yet so far.

And so, so STUPID.

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