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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Romantic Ireland's Dead and Gone, 27 Sep 2009
It's been a long time since I read anything by William Trevor (30 years?) and so I wasn't sure what to expect from this novel. Yes, it was overly long for the subject matter - as another reviewer has suggested, it might have made a more efficient "long short story". Yes, it was terribly nostalgic and very old fashioned, but I enjoyed it nevertheless. I liked the intensity of it, the innocence of a long-gone simple rural Ireland (the young wife and her older husband), simple yet at the same time complex with its newly emerging property-based class system replacing - and aping - the system of the British, Anglo-Irish and Protestants. What is known now about clerical abuse and the structures that enabled it to thrive belie the innocence of the time - I wonder if Trevor had this in mind. For some reason it "Love and Summer" reminded me of "Ryan's Daughter" - the repressed sexuality of the young wife, and the tenderness and kindness of the older husband.
The Connulty twins and the parent to whom each was respectively attached represent two sides of the one coin of the allegedly pre-materialism days that people apparently yearn for: the cold mother who invested more in her son and the father who ultimately stood by his daughter in her time of need. The young lover's decaying house and his besotted artistic parents bring to mind Yeats' "romantic Ireland" being "dead and gone, ... with O'Leary in the grave." Romanticism doesn't feed you, despite its many attractions.
I did enjoy this book, but it rightly didn't win the Booker.
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48 of 73 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Love and Summer, 14 Aug 2009
At eighty one years of age, William Trevor is a well-respected veteran, and has gathered many prizes throughout his career. Love and Summer is his fourteenth novel, and is published on 27th August 2009 by Viking, Penguin, and he has also published twelve collections of short stories, two sets of novellas, a play, two non-fiction works and a children's book.
Unlike many other writers of his age and experience, his star has never faded. He continues to win and be shortlisted for major literary prizes: he's won The Whitbread Prize three times - for The Children of Dynmouth (1976), Fools of Fortune (1983), and Felicia's Journey (1994). His last novel, The Story of Lucy Gault (2002), was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.
Part of Trevor's enduring appeal is the ageless nature of his writing. His novels are often based in his home country, the Republic of Ireland, and involve ordinary people trapped by circumstance . Understated yet often quietly devastating, his fiction usually smoulders rather than erupts; he is the master of the slow burner.
Love and Summer is set in a small Irish town called Rathmoye 'some years after the middle of the last century'. As with much of Trevor's fiction, the story could apply equally in any of the last three centuries, so that mentions of running hot water, TV aerials and jet planes often jarred me from my reverie. The timeless truth of human nature hunches deep within the shadows, a powerful force.
Rathmoye is a typical small town. Gossip percolates swiftly through the streets, like the plague. Several of the properties are owned by the Connulty family, whose matriarch Eileen has recently died at the start of the story. Her middle-aged daughter, known with a tip of the hat only as Miss Connulty, is relieved to have escaped from the iron grasp of her imperious mother. Miss Connulty has a twin brother, Joseph Paul, who their mother adored in contrast to her icy treatment of her daughter. An incident in their past caused virtual estrangement between their mother and father, the latter then resorting to drink; and shards of this painful family dynamic extrude sharply in the narrative like slivers of glass wrapped up in a newspaper.
Other characters include the eccentric Orpen Wren, driven out of his mind by the fleeing of his wealthy employers from an imposing mansion just outside the town, and Dilhallan, the farmer, who is haunted by the death of his first wife and only child.
Into this quietly seething mass of emotion wanders Florian Kilderry, a young half Italian man who lives outside the town, whose parents have recently died. Florian meets Ellie, the young convent girl who became Dilhallan's second wife after working for him as a house maid, and human nature being what it is, feelings bloom.
All this information is related on the jacket notes. How matters proceed is what occupies this slim but potent novel. Early on, there are references to various individuals' pasts, and these tantalizing glimpses weave a hypnotic spell: 'She had been young when the trouble happened'; 'when they passed the bad place'.
Trevor excels at conjuring up the claustrophobic atmosphere of a place where people can't be avoided and everyone knows everyone else's business, for example 'They waited for her to be pregnant.' The mind-numbing yattering of dull small-talk imposed on the unwilling is also evoked with grimly comic subtlety :
'More often than she might have chosen, she heard the plot of the novel Miss Burke at the wool counter in Corbally's was reading.'
And:
'Grateful for the distraction yet resenting it, Ellie pushed the kettle onto the hot ring in case Mrs Hadden wanted tea. She came to the front door, which no one else ever did. 'I mustn't disturb you' she always said, and she said it now. Ellie led her to the kitchen...
What (Mrs Hadden) liked instead of tea was a soda bun if buns were cooling on a wire rack...
Mrs Hadden had another aunt, who embroidered purses, but attacks of rheumatism increasingly interfered with that. Ellie had heard before about this curtailment and was now brought up to date, the news being that the affliction eased a little in the summer months.'
Trevor's pared-down style conveys powerful moments without hyperbole. Evocative images from past and present are sketched with minimal brush strokes:
'The flies of some other summer darkening its windowsills.'
And:
'Sunlight on dingy window-panes cast shadows where the party people had danced.'
This economy with words means that when emotions are touched on, their bittersweet pleasure and pain seems stronger than if it was drowned in vebosity. Tiny moments are magnified by the tacit understanding that feelings are stronger than words can convey. A woman in unrequited love with her boss savours the snatched moments of their business meetings; tingles at the accidental touch of his trouser leg on her skin.
Trevor excels at capturing the secret disappointments and missed opportunities that litter the most ordinary lives. There is poetry in his simple sentences:
'He had loved being loved and knew too late that tenderness in return was not enough',
and
'Her fury had quietened but still was there, as the dead days of finished time were, and tears no longer shed. She felt a wave of pity for Ellie Dillihan as once, so wretchedly, she had for herself.'
Like Trevor's characters, his fiction simmers with tension. His lilting stories captures you in their lazy build-up, then shatter you with their ability to wreak havoc. He has lost none of his considerable power.
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5 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Beautifully written and evocative, 13 Sep 2009
I read this book in one sitting and was transported into another world. It's beautifully written: the people and places brought alive by the author's evocative prose. it starts slowly as the characters are fleshed out such that they seem real in the reader's mind. Then, gradually, trouble brews and you fear for the characters and what will happen in the end. A book full of love, hate, shame and longing. I've only read one other William Trevor book, Felicia's Journey, and now wonder why I haven't read more as he's a great writer.
A minor point, but important for older readers, the book has an easy to read type-face.
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