Two Lives

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

William Trevor's Last Stories is forthcoming from Viking.

In Reading Turgenev , which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, an Irish country girl is trapped in a loveless marriage with an older man, but finds release through secret meetings with a man who shares her passion for Russian novels.

My House in Umbra tells of Emily Delahunty, a writer of romantic novels, who helps survivors of a bomb attack on a train to convalesce, inventing colorful pasts for her patients.

Two novels, two women who retreat further into the realm of the imagination until the boundaries between what is real and what is not become blurred.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

Two Lives is two full-blown novels on isolated women, a vein familiar from Trevor's very elegant and very popular short stories. The first life, ``Reading Turgenev,'' is the uneventful one: marriage of convenience gone sour in small-town Ireland, glimpse of love in dying young man (who provides the Turgenev), willful retreat into loneliness. The second, ``My House in Umbria,'' is the eventful one: prostitute-turned-romance-novelist tears across three continents until slowed (and rendered reflective) by terrorist bomb. There is something labored about all this, especially the old-age frame for the first story and the chat about writing novels in the second. But Trevor's 12 novels (if we count this once) consistently manage to be both intelligent and moving. His loyal, literate following will be pleased by a two-for-one offer inviting exercises in comparison and contrast. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 5/1/91.-- John P. Harrington, Cooper Union, New York (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Publishers Weekly Review

One of our modern masters, Trevor ( Fools of Fortune ; Family Sins ) is in top form with this exquisite pair of mirroring narratives. The first novella, ``Reading Turgenev,'' is the story of a woman who, denied love in her marriage, turns to a half-imaginary romance with a cousin who reads Turgenev to her in a cemetery; later, she desolately retreats into the shadowy world of her memories and desires. ``My House in Umbria'' is a first-person narrative about an aging writer of romances with a mysterious past whose fiction exhibits resolution and a kind of tranquility. A passenger on a train attacked by terrorists, the writer takes in a group of fellow survivors of the blast. Their healing becomes cathartic for her, bringing elements of her past to the surface. The two lives thus limned provide a balanced pair of portraits, one of a woman who avoids reality and the other of one who confronts it. Told in Trevor's graceful, evocative language, these narratives are further evidence of the author's sublime grasp of the complexities of human relationships. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Kirkus Book Review

Trevor (Family Sins, etc.) provides genuine literary delight as well as book-buying value in this clever pairing of two novels under one title. The longer of the two, ``Reading Turgenev,'' is also the more conventional--a somber tale of a woman who feigns madness in response to an oppressive ``marriage of convenience.'' Mary Louise Dallon, the 21-year-old daughter of an impoverished Irish Protestant farmer, hopes to escape the boredom of country life by marrying ``the only well-to-do Protestant for miles around.'' Elmer Quarry, almost twice Mary Louise's age, is a bald and paunchy tradesman who lives in town with his two mean and petty unmarried sisters. Not surprisingly, the marriage is doomed from the start, with Elmer unable to bring it to consummation and his sisters making daily life for Mary Louise a living hell. While kind and guilt-ridden Elmer retreats into the bottle, Mary Louise develops a wild passion for her sickly cousin who, on their secret trysts, reads her Russian novels. Their love remains chaste since the cousin dies suddenly, sending Mary Louise deeper into herself. Eventually, she's institutionalized, to be released decades later, all the while revisiting the scenes of her true love, the passages from Turgenev that stirred her soul. The narrator of ``My House in Umbria'' also escapes into literature--the formulaic romance novels she writes with much commercial success in her middle age. Her retreat from reality was occasioned by a life of hardship that's far more interesting than anything in her fiction. Sold at birth by her natural parents, her adoptive father began to abuse her sexually at an early age. Eventually, she becomes a prostitute in Africa, where she saves enough money to buy a villa in Italy and begin writing her books. Fate intrudes in a rude way when she survives an unclearly motivated bombing on an Italian train, undermining the serenity she found in writing. Vastly different in style and setting, the two stories converge thematically, testifying to the range of Trevor's talent and the singularity of his vision.