Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A woman's complex lives and loves, June 20, 2006
Most reviewers of this book have been off the mark, faulting it for lack of plot, unappreciative of Valerie Trueblood's wise and wily narrative techniques, intricate fictive style and precisely evocative language. Trueblood is not a debut writer, either of fiction or of poetry, though it is the debut novel from a writer who, in "What's the Story? Aspects of the Form" from the American Poetry Review (July-August 2001), began with Louise Bogan's famous bon mot: "I believe in the short story and the long short story. The novel, never. To hell with the novel."
A suggestively structured collection of seven episodes, each involves the discovery of an intense and highly particularized, individually directed feeling of love arising at one period or another throughout the seventy-plus year life of May Nilsson. The last and longest episode focusses on memories of her mother, who died when May was fourteen, but generally we know her as a mid-20th century middle-class, middle-American woman. Her working life was mostly as a school teacher, married, after a college-delayed engagment, to a hard-working doctor, with whom she has had three children, two surviving into adulthood. After her retirement she returns to work, then, after her husband's death, eventually enters a retirement home. In each situation a new love springs up. Understanding and appreciation is deepened if the reader is aware of what has been happening culturally in America from the 1930s to the present. Still, sufficient fascination for a first reading--certainly the novel calls for two or three readings over time--comes from our wonderment at the profound questions and insights and feelings that arise and develop in each story. If much seems to be withheld, it is Trueblood's post-modern authorial wisdom not to pretend to be fully knowing, to recognize limitations in confronting life's complexities.
Presented in no immediately apparent order, either of time or ultimate importance, each episode is seen from May's point of view, but in the third person, acknowledging a degree of authorial control. The events are narrated retrospectively but usually in close, sometimes immediate proximity to the events being thought about. May (like her author) is most of all a thought-full person, but her perceptions of herself and others are, like everyone's, prone to error. Certainly what she does with her perceptions is not always self- or life-enhancing, but usually she learns from them, and they do certainly shape her life in crucial ways, at least for a significant period of time. The over-riding point is, however, that she cares about people a great deal, is interested in them, drawn toward them, and discovers an intensity of feeling toward a particular few that touches on the complex mystery of love in one or another of its myriad forms.
To specify here what May's seven major forms of love are and how they relate to each other would be to spoil the plot, which is, in fact, to make us each consider closely this woman and her plural capacities for loving and living. The great skill of the writing makes us feel for and with May's irregularly evolving personality. We recognize something of ourselves here and there, but we are always aware that May Nilsson is a mystery, a genuine other. The mystery is worth investigating because we know Trueblood will not betray our trust in her intelligence or compassion, nor, beyond that, will she betray the characters she has created. Without condescending to their naivete or clumsiness or manipulating events and experiences, Trueblood miraculously catches in her characters and their situations our flickering awareness of the unchosen and unpredictable occurring in our everyday living, even in its most ordnary, carefully controlled and examined episodes. This is one of those rare novels that helps us to think more carefully about the varied meanings of contemporary feelings and experiences, both chosen and unchosen, both of ourselves and of others whom we care about.
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11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Love and Loss, June 26, 2006
Reviewed by Marcelline (Marcy) Burns for Reader Views (06/06)
A perfect book is the jewel that tantalizes committed readers as they turn first pages and settle in for long reading hours, hoping for pleasure. When a book is even close to perfection, we are rewarded. "Seven Loves" is such a book. May Nilsson, who speaks to us from its page, is vulnerable to love in its many wondrous and heartbreaking guises. She makes us laugh and she makes us cry. We understand her, and that means she breaks our hearts. She loves her good husband and her absent daughters. She loves the son who was so lost he could not live, and she yearns passionately for the lover who leaves her. Ultimately, the great joys and pains of loving create her life and they end her life.
"Seven Loves" is remarkable in many ways, not the least of which is its elegantly spare language. Valerie Trueblood gets it so exactly right! She moves May forward in time and place without excess words. The reader is hardly aware of the "narrative" as such and can only marvel at how clear it all is, our understanding of what has happened and why it matters. This is a book that will be reread simply to experience it again. Never will it be reread, because the words failed to tell the story.
A passage from almost any page would illustrate the truths told by Ms Trueblood. Consider this one: "Of course you would not be able to pick the happiest day in a life ... There were too many different kinds of happiness, too many occasions for it. It sprang up in every soil. In no soil. Like ivy, it worked its way through brick, no matter that it might be a silly, upstart, last-minute thing."
How profound it is, and how hopeful, that a simple life indeed can be lived large! With pain and sorry, yes, but also with joy and passion. Older women, who have lived long enough to understand, will marvel at the depth of this story. It is likely, too, that many will ponder how it is that a woman as young as Ms Trueblood knows these truths about life. Younger women, as they are able to carry May's story with them during their own passages, will find in it both guidance and comfort. A man who reads it surely will be wiser about the passions that steer women even in the ordinariness of their everyday lives. Without reservation, this is a book to be recommended to any adult reader.
Valerie Trueblood's writing hand was steady and sure in "Seven Loves". We can hope that she will write again and again, and we will be watching for her name.
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9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Seven Loves is a gift to give yourself and others...., October 2, 2006
How does one distill the most pivotal relationships of a life into a narrative in which most of us would recognize themes, sensations, memories, and losses resonant with our own lives, however dissimilar from the fictional character of May in Valerie Trueblood's Seven Loves? This is a deceptively slim novel of seven vignettes from a long life lived with passionate intensity and contemplative attention to the details and nuances that fill the spaces between people's minds and hearts. I say it is deceptive for two reasons. First, each chapter renders flesh and blood characters so clearly that we step into their lives without knowing it until the story ends and we are shocked to find how deeply we entered into the story with this writer's guiding presence. Second, it is not literally about seven loves in the conventional sense. How many of us have expanded our definition of love to include the stranger or the one who causes irreparable loss or harm to us just as intensely as our most romanticized attachments? The periods of time represented in each vignette highlight definitive moments and people in May's life: husband, lover, child, parent, friend, stranger, even a beloved cat, to name a few. The reflections are retrospective, often glimpsed obliquely within the deep interior conversation generated by a restless mind. Subtlety and nuance render textures, smells, visual recollections, sounds, and the silence of memories probing into consciousness from the murky depths of love, loss, grief, regret, and often, pure sensual and intellectual curiosity. This book could be described as a tone poem, for it has a quiet, steady energy of mature intelligence, acute observation, beautiful, heart-breaking language and a quiet, persistent rhythm consistent with the persona of May. This quality of contemplation and careful expression of thought reaches into the deep inner psyche of the reader and takes hold quietly but confidently so that the reader trusts these stories and characters are real. We see ourselves and our deepest secret musings on similar scenes from our own, non-fictive lives. Often, I read only one chapter at time, needing to savor what I read as well as to find room in my life for the fullness of feelings it evoked, often surprisingly intense. When I put down the book each time, there was a palpable sense of absence from the space I had entered into while reading. The images I created in my mind's eye were not one-dimensional: I smelled the dampness of woods, felt the ache of being misunderstood, the tears of old grief still susceptible to the cathartic power of well-written literature. To say that Ms. Trueblood has the skill and power to evoke trust in readers is the highest compliment on her craft, her imagination, and her artistic integrity.
Every writer has antecedents in writers more famously known who have gone before them, maybe even mentored them. In Seven Loves I sensed the rhythms and keen intelligence of Virginia Woolf, the reflective patience and careful detail of Eva Figes, and the mastery of language I first encountered in Annie Proulx. Yet, Valerie Trueblood is her own writer, brave enough to leap into the unknown and offer us this first book, carrying like seeds on the wind, the promise of her extraordinary gifts to come as a writer. She is a master of turning phrases that haunt the reader with their accuracy, strangeness, and perfect expression of what is often inexpressible. I found myself stopping to reread these lines repeatedly, marveling at the strength of her metaphor, the rightness of her touch, the sureness of her ability to speak for all her characters and yet not intrude with her own voice. In these times, when there is sensory overload, facile language that is too often sloppy, trite, and bombastic, seldom does a reader find the still, quiet place of an individual, transient relationship between a book/author and reader. Seven Loves is a gift to give yourself and others, when you pass along the word that this book needs to reach a wide audience waiting to hear the story each of us knows and shares with anyone else who has lived, and loved.
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