Customer Reviews

The Summer of Katya: A Novel

5 star:		(19)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This is one of the few books that I can read steadily and finish within a short time. The writing is poetic, the dialogue witty, and the characters three-dimensional. The story flows with animation and grace. And probably the most important facet of the experience is you sympathize with the main characters and desperately want to know how each one makes out in the end.

At first a story of romance, which gradually introduces mystery, and in the end escalates into the unthinkable. The rare story that made me go WHAT? Did I just read that? The end was absolutely unpredictable but absolutely perfect! Beautiful psychological drama.

If anyone knows novels of this type, please recommend them to me at powerj97@hotmail.com. Thanks.

I wasn't expecting what I got when I randomly picked up this book that proclaimed itself a psychological thriller. The characters contained therein were very memorable and provided haunting images. I'm not quite sure why I never heard of this book before but I'm just glad I stumbled across it. Although it isn't a very short book, it was a fast read because I just couldn't wait to find out what was going to happen next. The unanticipated ending was poignant. The author has provided a well written and plotted story and presented it in an almost lyrical fashion. This love story is set in the pre-WWI french countryside and certainly provides the taste and feel of that time and culture.

I came across The Summer of Katya by accident, and am happy to have discovered both the author and the novel. This is a witty, often amusing little story, with dialog that you can practically hear and a mystery that remains a tantalizing, just-out-of-reach secret until the end. Both of the male characters are vitally human - Katya, the love interest, is superficially charming but strangely wooden, the first clue that something is seriously wrong with this picture. The plot epitomizes the old adage that love is blind; although the reader is not sure what the problem is, you know there is one, a discovery that Jean-Marc stubbornly refuses to see until it is literally forced upon him. This book is a little known gem; a quick, enthralling reading experience.

I was sixteen,and just finished my grade school exams ( I belong to Bengal, in India) when I came across this exceptional book-I had read 'Shibumi', and 'The Main',both of which just bowled me over, and I had fallen in love with the style of Trevanian, a maestro de su genero, on every grounds! I fell in love with Katya, too--perhaps a little more than Jean Marc, who;s ideology made him a lovable character by his own rights--but my world became transmuted to darkness, in the oppressive summer afternoon, when I finished reading---I had grown up, and I was in love------the name Hortense, the name Katya----became the very centre of my being , at least for some time to come. A book exceptional in its poignancy, a must read for all lovers and madmen.

This is not a page turner, but a brilliant, slow-moving psychological thriller. Experts say the 19th century ended only in 1914 with the outbreak of WW I [and the 20th century in 1989 with the fall of the Berlin Wall]. The life of newly-graduated medical doctor Jean-Marc Montjean (25)(JMM) straddles both centuries. He wrote this account of the fateful events of the summer of Katya in 1914 which deeply marked him, only in 1938 when he returns to where it all happened. In 1914, as in 1938, the air is rife with rumors about war...
In 1914, JMM works in Salies in his Basque home area as a temporary understudy of the resident doctor Gros, who is awesomely ugly, but a great success with women of a certain age, who patronize this spa village, a delightful book character. JMM is totally bored until handsome Katya seeks his help when her twin brother Paul breaks his collar bone. The twins (26) live with their father, a historian specialized in medieval village life, in a rented, chilly, half-ruined summer house 2.5 km out of Salies. He bandages Paul and before returning to his lodgings in Salies, JMM realizes he is in love with Katya.

No reader/reviewer on any Amazon site has dared to disclose fully what will happen next. This reader follows suit. When love or passion grows between Katya and JMM, her twin brother Paul warns JMM repeatedly to stop meeting her, with ever more contrived stories of why his family fled from his beloved Paris to the foothills of the Pyrenees and a damp ruin...
Katya is either alert, daydreaming or demure. She is the most enigmatic character in the book. Her twin brother Paul is a truly decadent male, embodying all tenets of J.-K. Huysmans hero Des Essentes in his 1884 novel "Against Nature". JMM is the only character foreshadowing the 20th century, questioning what is wrong with the Age of Grace and foreshadowing the Era of Efficiency. Finally, the twins' scholarly father appears unaware of his surroundings.

Trevanian (T) is the pen name of a Canadian professor of linguistics and communication sciences in the USA. His unique gift was (he passed away in 2005) his ability to grasp and copy the writing styles of bestselling- or classical writers. He could hardly believe the success of "The Eiger Sanction", a parody of Ian Fleming's James Bond novels and wrote another, "The Loo Sanction". "The Main", written in the present tense about a widowed police veteran in Montreal in the mid-1970s, is a homage to Emile Zola. The worldwide success of these novels prompted him to turn his back on teaching and the USA and settle with his family in the French Basque country, which forms the backdrop of "Shibumi", a parody of the popular Ninja books written by e.g. James Clavell and Eric von Lustbader in the late 1970s. And of this book, which is a brilliant horror story in the vein of Marcel Proust and J.-K. Huysmans. [Finally, readers should consult Wikipedia to find out how versatile a writer Trevanian was].

The Summer of Katya is an exquisitely crafted literary masterpiece that in numerous ways is more poetry than prose. This is what writing as an art is all about!

Set in the summer of 1914, between, what the author Trevanian calls, "the age of grace and the era of efficiency," the young Basque doctor Jean-Marc Montjean falls in love with Katya Treville, a young Parisian woman. His brief and heartbreaking relationship in what he calls the "Summer of Katya" ultimately devastates him in life.

In this short story(about 280 pages), Trevanian has brilliantly encapsulated the unfathomable intensity of love and youth. Set in the Basque region of Southwestern France, the novel is a pristine example of the author's artistic and lyrical writing talent. It is a novel that is not only read but is "experienced." It leaves the reader with a profound sense of melancholy that only a writer of Trevanian's calibre and genius can deliver.

For those sick of the mainstream nauseating happily ever after love stories, "The Summer of Katya" is written for you...an expertly weaved tragic romance that is unforgettable! Trevanian has truly shown that there is poetry and beauty in sadness. You will shed a bucket of intellectual tears!!!!

Trevanian is a wonderful writer, best known for spy thrillers, his artistry however, is most impeccable in this mysterious love story. As it opens, Jean-Marc Montjean, begins telling his story and it flows from there with casual, yet poetic prose, evolving like the day, bright with possibilities in the early hours, full of hope, yet soon twists to the inevitable dark of evening. The reader feels compelled back in time and into the shoes of the narrator. It is tight, organic and fluid. Goes down in history as a classic along side Rebecca and Wuthering Heights.

It's amazing how many people here discovered this book accidently. You won't find this listed on any best seller list because you won't know which list to add this on. But ... what a read!! The build up from mundane crush of a young doctor to the absolutely gripping, hunting end is brilliant and leaves you speechless where you can only express you feeling with `Oh my God!'.

This is my second Trevanian after Shibumi and its hard to belive its been written by the same person. Both books are brilliant but so very different from each other.

It is a book I absolutely loved, and left me feeling hunted, disturbed, sad ... it is a book I will never read again but will strongly recommend.

This really is a work of genious. A love shadowed by the burdens of a painful past. A must read!

The Summer of Katya was given me to read by my tenth grade Honors English teacher. She told our class that she was probably in a minority of teachers in giving this book to a tenth grade class to read, but that we would read many books of mature content and sometimes controversial nature... throughout the year we read The Catcher in the Rye, The Lord of the Flies, and Hamlet, among other diverse works, but The Summer of Katya remained one of my favorites... indeed, Katya is right up there with Holden Caulfield as a literary character, though perhaps not so widely known. It will remain one of the most astoundingly psychological books I have read for many years to come, and I hope to purchase a copy if one is to be found.