Customer Reviews

Love and Summer (Platinum Readers Circle (Center Point))

5 star:		(29)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

In this wonderfully detailed snapshot of a vanishing Ireland, a young woman falls in love too quickly, a young man falls in love too slowly, and the consequences are ultimately heart-wrenching.

The book starts in a passive voice that demands the reader's full attention to understand fully what is going on. After a bit I recognized this as a sort of verbal averted vision, conveying respect for a funeral in progress. The skill with which this was accomplished amazed me, and though I was glad to have the book then proceed in a more conventional narrative, I noted other areas where style variations conveyed as much of the book's substance as the literal sense of the words did. Wow!

The book is set in village/rural Ireland in a vaguely specified time that I guess would be about 1965. The material culture, characters, their interactions, institutions that effect them - everything that enters into the story is detailed concisely yet clearly enough to recognize this as a regional story, not just a generic Ireland, but probably in the middle-south of the island. It may be useful to know some details of Irish life already - for example it is helpful at one point know that in Ireland "Pioneers" are sworn teetotalers - but much of this you will get by osmosis through the book.

The characters are so real I will surely not forget them. The old servant, cast off by the fled aristocracy, whose dementia-driven ravings seem about as clear as a classical Oracle and ultimately turn the story. The young woman, "placed" on a widower's farm out of Catholic orphanage, married for respect and security, who stumbles on her first experience of love. The observant spinster, inheritor of the boarding house, who sees right to the heart of the girl's peril in a single bit of street conversation glimpsed through a window. No-one is very demonstrative, but the people can see each other's hearts directly. On reflection I understood that to depend on not only the inevitable interest and effective intimacy of a sparse village and rural population, but on their homogeneous culture. In America, and in much of Ireland today, the basis for that sort ready understanding is eroded, and misunderstanding is more likely. Thus I saw this as a story of a very particular time and place, not just in its setting but in its core.

I'm not going to detail the story, and I hope other reviewers will refrain as well; it deserves to be discovered as read. Parts of the book may seem very deliberate in the story's development, even a bit staid; but the full weight of the entire work comes to bear in the ending. I highly recommend this book to read and re-read.

[This review was written based on an Advance Uncorrected Proof edition of the book]

Consider the opening paragraph. "On a June evening some years after the middle of the last century Mrs Eileen Connulty passed through the town of Rathmoye: from Number 4 The Square to Magennis Street, into Hurley Lane, along Irish Street, across Cloughjordan Road to the Church of the Most Holy Redeemer. Her night was spent there." How beautifully it sets the period, establishes the mid-sized Irish town, brushes against the mild pretension of "Number 4 The Square," and adds its final piece of delayed information: Mrs. Connulty was in her coffin. William Trevor treads with assurance on familiar ground, but he never quite walks in straight lines; he will tell you what you need to know only when you need it. In this book where nothing much happens -- at least to the outward eye -- it is important that things be told at their proper pace and in the right order. At this, Trevor is the acknowledged master.

Mrs. Connulty's funeral gives us occasion to meet the main characters, who are few. The old lady's middle-aged son and daughter, both business people in the town. An elderly man whose mind is stuck thirty years back. Ellie, a naive young woman from the countryside. And a strange young man on a bicycle who takes photographs. The only major character not present is Dillahan, Ellie's husband, a sheep-farmer who has his reasons for avoiding company. I am only at the start of the second chapter, and already I have revealed more than the author (although the jacket blurb gives away almost the entire plot). Taking his time, but never wasting words, Trevor will tell us more of Dillahan's tragedy, and how he came to marry this dutiful girl from the orphanage. He will have us meet the bicycling photographer, Florian Kilderry, living alone in a crumbling mansion outside town. He will have Florian meet Ellie, unaware at first that she is married, and gradually let us enter both their hearts. And he will establish the older characters as town chorus, occasional bit-players, and individuals with past secrets of their own.

In novels such as THE STORY OF LUCY GAULT, and even more in his story collections like the perfectly-titled AFTER RAIN, Trevor has shown an amazing ability to emerge from apparent tragedy with an outcome that, though seldom the storybook ending, is emotionally consoling and morally right. Although LOVE AND SUMMER is not his strongest book, in this respect he does not disappoint. We may think we know these people and what is going to happen... but then Trevor slowly reveals more of each of them, here deepening our sympathies, there shading them with further knowledge. Over the course of the long summer, the emotional perspective slowly shifts. By the time the senile old man stumbles back into the picture, bringing a muddled epiphany, we will understand that the surprising resolution is really the only one possible.

Brief summary, no spoilers:

This beautiful little book takes place during one summer. The time is the mid 1950s.

Ellie Dillahan is a young woman, married to a kindly farmer (referred to as "Dillahan" in the book) who is several years older. Ellie was a foundling, raised in the convent where she was left as an infant. She is sent directly from that convent to work for Dillahan, and after a couple of years they marry.

We know that years earlier there was a terrible accident of some sort, and that Dillahan's wife and child were killed. Ellie is a comfort to him and he is a good husband to her.

Into this picture comes Florian Kilderry, a young man raised affectionately by two bohemian parents. When he happens to be in Ellie's town taking pictures of a funeral, they meet, and Ellie falls in love.

Ellie must decide between her husband and Florian - and Trevor shows us that the choice is anything but easy.

There are other assorted wonderful characters. The book starts out with a funeral, and we become acquainted with the dead woman's twin daughter and son. Something terrible has happened to the daughter, and we know that she and the mother didn't get along. The daughter takes a special interest in Ellie and Florian.

We also meet a deranged older man named Orpen, who becomes an important player in the story.

This is a very short book, and you can probably read it in a few hours. But it packs a big punch. The language is just beautiful, and Trevor paints a wonderful picture of a small Irish town in the 1950s, and how our past has everything to do with the choices we make now.

Recommended. William Trevor is one of my favorite writers, and this book demonstrates why.

Many women know that love and summer can be a heart-breaking mix. In this superb novel by William Trevor, the reader is introduced to what could be an explosive and destructive love affair. Taking place in a small town in Ireland, Rathmoye, in the 1950's, there is not much news. The town is populated with farmers, shopkeepers and other small business owners who worry about their financial survival.

The novel opens with a stranger taking photographs of the funeral of Mrs. Connulty, a prominent resident of the town, who disliked her own daughter and husband. The daughter, Ms. Connulty has a secret past of a lost love. Her bitterness transfers to Ellie Dillahan, a farmer's wife who falls in love with the photographer, Florian Kilderry. Based on this premise, Trevor writes a tale of suspicion, guilt and starting over with wondrous scenes of everyday life and those of unrequited love.

With great subtlety, Trevor develops Ellie Dillahan, a foundling, who was outsourced from an orphanage to a widower's farm. She makes every effort to learn the skills required to help the farmer and he marries her after a short time. Despite her ample intentions and poignant undertaking of all the tasks given her, Trevor awakens her passion when she meets Florian. Florian's response to Ellie is more than a fleeting comparison to that of Ms. Connulty's secret history. Other important characters are the husband of Ellie, who lived with agony and tragedy, and a rather demented old man, Orpen Wren who plays a strong role at the outskirts of the plot.

The dialogue is exceptional and Trevor's perspective provokes sympathies and nostalgia in the most jaded reader.

As fans of the 81-year-old author's 13 other novels (including the Man Booker-shortlisted THE STORY OF LUCY GAULT) and 12 collections of short stories can attest, William Trevor has made a long-standing career out of exploring the quiet, melancholic lives of ordinary, repressed people with past shame to hide and present secrets to keep. But he does it in such a way that seems new (albeit slightly short of revelatory) each time.

His latest novel, LOVE AND SUMMER, takes place half a century ago in the small Irish town of Rathmoye. The residents are simple folk, many of them farmers, who lead fairly basic lives. Everyone knows everyone else (and everyone else's business), and they rarely venture out beyond the town's boundaries, let alone to the nearest city. This type of pristine yet somewhat hermetic setting is ripe for an interloper, and Trevor's Florian Kilderry is not only as unassumingly assuming as they come, he's also the perfect shoe-in for a catalyst.

Dressed in a tweed coat, riding into town on a bicycle, Florian appears on the scene --- the funeral of one of the town's revered elders, Mrs. Connulty --- without much fanfare, or so he thinks. Intending to quickly photograph an old dilapidated cinema in the town before departing, he minds his business and asks directions when needed, hoping to blend into the background. But as anyone from a small town knows, strangers don't just blend in --- especially ones with a camera around their neck.

The minute Ellie Dillahan, the wife of a widowed farmer who accidentally ran over his first wife and child with a tractor years earlier, sets her gaze on Florian, her life is unalterably different. "She wondered if she would be the same herself; if she was no longer --- and would not be again --- the person she was when she had gone to Mrs. Connulty's funeral and for all the time before that." In true Trevor fashion, this chance encounter splinters Ellie's once solid (if complacent) life into a "before" and an "after," two bipolar modes of consciousness that, for her, are now irrevocably irreconcilable.

For the remainder of the slim book, Trevor unwinds the sad story of the affair between Ellie and Florian, using spare and restrained language. Most of the action happens off the page, and whatever action there is, is contained. Unfortunately for the reader, this makes for somewhat snoozy reading. What is interesting, however, is what happens after the summer (and, thus, the affair) is over.

LOVE AND SUMMER (what a strangely deceptive title) is peppered with characters who each have their own burden to shoulder. Ellie's too-kind husband borders on the pitiful in his relentless, guilt-ridden suffering. Miss Connulty, the daughter of the deceased Mrs. Connulty, comes off as unnecessarily bitter and cold --- but she has her skeleton in the closet, too. And Orpen Wren, the nattering old man who is half off his rocker with a head stuck in the past, seems downright creepy.

Is LOVE AND SUMMER a joy to read? Not by a long shot. It's not that engrossing, either. But there's something quietly moving and slightly unsettling about what little Trevor's characters are left with at the end of the story --- and that situation, a possibility for all of us, is what sticks with you.

--- Reviewed by Alexis Burling

It's a summer day in the small town of Rathmoye when Florian Kilderry first cycles into it and pauses to take some pictures of a funeral underway in the town's Catholic cemetary. Florian, an aimless young man planning to leave Ireland for good, is making a final stab at following in the artistic footsteps of his parents by trying his hand at photography and had come to Rathmoye in hopes of photographing the ruins of a burned-out cinema -- he is drawn to scenes of abandonment and disaster. Instead, Florian becomes a catalyst of sorts, transforming the lives of those attending the funeral and who notice his presence. He makes farmer's wife Ellie Dillahan wonder what else is possible beyond the bounds of her circumscribed world; forces Miss Connulty, daughter of the woman being buried, to think back over her own past, and jars the hapless and witless Orpen Wren into confusing Florian with figures from his past -- figures who are more real to him than anyone in his present -- and that confusion will lead to a decisive turning point for all of Trevor's characters.

There's immense emotional drama in this novel, but it's implicit and understated. On the surface, life in Rathmoye continues at its usual pace as Miss Connulty serves guests at the family-owned bed and breakfast and Orpen Wren continues to sit and wait for trains that never arrive. But William Trevor is an artist, and he conveys the emotional changes indirectly, writing about the arrival of Florian's new passport in the mail or how Ellie changes the day of the week that she visits Rathmoye to deliver eggs and do her shopping. The prose is often beautiful and always vivid -- even had I not visited farm kitchens in rural Ireland, I would have been able to picture the Dillahans' home just through Trevor's prose. More skilful yet is his depiction of his characters and his ability to convey a sense of their personality and nature in only a few words. He writes of Orpen Wren, whose life revolves around the period he spent cataloging the library of a long-departed Anglo-Irish aristocratic family and who now carries documents he believes belong to the St. John family around with him to share with others and, hopefully, return to their rightful owners: "Carefully now, he tucked what had been returned to him into his clothes and continued on his way. Sometimes his name eluded him, but returned when it was used by someone on the streets or by the post-office clerks when he went to collect his pension."

There isn't an ill-chosen word or an inappropriate plot twist or unconvincing character to be found throughout the pages of this slim novel. Trevor's writing reminded me of the drawings and sketches by great artists, who were able to capture in just a few simple lines, not only the nature of the person they are drawing, but their spirit as well. So vivid are those drawings that although they are centuries old, I always feel that if I looked away and suddenly glanced back at them, I would catch their subjects moving or trying to jump off the paper. That is the same skill that Trevor displays in his writing, and has so far been best displayed in his short stories (which are far better known than his relatively small number of novels.) I know these characters; they have become real people to me and their experiences and dilemmas, however far from my personal experience, are utterly comprehensible. I also relished the fact that I felt able to discover the characters and the themes, rather than feeling as if the author was shoving them in my face, saying, "see?" or "look at that!" as occurs in so much contemporary fiction. This is a novel by an accomplished and talented writer who knows he doesn't need to resort to antics or artificial drama to craft a work of art.

This is a brilliant novel, the kind that makes you wish its author would live to be 150 so that he could continue to observe, to think and to write for the pleasure of all around him. Very highly recommended to anyone and everyone with a taste for literary fiction.

William Trevor's languidly paced novel is like summer itself: brief but charged with the beauty and passion of that longed for season. If you, as I, are a William Trevor fan, you know you will be rewarded with moment to moment, finely tuned descriptions and images, which might be overlooked by a more plot driven author. And like his suspenseful Felicia's Journey, Love and Summer features a highly sympathetic main character, Ellie, an orphaned girl, raised by nuns in a Convent, and farmed out as a maid to an unfortunate widower, racked by guilt after the accidental death of his wife and infant son. Our competent and quick-to-please heroine, has agreed to a passionless marriage to the man, who is not unkind to her and who has come to depend on her sweet personality as a balm to his guilt and memory. Enter a shiftless son of bohemian artists who have left him their country estate. Florian, the nearly talentless, amateur photographer, much like the fume of a rose in bloom, draws Ellie toward him and awakens in her emotions she has never experienced. In addition to this triangle, an observant spinster notices the look of something she recognizes in Ellie's eyes and fears for Ellie's future. The spinster's dark secret and shame alludes to a fate awaiting the love-stricken Ellie. Trevor's gorgeous prose is always enough to keep me reading, but in Love in Summer, he offers much more. Going beyond a predictable romance with its tragic or not ending, he explores the moral dilemma with which Ellie is faced when she learns Florian has sold the estate and is planning to move to Scandinavia. Readers of romance novels may be disappointed, but this reader enjoyed the somewhat surprising ending, which explores the age old conundrum regarding hedonism versus enlightened hedonism. With his marvelous sensitivity toward women, particularly Irish Catholic girls and women, Trevor, once again, proves to be an enlightened master.

Content is the only way to judge the quality of a book. Still it's interesting to note that William Trevor has been short-listed four times for Britain's most important literary prize, the Man Booker Award, and that as of this writing, "Love and Summer" has been long-listed for this year's award. Trevor is arguably one of the five best fiction writers in the English language.

"Love and Summer" is a short book that looks at the growing relationship between a young married woman and a footloose young bachelor, and at the circle of people around them. As important as the individuals is the Irish village and countryside in which these folks live. The examination of the lives of the characters, major and minor, shows us that place is as much a matter of personalities as geography.

Trevor's work operates on a small intimate scale spending lots of time on the simple details of ordinary lives. Rather than being boring, this approach illuminates the lives and personalities of the characters. For example, we learn a great deal about one of the main characters as he goes about the business of preparing to mend a fence. To further reveal the several people that Trevor focuses on, the author regularly shifts the point of view to reflect that of each of these individuals. This results in the reader having sympathy for each of them, and the lives they have fashioned and had fashioned for them. Because of that sympathy, we have no condemnation for the characters, even when they are petty or incredibly thoughtless, but rather feel filled with a sense of pathos for each of them, regardless of how successful their lives may seem.

Moreover, it's not just the lives of the half dozen people that are the main characters that Trevor explores. In just a few words, Trevor reveals the lives and motivations of secondary characters.

Books rich in texture and character developments can be boring to those active in the world of Twitter and action movies, and I expect that many readers will be have no interest in examining the lives of these people, especially if the result is a feeling of sadness. On the other hand, for those who are interested in the essential human condition, here is another small gem from a great master of the English language.

Veteran (age 80-plus) Irish author Trevor's 14th novel opens with the funeral of a prominent matriarch in a small Irish town in June in the 1950s. "Nothing happened in Rathmoye, its people said, but most of them went on living there."

He gives us a tour of this ordinary place whose solid citizens pay their due respects to the pious, prosperous Mrs. Connulty and then go about their daily business. He then introduces the main cast of characters one by one as they leave the funeral mass.

Florian Kilderry, a stranger in town, happens to be passing by with his camera, and takes several shots of the mourners gathered on the pavement. Ellie Dillihan, a young farm wife, hurries home on her bicycle, curious about the young man with the camera and sorry that chores prevent her going back to the Connulty house. "She'd have liked to see the inside of it, which she never had, although she'd been supplying Mrs. Connulty with eggs for a long time."

Miss Connulty, whose mother had not addressed her by her name in 20 years, tries on her mother's jewelry, remembering the day as a child when she'd held her mother's garnet necklace against her own small neck and Mrs. Connulty had declared "the Guards must be sent for," and then actually sent for them.

Joseph Paul Connulty, his mother's pet, and Miss Connulty's twin, had missed his priestly calling, "lost beneath the weight of his mother's doubt that he would make a success of the religious life." He runs the family coal yards and public house, and has always, like his sister, lived in his childhood home, a boarding house that Miss Connulty will now run.

Dillihan, Ellie's farmer, is a conscientious, taciturn man, widowed by an accident seven years earlier. "Try as he would he could never prevent the memory from nagging when another June came, and lingering then until summer was finished with and the days were different." Ellie had come five years ago, as a servant, an orphan who knew nothing of farming, and he had never dreamed then that one day they'd be married.

Other characters, some of whom play crucial roles in the summer's events, some of whom never get the chance, are all exquisitely drawn, from Bernadette O'Keefe, Mr. Connulty's assistant who pines to be something more, to demented old Orpen Wren, obsessed with a long-gone landed family.

It's Florian, of course, the newcomer, who disturbs the even tenor of community life. He and Ellie meet in town by accident, and he awakens feelings in the naïve, sheltered girl that she'd never expected to have. Florian, however, is one of life's dilettantes, a man who can't settle at anything and who is already looking over the next hill.

Miss Connulty, viewing the world through her net curtains, is beside herself with anxiety for Ellie and anger at Florian. She sees herself in the girl, her life blighted by just such a man 20 years before.

As the summer proceeds, Ellie's passion grows and she becomes less willing to live her life in grateful tranquility with a kind man. Florian, however, is not a man for strong feeling or decisiveness. The narrative seems to move inexorably to a train wreck of an ending.

Trevor's spare, understated prose delves deeply into the circumscribed lives of his characters. Their free will, even their imaginations mostly tempered by the expectations of their deeply Catholic community. Like Miss Connulty, the reader grows increasingly anxious for Ellie, whose life can be forever blighted by a careless man.

Trevor adds layer after revealing layer, portraying the town and its individual lives as much by what he leaves out and by the details of how they live, and in the end he brings this deceptively quiet story to a hauntingly masterful conclusion.

I've just finished this perfect gem of a novel by masterful author William Trevor. It's impossible to come up with anything coherent that could convey why he is the greatest writer writing in the English language. His work is subtle, poetic, humorous, truthful and heartbreaking. Always. I tip my hat to Mr. Trevor's genius once again. And I thank him for his illustrious unparalleled career.