Customer Reviews

Eva Trout, or Changing Scenes

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EVA TROUT is perhaps the weakest of Bowen's novels and is certainly not the place to start your appreciation of her work. One of Bowen's characteristic devices is to describe not the terrible event, but the day after the terrible event, as people realize that they are nonetheless going to have to pick up the pieces and continue with their lives. EVA TROUT takes this device--which may strike you as a trick but is actually one of Bowen's great insights into life as it is lived--to the greatest extreme. Except for the ending, almost every major event in this book happens between the end of one chapter and the start of the next.

If you admire Bowen as I do, it's interesting to read her at her most Bowenesque. If you do not already admire Bowen, please don't start here--I've put off too many people by recommeding this book. Start instead with her short stories, some of which are widely anthologized.

I think that Eva trout is Elizabeth Bowen's strongest work. It completes the feeling started in the book Death of the Heart. Who could not relate to Eva and her childish heart. Much like Portia in Death of the Heart, Eva remains unchanged as the world around her closes her in, and forces others to "grow-up", thus killing all that they believed in when children. Eva so closes herself off from the world, that she has never cried, but one can feel the verge of tears from page one on. I wont ruin the book for you by saying anything else, but i STRONGLY suggest that you read this book.

This is the first of Bowen's novels I have read and I was quite interested in the two polarised reviews below me, one reckoned it her best, and one reckoned it her worst book. Strange how writing can be so different to so many people.

I really enjoyed it - it was darkly humourous. We are introduced to Eva Trout and her unstoppable machinations right from the start - her inability to leave things alone, and perhaps more importantly, other people's inability to get her to leave them alone. It really is enormously funny at times - a mischevious social comedy and with a nice suitably bizarre twist for the finish.