Two Lives: Two Novels (Reading Turgenev and My House in Umbria) [Hardcover]

William Trevor (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 1, 1991

This book comprises two novels, "Reading Turgenev" and "My House in Umbria", which evoke the landscapes of Ireland and Italy, respectively. The stories are linked by a common theme - the importance of fiction in two women's lives. "Reading Turgenev" was shortlisted for the 1991 Booker Prize.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

The two lives of the title are brilliantly illuminated in a pair of short novels, Reading Turgenev and My House in Umbria, that exemplify the biting, tragicomic work of this Anglo-Irish master. The first novel is a sorrowful love story, the second a sort of thriller. Each of Trevor's two heroines is trapped in her life, one in Ireland and the other in Italy, and each has some experience of the transformative power of literature, a subject the author knows at first hand. Nobody can break your heart with such laconic precision. To be read with Bushmill's in hand. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

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.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 384 pages
• Publisher: Viking Adult; First edition (September 1, 1991)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0670839337
• ISBN-13: 978-0670839339
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 5.7 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,603,238 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

William Trevor was born in Mitchelstown, County Cork. He has written many novels, and has won many prizes including the Hawthornden Prize, the Yorkshire Post Book of the Year Award, and the Whitbread Book of the Year Award. His most recent novel Love and Summer was longlisted for the Booker Prize. He is also a renowned short-story writer, and his two-volume Collected Stories was published by Viking Penguin in 2009. In 1999 William Trevor received the prestigious David Cohen Literature Prize in recognition of a lifetime's literary achievement, and in 2002 he was knighted for his services to literature. He now lives in Devon.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

32 of 33 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A devotion that outlasts death, May 19, 2000

By 

Rese Jamora-Garceau - See all my reviews

This review is from: Two Lives (Paperback)

The Irish author William Trevor can be deceptive. He writes his tales about Irish women in a vernacular that would seem at home in a 19th-century Romance novel. You think you've entered the pages of Henry James or Thomas Hardy. But underneath the carefully-chosen language, and a writing style that matches the green rolling hills and bustling seaports of his native Cork, Trevor's characters contain and endure all the horrors of modern life, as diverse and topical as terrorist bombings and mental illness.

Two Lives, Trevor's 1991 offering, contains a pair of novellas, Reading Turgenev and My House in Umbria. The first is about Mary Louise Dallon, a young Protestant girl who consents to a "marriage of convenience" with a much older Catholic man, only to find herself in love with her ailing cousin, Robert. She is tortured daily by her husband's two old maid sisters, and finds refuge in the passages of Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev which Robert reads to her in a graveyard.

The situation may seem very old-fashioned, but watch how Trevor's plot unfolds like a well-tended piece of cloth: readers quickly become wrapped up in the life of Mary Louise, and anyone who has ever been accused of "burying their nose in a book" will understand her fate.

The second novella concerns Mrs. Delahunty, the owner of an Italian guest house in My House in Umbria, another woman character whose daily survival depends on burying the bad memories and experiences of her life. As she ruminates about the plot of her next Romance novel aboard a tourist train, a bomb goes off, killing half the passengers. The survivors find a refuge in her home, including an orphaned American girl who may hold the key to their psychic recovery.

In one sense, the two novellas in Two Lives are about the strange uses people make of literature in their lives. It can be a life preserver for some, an escape hatch for others. Some readers may have trouble with Trevor's style, which occasionally jumps from present consciousness to filtered memory with no intervening transition, like Mary Louise, whose life switches channels between the present moment and her remembered scraps of Russian literature quite erratically. Mrs. Delahunty in My House in Umbria also spends her time alternating between real events and the plot of her next novel. It takes getting used to. But isn't consciousness like this sometimes, the intrusions of real life dovetailing unevenly with our renegade thoughts? Trevor's memorable characters seem as though they live by the rules of an earlier era, but they are also gifted with a hard, native common sense. It's this trait that wins the day, or helps them persist through very difficult lives. Not to mention that William Trevor is among the finest writers living today, in touch with mysteries of both depth and shadow.

The question of faith runs through both novellas, and with it a theme so common in Irish literature and music, from James Joyce's The Dead to Sinead O'Connor's I Am Stretched On Your Grave: that of a devotion that outlasts death. What kind of faith can compete with a love from beyond the grave? This question causes one character to muse: "The dead become nothing when you weary of doing their living for them. You pick and choose among the dead; the living are thrust upon you."

In Two Lives, faith not only creates mysteries, it can produce minor miracles. In William Trevor's completely believable world, mixed in with the old-fashioned, there are strong doses of the new, the horrible and the tragic. Thankfully, there are also flashes of hope and kindness.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Two Wonderfully Mesmerizing Novellas, March 29, 2000

By 

Tom O'Leary "Writer" (Los Angeles, California) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Two Lives (Paperback)

William Trevor has once again cast his storytelling spell. These two novellas are absolutely captivating. I read this book in one sitting and upon finishing turned back to page one and began again. The man can write---what genius. Bravo.

5 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars maybe its just me!, October 15, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Two Lives (Paperback)

I found this book really hard to get into and quite boring, perhaps i need to read it again to get the full value of Trevor's work. PLEASE, don't get me wrong Trevor is a fantastic and talented writer who definately deserves praise, this book just didn't do much for me at all.