A Year of Two Summers

by Shaun Levin

A Year of Two Summers moves between South Africa, Israel, New York and London. Shaun Levin's stories introduce us to a fascinating array of characters as they negotiate identity, migration, belonging, and the things that get lost in translation. A new recruit fantasises about a fellow solder during Israel's invasion of Lebanon; a young gay man experiments with cross-dressing; a father worries about protecting his son during the bombing of Tel Aviv; a South African woman and her Syrian boyfriend tiptoe around each other as they look after their unexpected baby. The stories in A Year of Two Summers keep alive the elements of both Jewish and gay traditions of storytelling. The are lyrical and unflinching, nostalgic and pragmatic.

164 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2006

About the author

Shaun Levin is the author, most recently, of Snapshots of The Boy, an exploration of the unseen stories in photographs. His first book, Seven Sweet Things, published originally in the UK in 2003, has just be re-issued. His other books include A Year of Two Summers and Isaac Rosenberg's Journey to Arras: A Meditation.

He is currently completing the first in a trilogy of fictional biographies based on the lives of the artists Mark Gertler, Isaac Rosenberg, and David Bomberg. An extract from the Mark Gertler novel won the Moment-Karma Fiction Prize in 2006 and can be found on his website, shaunlevin.com.

Shaun has recently written and launched a series of illustrated creative writing maps of inspiration, Writing Maps.

He is also the founding editor of the international queer literary and arts journal, Chroma.

Reviews

[Liam Ostermann · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read these stories a long time ago and they remained fresh in my memory though specifics had long vanished which is why I reread them. Sometimes it is not good to revisit the past and rereading these stories is a good example, or maybe this was bad timing.

What I still liked were the stories about his childhood in South Africa and in the army.

What I didn't like were the stories about his time in London they all had dated feel whether it was squats in Kings Cross or Soho when it was the centre of London's gay scene. They seemed so specific that they couldn't but date, particularly the Soho story. Soho as London's gay centre was a marketing/advertiusing/real estate creation it had no roots like Greenwich village and it was antithecal to those who didn't have alot of money. In terms of the actual length of time it existed it was barely a blip on Soho's long and rich history.

My real problem with the stories is that it explores Mr. Levin's complex personal history as a gay man and as a jew with South Africa were he was born and Israel were his family moved to when he barely a teenager. This is a very difficult time to read anything about Israel, I cannot ignore what is on my TV screen everyday (this is written in October 2024) and if you imagine that I am admitting some sort of undisguised antisemetism you are wrong and have clearly read nothing else I have written.

These are not bad stories, some of them are very good, others aren't and the rest I cannot relate to at the present time.

I have reduced my rating to three from five stars.

[Andy Irwin · Rating 3 out of 5]

There is some lovely writing throughout these short stories. Levin captures complex emotions in shared and snatched moments. It is unusual to be able to effectively portray the flickering images and words that pass through our minds in a given moment, but Levin does this really well and it is nice to read this kind of emotional depth in gay characters. The flip side, though, is that I wasn’t sure what was going on a lot of the time, I found myself going back pages at a time to establish who was speaking and what was happening. So whilst some of the prose and the emotion it captures is gorgeous, it is also a bit too wild and unconfined for me, and not in that way we allow short stories to be. Worth a read certainly, for lovers of gay writing, and I’d be interested to hear others’ responses to it.