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Two Lives
William Trevor's astonishing range as a writer--his humor, subtlety, and compassionate grasp of human behavior--is fully demonstrated in these two short novels. In Reading Turgenev, a lonely country girl escapes her loveless marriage in the arms of a bookish young man. In My House in Umbria, a former madam befriends the other survivors of a terrorist bombing with surprising results. Nominated for the Booker Award.
375 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1991
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1964 people want to read
About the author
William Trevor
176 books761 followersWilliam Trevor, KBE grew up in various provincial towns and attended a number of schools, graduating from Trinity College, in Dublin, with a degree in history. He first exercised his artistry as a sculptor, working as a teacher in Northern Ireland and then emigrated to England in search of work when the school went bankrupt. He could have returned to Ireland once he became a successful writer, he said, "but by then I had become a wanderer, and one way and another, I just stayed in England ... I hated leaving Ireland. I was very bitter at the time. But, had it not happened, I think I might never have written at all."
In 1958 Trevor published his first novel, A Standard of Behaviour, to little critical success. Two years later, he abandoned sculpting completely, feeling his work had become too abstract, and found a job writing copy for a London advertising agency. 'This was absurd,' he said. 'They would give me four lines or so to write and four or five days to write it in. It was so boring. But they had given me this typewriter to work on, so I just started writing stories. I sometimes think all the people who were missing in my sculpture gushed out into the stories.' He published several short stories, then his second and third novels, which both won the Hawthornden Prize (established in 1919 by Alice Warrender and named after William Drummond of Hawthornden, the Hawthornden Prize is one of the UK's oldest literary awards). A number of other prizes followed, and Trevor began working full-time as a writer in 1965.
Since then, Trevor has published nearly 40 novels, short story collections, plays, and collections of nonfiction. He has won three Whitbread Awards, a PEN/Macmillan Silver Pen Award, and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. In 1977 Trevor was appointed an honorary (he holds Irish, not British, citizenship) Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (CBE) for his services to literature and in 2002 he was elevated to honorary Knight Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (KBE). Since he began writing, William Trevor regularly spends half the year in Italy or Switzerland, often visiting Ireland in the other half. He lived in Devon, in South West England, on an old mill surrounded by 40 acres of land.
In 1958 Trevor published his first novel, A Standard of Behaviour, to little critical success. Two years later, he abandoned sculpting completely, feeling his work had become too abstract, and found a job writing copy for a London advertising agency. 'This was absurd,' he said. 'They would give me four lines or so to write and four or five days to write it in. It was so boring. But they had given me this typewriter to work on, so I just started writing stories. I sometimes think all the people who were missing in my sculpture gushed out into the stories.' He published several short stories, then his second and third novels, which both won the Hawthornden Prize (established in 1919 by Alice Warrender and named after William Drummond of Hawthornden, the Hawthornden Prize is one of the UK's oldest literary awards). A number of other prizes followed, and Trevor began working full-time as a writer in 1965.
Since then, Trevor has published nearly 40 novels, short story collections, plays, and collections of nonfiction. He has won three Whitbread Awards, a PEN/Macmillan Silver Pen Award, and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. In 1977 Trevor was appointed an honorary (he holds Irish, not British, citizenship) Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (CBE) for his services to literature and in 2002 he was elevated to honorary Knight Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (KBE). Since he began writing, William Trevor regularly spends half the year in Italy or Switzerland, often visiting Ireland in the other half. He lived in Devon, in South West England, on an old mill surrounded by 40 acres of land.
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February 17, 2021
William Trevor is meticulous in every tiny detail, psychologically very profound and to him human lives are open books…
Love may either make one happy or bring the bitter unhappiness: the heroine’s marriage turns into an excruciating disaster so she tries to hide in her dreamworld but a dreamworld is so brittle…
Life in Reading Turgenev is mournfully sorrowful.
The heroine is a guesthouse proprietress and an author of some pink novels – she and her guests are trying to recuperate after a terrible gory calamity.
Judging by the human nature depicted in the novel the people on the frieze are heading for hell…
Life in My House in Umbria is sorrowfully mournful.
Two Lives, thousand destinies, million fates – every facet of human existence is precious.
A person’s life isn’t orderly, it runs about all over the place, in and out through time. The present’s hardly there; the future doesn’t exist. Only love matters in the bits and pieces of a person’s life.
Love may either make one happy or bring the bitter unhappiness: the heroine’s marriage turns into an excruciating disaster so she tries to hide in her dreamworld but a dreamworld is so brittle…
Life in Reading Turgenev is mournfully sorrowful.
Once, somewhere, I have seen a painted frieze continuing around the inside walls of a church – people processing in old-fashioned dress, proceeding on their way to Heaven or to Hell, I’m not sure which. Over the years the tourists who have come to my house have lingered in my memory like that.
The heroine is a guesthouse proprietress and an author of some pink novels – she and her guests are trying to recuperate after a terrible gory calamity.
Judging by the human nature depicted in the novel the people on the frieze are heading for hell…
Life in My House in Umbria is sorrowfully mournful.
Two Lives, thousand destinies, million fates – every facet of human existence is precious.
May 12, 2016
Two women.
Two lives.
Multiple realities.
“Two Lives” couldn’t be a more befitting title for this book, for it consists of two stories narrated by middle-aged women who review past events to make sense of their dismal present. Such title could also be interpreted as the alternative existences both protagonists create in their minds to cope with the unsparing reality that has robbed them of their youthful illusions.
Told in the first-person narrative, the reader is dragged away in a deluge of unreliable memories that blends with the accounts of the grim lives these women recite in muffled resignation, as if they tried to convince themselves that the traumatic experiences they went through didn’t actually befall on them.
Trevor presents two heroines that couldn’t be more opposed in character, background or aspirations. Whereas Mary Louise is docile, Emily is feisty. Whereas the former is innocent but of a strategic frame of mind, the later is sexually experienced but gullible. One is barely touched by her older husband, who drowns his shame in whisky, while the other is abused by her foster father at the tender age of eight, a fact that sets the doomed course for the rest of her lifetime.
What do these women have in common besides their age, then?
That they both seek refuge and consolation in words, in literature, in parallel universes they can access through the power of their inextinguishable imagination. Be it Turgenev’s short stories or romantic paperbacks that provide make-believe solace, these women take a stand and preserve their quiet courage without betraying their ideals. They also challenge the morals of a collectively established authority with stoic endurance. Thus, these same illusory worlds allow them to remain true to themselves in spite of the silent anxiety, the indescribable humiliations that are intuited in-between the silences that pulsate in this low-keyed narration, which wrings the reader’s heart until it seems it will take flight from the chest.
Trevor’s outwardly modest prose does the trick.
The subdued melancholy that pervades these stories evokes a strong sense of place impregnated with almost supernatural timelessness, making them undeniably Irish because of the asphyxiating atmosphere so distinctive of the isolated rural communities of the Emerald Isle, which in turn relates naturally to the dual quality of the dissatisfied love-hate feelings that haunt Trevor’s characters. Their yearnings, their feverish daydreaming, their wasted passions remain irredeemably bound to a land that simultaneously imprisons and gives them reason to be.
And such is the burden of readers; that of juggling several realities and inescapable ends without losing the zest for their one and only life while reincarnating people from vanished worlds to grant them the acknowledgment they were denied at the time. Burden and escapism at once, that is the contradictory nature of those who juggle boundless fiction and limiting circumstances.
Two lives.
Multiple realities.
“Two Lives” couldn’t be a more befitting title for this book, for it consists of two stories narrated by middle-aged women who review past events to make sense of their dismal present. Such title could also be interpreted as the alternative existences both protagonists create in their minds to cope with the unsparing reality that has robbed them of their youthful illusions.
Told in the first-person narrative, the reader is dragged away in a deluge of unreliable memories that blends with the accounts of the grim lives these women recite in muffled resignation, as if they tried to convince themselves that the traumatic experiences they went through didn’t actually befall on them.
Trevor presents two heroines that couldn’t be more opposed in character, background or aspirations. Whereas Mary Louise is docile, Emily is feisty. Whereas the former is innocent but of a strategic frame of mind, the later is sexually experienced but gullible. One is barely touched by her older husband, who drowns his shame in whisky, while the other is abused by her foster father at the tender age of eight, a fact that sets the doomed course for the rest of her lifetime.
What do these women have in common besides their age, then?
That they both seek refuge and consolation in words, in literature, in parallel universes they can access through the power of their inextinguishable imagination. Be it Turgenev’s short stories or romantic paperbacks that provide make-believe solace, these women take a stand and preserve their quiet courage without betraying their ideals. They also challenge the morals of a collectively established authority with stoic endurance. Thus, these same illusory worlds allow them to remain true to themselves in spite of the silent anxiety, the indescribable humiliations that are intuited in-between the silences that pulsate in this low-keyed narration, which wrings the reader’s heart until it seems it will take flight from the chest.
Trevor’s outwardly modest prose does the trick.
The subdued melancholy that pervades these stories evokes a strong sense of place impregnated with almost supernatural timelessness, making them undeniably Irish because of the asphyxiating atmosphere so distinctive of the isolated rural communities of the Emerald Isle, which in turn relates naturally to the dual quality of the dissatisfied love-hate feelings that haunt Trevor’s characters. Their yearnings, their feverish daydreaming, their wasted passions remain irredeemably bound to a land that simultaneously imprisons and gives them reason to be.
And such is the burden of readers; that of juggling several realities and inescapable ends without losing the zest for their one and only life while reincarnating people from vanished worlds to grant them the acknowledgment they were denied at the time. Burden and escapism at once, that is the contradictory nature of those who juggle boundless fiction and limiting circumstances.
Read
May 1, 2025What intrigued me most about these two beautifully written novellas, 'Reading Turgenev' and 'My House In Umbria', written at different times but later published together under the modest title 'Two Lives', was William Trevor’s motivation in writing them.
While reading, my mind was teeming with questions: why did Trevor decide to look so closely at the very different lives of two women in the year 1987?
What is the significance of them both being 56 years old at that time and both arriving at defining moments in their exterior as well as interior lives?
Did he purposefully intend that both characters should experience life changing events around 1957?
What is the significance of them both being deeply attached to fictional worlds, and memorial gardens, even if in different ways?
I can well imagine that my questions would irritate Mr Trevor were he to hear of them.
“I don’t appreciate my work being analysed to that extent,” he might say. “I just want people to enjoy it."
"And, in any case,” he would add politely, “your questions underline the obvious: that the common ground between the two lives of my characters is what is significant. Their similarities are clearly the focus of my attention and the rest is my own business.”
Ah, I see...
Well, I’m very glad I’ve had that chat with you, Mr Trevor.
While reading, my mind was teeming with questions: why did Trevor decide to look so closely at the very different lives of two women in the year 1987?
What is the significance of them both being 56 years old at that time and both arriving at defining moments in their exterior as well as interior lives?
Did he purposefully intend that both characters should experience life changing events around 1957?
What is the significance of them both being deeply attached to fictional worlds, and memorial gardens, even if in different ways?
I can well imagine that my questions would irritate Mr Trevor were he to hear of them.
“I don’t appreciate my work being analysed to that extent,” he might say. “I just want people to enjoy it."
"And, in any case,” he would add politely, “your questions underline the obvious: that the common ground between the two lives of my characters is what is significant. Their similarities are clearly the focus of my attention and the rest is my own business.”
Ah, I see...
Well, I’m very glad I’ve had that chat with you, Mr Trevor.
October 22, 2020
A lot of people have been puzzled by the connection between these two novellas. They both have as their pivot a woman of the same age who lives in a fantasy world. My theory is the second novella was written out of the missed opportunity he detected in the first novella. That, in a sense, he was rewriting the first novella from a less romantic perspective. There's a kiss in the first novella which maybe shouldn't have been there, an act of reciprocation which gives some credence to Mary Louise's lifelong romantic obsession with her cousin. In a sense this kiss makes her narrative more reliable than it needs to be. At times it felt like Trevor was extolling the virtues of romantic feeling and missed a rich opportunity to question its hidden purposes and even its validity. And there perhaps was sown the seed of giving the second novella an utterly unreliable narrator.
This was my first experience of William Trevor. And, without question, he's a captivating writer. I quickly felt I was in the hands of a writer who has mastered his craft. He's also very good at impersonating women. The most memorable part of the first novella for me was the wedding night. I don't think any writer has ever made me feel the horror of the predicament of the shy virginal sleepwalking girl who is forced by circumstances to couple with a man she barely knows and has nothing in common with. Trevor takes the newly married couple to a pub and the banality of the detail is a movingly striking contrast to the momentous event which awaits Mary Louise in the hotel bedroom. It felt like she was being made to yield up all the privacy of her naked self to a man she had just met in a newsagents. And then you realise how often this was the case for girls in times gone past. Horrifying.
The two spinster sisters of her husband who she has to live with are splendid villainesses. You might say it's a narrative about the lengths some women will go to not to have sex and the mental health problems such a renunciation leads to!
The second novella is much more ambitious and as such both more exciting and more frustrating. It was inspired of Trevor to have as his unreliable narrator a novelist of romantic fiction. Romantic novelists, as we all know, tell lies to their readers. It's how they sell their books. They probably also have to tell lies to themselves in order to justify pedalling their pink plastic fairy stories. Mrs Delahunty, the narrator, was abused as a child by her stepfather - the connection between this experience and her drive to create happy ever after fiction was clever and well done. The problem for me was that Trevor packs too much exotic drama into his narrator's interim life, in particular her experience as a prostitute in a brothel in Africa. The catalyst of the story itself is an extraordinary event - an unmotivated terrorist attack on a train in Italy. That's enough melodrama for a novella. We don't need brothels in Africa. William Trevor is investigating something we all do - fictionalising our lives. To have kept her closer to someone whose experiences we recognise would have been more powerful. In a nutshell, he should have made Mrs Delahunty's life story more ordinary. After all, when we fictionalise ourselves what we do is exoticise the ordinary. Mrs Delahunty on the other hand exoticises the already exotic. I found this aspect of the novella clumsy. That said, I loved the slow incremental unravelling of her secret.
This was my first experience of William Trevor. And, without question, he's a captivating writer. I quickly felt I was in the hands of a writer who has mastered his craft. He's also very good at impersonating women. The most memorable part of the first novella for me was the wedding night. I don't think any writer has ever made me feel the horror of the predicament of the shy virginal sleepwalking girl who is forced by circumstances to couple with a man she barely knows and has nothing in common with. Trevor takes the newly married couple to a pub and the banality of the detail is a movingly striking contrast to the momentous event which awaits Mary Louise in the hotel bedroom. It felt like she was being made to yield up all the privacy of her naked self to a man she had just met in a newsagents. And then you realise how often this was the case for girls in times gone past. Horrifying.
The two spinster sisters of her husband who she has to live with are splendid villainesses. You might say it's a narrative about the lengths some women will go to not to have sex and the mental health problems such a renunciation leads to!
The second novella is much more ambitious and as such both more exciting and more frustrating. It was inspired of Trevor to have as his unreliable narrator a novelist of romantic fiction. Romantic novelists, as we all know, tell lies to their readers. It's how they sell their books. They probably also have to tell lies to themselves in order to justify pedalling their pink plastic fairy stories. Mrs Delahunty, the narrator, was abused as a child by her stepfather - the connection between this experience and her drive to create happy ever after fiction was clever and well done. The problem for me was that Trevor packs too much exotic drama into his narrator's interim life, in particular her experience as a prostitute in a brothel in Africa. The catalyst of the story itself is an extraordinary event - an unmotivated terrorist attack on a train in Italy. That's enough melodrama for a novella. We don't need brothels in Africa. William Trevor is investigating something we all do - fictionalising our lives. To have kept her closer to someone whose experiences we recognise would have been more powerful. In a nutshell, he should have made Mrs Delahunty's life story more ordinary. After all, when we fictionalise ourselves what we do is exoticise the ordinary. Mrs Delahunty on the other hand exoticises the already exotic. I found this aspect of the novella clumsy. That said, I loved the slow incremental unravelling of her secret.
October 20, 2016
Well I've tried and tried and I've found it impossible to write a review on these two novellas. Briefly, two middle-aged women, both aged fifty-six which I found very odd; one novella set in south-east Ireland and the other in Umbria in Italy.
How Trevor has managed to immerse himself under the skins of two women in such a skilful way I find remarkable and in fact baffling. He shows a sensitivity and a style of writing that is quite mesmerising. I still don't know why I love this book so much. In fact I'm just starting his novel "The Silence in the Garden".
In conclusion, there are so many excellent reviews on this book on Goodreads that I thought it best to leave it at that.
How Trevor has managed to immerse himself under the skins of two women in such a skilful way I find remarkable and in fact baffling. He shows a sensitivity and a style of writing that is quite mesmerising. I still don't know why I love this book so much. In fact I'm just starting his novel "The Silence in the Garden".
In conclusion, there are so many excellent reviews on this book on Goodreads that I thought it best to leave it at that.
November 19, 2020
So - after the simple-minded cruelty of the Quarry sisters I don't have the umph to pursue the second story in this book. In the first one, Reading Turgenev there is a description of Robert which my gut feeling tells me is Trevor himself - the bookish, delicate boy who is different from the run-of-the-mill lads found in small-town Ireland. I suspect the origins of the story come from Trevor's own experiences of being bullied and ostracised.
Trevor's second angle on this herd-instinct behaviour, or the pressures for social-conformity is the subtle plot concerning the behaviour of Mary Louise's family. They 'Do Nothing', and these details demonstrate that just as much as the active manipulations of the gossipers, the passive, do-nothing-people are just as much part of this process whereby Mary Louise is punished for behaviour that the rest do not understand.
Even as I write the above paragraph it seems odd to dwell on this theme of social exclusion in what is ostensibly a story of an unsuitable marriage and secret love; and yet I feel that the undercurrent of Reading Turgenev is about this process of a society creating outcasts/misfits. The second half of Mary Louise's story is told 31 years later - in alternative chapters with the Love story and marriage. I couldn't help but think of Sebastian Barry's novel The Secret Scriptures where our female protagonist is incarcerated in a mental institute for more than half her life. Likewise Mary Louise is released years later only because the Home no longer has funds, and all the elderly/"deranged" women must be "returned to the community".
On the positive side, there were moments, when I thought - Yes - that is a particular feeling or thought caught exactly, unfortunately those insights were drowned in the awfulness of the attitudes and platitudes of all the minor characters.
Here is Trevor's description of Robert - the cousin that Mary Louise loves for her whole life.
He took his spectacles off and wiped them on a handkerchief. He was wearing brown corduroy trousers and a tweed jacket, and brown brogue shoes. A watch-chain hung from the buttonhole of his left lapel and disappeared into the pocket beneath it. The family rumour was that this watch had been returned from a soft-hearted pawnbroker when he heard that Robert's father had died without leaving much behind.
Trevor's second angle on this herd-instinct behaviour, or the pressures for social-conformity is the subtle plot concerning the behaviour of Mary Louise's family. They 'Do Nothing', and these details demonstrate that just as much as the active manipulations of the gossipers, the passive, do-nothing-people are just as much part of this process whereby Mary Louise is punished for behaviour that the rest do not understand.
Even as I write the above paragraph it seems odd to dwell on this theme of social exclusion in what is ostensibly a story of an unsuitable marriage and secret love; and yet I feel that the undercurrent of Reading Turgenev is about this process of a society creating outcasts/misfits. The second half of Mary Louise's story is told 31 years later - in alternative chapters with the Love story and marriage. I couldn't help but think of Sebastian Barry's novel The Secret Scriptures where our female protagonist is incarcerated in a mental institute for more than half her life. Likewise Mary Louise is released years later only because the Home no longer has funds, and all the elderly/"deranged" women must be "returned to the community".
On the positive side, there were moments, when I thought - Yes - that is a particular feeling or thought caught exactly, unfortunately those insights were drowned in the awfulness of the attitudes and platitudes of all the minor characters.
Here is Trevor's description of Robert - the cousin that Mary Louise loves for her whole life.
He took his spectacles off and wiped them on a handkerchief. He was wearing brown corduroy trousers and a tweed jacket, and brown brogue shoes. A watch-chain hung from the buttonhole of his left lapel and disappeared into the pocket beneath it. The family rumour was that this watch had been returned from a soft-hearted pawnbroker when he heard that Robert's father had died without leaving much behind.
December 10, 2025
"Sister Hannah's the wise one. A person's life isn't orderly, Sister Hannah maintains; it runs about all over the place, in and out through time. The present's hardly there; the future doesn't exist. Only love matters in the bits and pieces of a person's life."
This book comprises two novellas, published together in 1991. It is the first story, Reading Turgenev, that was shortlisted for the 1991 Booker Prize, so apparently they were judged individually.
Reading Turgenev
4.5★
Sister Hannah, of the quote above, was one of the nurses in the mental facility to which young wife Mary Louise Quarry had been sent by her husband, Elmer. That is where the book opens.
Growing up in the confines of a tiny Irish village, Mary Louise's aspirations were limited to one day working in the local pharmacy, but it was an older man, the owner of the neighbouring drapery, who had been sizing up the local women and thought she might be worth a look.
The courtship begins as a practical matter, a test run, and it's only as they are leaving the cinema one evening that Mary Louise actually makes an impression on him. As he has no car, she meets him at the cinema, riding her bicycle into town from the family farm. When the film is over, she goes to get her bike.
This began so slowly that I began to lose interest, but I wondered about Elmer's rather sudden, late-blooming stirring of lust.
Often now, if a book doesn't hold my attention or pique my curiosity early, I'll move on. But I know this is a favourite of a GR friend (hello Bella/Kiki) and was also shortlisted for the 1991 Booker Prize, so I figured I'd give it a little longer, and I'm glad I did.
I hadn't counted on the spiteful, Cinderella/step-sister natures of Elmer's two sisters. They were not happy with this disturbance to their ordered life. Why should some pretty girl captivate their brother and upset their harmonious household?
To escape, Mary Louise begins riding her bicycle, exploring the countryside. One day, she happens to ride by the property belonging to her mother's estranged sister where her invalid cousin Robert lives. He was a classmate when they began school but became too ill to continue. She remembers she had a crush on him when they were children.
She stops in to say hello, and her aunt is delighted. Robert is still pale and weak, but also talkative and interesting. They begin meeting regularly in a peaceful, overgrown graveyard, where he reads to her, introducing her to Turgenev, history, and tales of the world beyond anything she's ever known existed.
The stories of her youth, her marriage, and her three decades spent in a mental institution are interwoven, and if the government hadn't decided to close these places, she'd be there still. It's hard to believe how long these patriarchal rules have persisted.
I have read a fair bit about the frustrations of those times in Ireland, and I admire the way the author allowed Mary Louise the freedom of imagination, once it was sparked. I haven't read what it was that caught the attention of the Booker judges, so I must now investigate. I liked it.
My House in Umbria
3★
Meet Mrs. Delahunty, who is not a Mrs and has had a number of other names. She presents herself, in the first person, as well-dressed, well-mannered, and reasonably well-to-do. She hides her abusive childhood, her work on the streets, and her time as a madam so well that she's become a snob. She fancies herself an acclaimed author and spouts titles of her romance novels at every opportunity.
While on the train in Italy one day, she observes a few groups of passengers and imagines their relationships. She becomes so absorbed in them that when a bomb goes off, and she wakes up in hospital, it's no wonder she's confused.
Eventually, she brings the walking wounded from the train back to her house in Umbria to recover. It's a kind of guest house, where her friend Quinty acts as the manager. She begins to learn the real stories of the survivors, but embellishes them in her mind with scenes from her romance plots.
For example, Omar is a young German whose new fiancée was killed instantly in the blast. After he has lived with Mrs Delahunty and the others for a while, she asks how he and Madeleine met.
Omar had lost an arm, so Mrs. Delahunty lights his cigarette, casually brushing the back of his hand. He tells her they met in a supermarket, met again at the checkout, and he invited her for coffee across the street.
Otmar's is not the only story – the others belong to a newly-orphaned, almost mute little girl and a bereft elderly English general.
I thought Trevor got inside the narrator's head well as she desperately tried to be the heroine of her own life.
These two novellas are listed separately on Goodreads, but it seems that they are usually published as a pair.
This book comprises two novellas, published together in 1991. It is the first story, Reading Turgenev, that was shortlisted for the 1991 Booker Prize, so apparently they were judged individually.
Reading Turgenev
4.5★
Sister Hannah, of the quote above, was one of the nurses in the mental facility to which young wife Mary Louise Quarry had been sent by her husband, Elmer. That is where the book opens.
Growing up in the confines of a tiny Irish village, Mary Louise's aspirations were limited to one day working in the local pharmacy, but it was an older man, the owner of the neighbouring drapery, who had been sizing up the local women and thought she might be worth a look.
"Elmer Quarry first noticed that Mary Louise Dallon was an agreeable-looking girl in January of the year in question. He was thirty-five then, Mary Louise twenty-one."
The courtship begins as a practical matter, a test run, and it's only as they are leaving the cinema one evening that Mary Louise actually makes an impression on him. As he has no car, she meets him at the cinema, riding her bicycle into town from the family farm. When the film is over, she goes to get her bike.
" 'I'll walk you out a bit towards Culleen,' he said.
'Oh, no need, Mr Quarry. Thanks though.'
In the lane that ran by the side of the Electric there was an ungainly chain and padlock on her bicycle, which she undid and dropped into the basket that was attached to the handlebars. When she leaned down to do this lamplight from the street fell on the back of her legs, and for the first time Elmer experienced physical desire where Mary Louise was concerned. Between the hem of her shabby blue coat and the tops of her boots the silk of her stockings gleamed in a way he found disturbing. Once or twice during the film his attention had been held by Lana Turner's low-cut bodices.
'Give me the bike to wheel,' he urged, ignoring Mary Louise's protest that there was no need to walk through the streets with her."
This began so slowly that I began to lose interest, but I wondered about Elmer's rather sudden, late-blooming stirring of lust.
Often now, if a book doesn't hold my attention or pique my curiosity early, I'll move on. But I know this is a favourite of a GR friend (hello Bella/Kiki) and was also shortlisted for the 1991 Booker Prize, so I figured I'd give it a little longer, and I'm glad I did.
I hadn't counted on the spiteful, Cinderella/step-sister natures of Elmer's two sisters. They were not happy with this disturbance to their ordered life. Why should some pretty girl captivate their brother and upset their harmonious household?
To escape, Mary Louise begins riding her bicycle, exploring the countryside. One day, she happens to ride by the property belonging to her mother's estranged sister where her invalid cousin Robert lives. He was a classmate when they began school but became too ill to continue. She remembers she had a crush on him when they were children.
She stops in to say hello, and her aunt is delighted. Robert is still pale and weak, but also talkative and interesting. They begin meeting regularly in a peaceful, overgrown graveyard, where he reads to her, introducing her to Turgenev, history, and tales of the world beyond anything she's ever known existed.
The stories of her youth, her marriage, and her three decades spent in a mental institution are interwoven, and if the government hadn't decided to close these places, she'd be there still. It's hard to believe how long these patriarchal rules have persisted.
I have read a fair bit about the frustrations of those times in Ireland, and I admire the way the author allowed Mary Louise the freedom of imagination, once it was sparked. I haven't read what it was that caught the attention of the Booker judges, so I must now investigate. I liked it.
My House in Umbria
3★
" 'A timed device,' Quinty said.
'I thought it was lightning.'
'It was a timed device.'
'Where was it, Quinty? Near where I was?'
'It was close all right. The rest of the train was OK.'
'Is that why the police came?'
'That would be it.'
Early on in my hospital sojourn the carabinieri had been clustered round my bed. Their presence had interfered with my dreams and the confusion of my thoughts."
Meet Mrs. Delahunty, who is not a Mrs and has had a number of other names. She presents herself, in the first person, as well-dressed, well-mannered, and reasonably well-to-do. She hides her abusive childhood, her work on the streets, and her time as a madam so well that she's become a snob. She fancies herself an acclaimed author and spouts titles of her romance novels at every opportunity.
While on the train in Italy one day, she observes a few groups of passengers and imagines their relationships. She becomes so absorbed in them that when a bomb goes off, and she wakes up in hospital, it's no wonder she's confused.
Eventually, she brings the walking wounded from the train back to her house in Umbria to recover. It's a kind of guest house, where her friend Quinty acts as the manager. She begins to learn the real stories of the survivors, but embellishes them in her mind with scenes from her romance plots.
For example, Omar is a young German whose new fiancée was killed instantly in the blast. After he has lived with Mrs Delahunty and the others for a while, she asks how he and Madeleine met.
Omar had lost an arm, so Mrs. Delahunty lights his cigarette, casually brushing the back of his hand. He tells her they met in a supermarket, met again at the checkout, and he invited her for coffee across the street.
"I was reminded of the encounter in 'Petals of a Summer', but naturally I kept that to myself.
'These are good cigarettes,' Otmar remarked, rising as he spoke. 'I must walk now,' he said, and left me to my thoughts. [NOTE: Left her to her thoughts, always dangerous.]
Such a romance had never occurred in Madeleine's life before. I imagined her saying that to herself as they strolled together to the café, he politely carrying the plastic bag that contained her supermarket groceries. In the café he confessed he'd seen her on previous occasions, that he had often seen her. He had bided his time, he confessed, and spoke with passion of her pretty features – how they had come into his dreams, how he had wondered about her voice. 'Oh, I'm not pretty in the very least,' she protested, but he took no notice. He said he was in love with her, using the word that had so endlessly been on the lips of the Austrian ivory cutter. 'Liebe,' Otmar repeated as they passed again through the car park. 'Liebe.'
Madeleine could not sleep that night. She tossed and turned until the dawn. If there could be a pretence about her prettiness there could be none about his. He was not handsome, even a little ugly, she considered. Yet none of it mattered. Never before had she experienced such intense protestations, not just of love, but of adoration.
'O Otmar, ich liebe dich,' Madeleine said exactly a month later."
Otmar's is not the only story – the others belong to a newly-orphaned, almost mute little girl and a bereft elderly English general.
I thought Trevor got inside the narrator's head well as she desperately tried to be the heroine of her own life.
These two novellas are listed separately on Goodreads, but it seems that they are usually published as a pair.
December 13, 2012
Two women, both fifty-six (pure coincidence that I’m reading this), who both, for a time at least, live in fantasy worlds, blurring the border between the place they live in their heads and the world outside. One of them saves herself, the other makes herself ridiculous, but helps to rescue people too, offers them a place to heal. William Trevor cannot put a foot wrong. There's not an untidy phrase to be found. Controlled, but not tight.
I re-read Reading Turgenev. The journey is quite a different one when you know where you're going. What's truly impressive: the subtly shifting points of view, and the way that the narrator withholds all comment, judgement, evaluation. William Trevor allows the reader that privilege. But that privilege is impossible to enjoy, as everything seems to float away and shimmer in the air. A mirage? I don't know, nothing can be known for sure, and all of us live inside our own heads, for there is nowhere else to be.
I re-read Reading Turgenev. The journey is quite a different one when you know where you're going. What's truly impressive: the subtly shifting points of view, and the way that the narrator withholds all comment, judgement, evaluation. William Trevor allows the reader that privilege. But that privilege is impossible to enjoy, as everything seems to float away and shimmer in the air. A mirage? I don't know, nothing can be known for sure, and all of us live inside our own heads, for there is nowhere else to be.
April 20, 2012
I don’t think I want to meet William Trevor. Which might seem odd because he is one of my favorite authors and the picture of him at the back of every one of his books reveals the face of a kindly, intelligent, slightly amused, older gentleman. Ah, but don’t let the crinkly eyes and the tweed hat fool you. I feel fairly certain that with the briefest of handshakes he would make note of the too-soft hands. The merest chat, and he would have the manic cadence of speech and that annoying impediment down pat. He would imagine, exactly, every loss. He would assume, correctly, each transgression. And all that before he started making stuff up.
In Two Lives, Trevor displays once again this ability to get at the core of people. The book is two novels, each one bearing a female protagonist who is going slightly mad.
Reading Turgenev
I need to do a bit of plot here: Mary Louise Dallon marries one Elmer Quarry, for convenience, as they say. Elmer is older, a draper by profession. He lives with his two spinster sisters. Starting from the wedding night, this marriage will not be consummated and Elmer turns rather spectacularly to drink. Mary Louise turns to nostalgic whimsy. She visits her invalid cousin Robert. There are shy protestations of remembered love. The title? Well, Robert reads to her from Turgenev’s novels.
Trevor draws these characters with predictable subtle perfection. There is much to like here. Perhaps, though, I read Turgenev too long ago. The quoted passages failed to provoke an Ah-Ha! moment.
Still, I loved the dialogue, the characters. You would often be wearing a smile, reading this.
My House in Umbria
Emily Delahunty – or pick one of several assumed names – owns that house in Italy, and often takes in visitors when the hotels fill. But one day on a train, there is an ‘outrage’ – a bomb which injures and kills. Emily’s wounds will heal, enough to be hidden by make-up, just as her wounds from long ago will be masked by grappa and her own romance novels. There are other ‘survivors’, each with wounds from the bomb and from long ago. An old general lives, but his daughter and son-in-law are killed. A young German loses an arm and his fiancée. Amelie, a little girl, loses the rest of her family.
Emily herds them into that house in Umbria. The survivors heal together, ‘a skin’ forming over them.
But as they do, Trevor reveals each one. And we watch Emily fracture, slowly, with each grappa, each memory, each dream.
…………………………….
Other reviewers seem unanimous in preferring Reading Turgenev to My House in Umbria. It was the reverse for me. But the question is begged: why have the two novels been joined in one book? I think it has to do with that ‘skin’ that Trevor talked about. Trauma, injury, takes many forms, from assault to indifference. Wounds are inflicted in a brothel, in a train, in a drapery shop. And scabs, if not quite healing, can be found in a bottle, a Russian or romance novel, or retreat to an attic, surrounded by the curios of an imagined love.
In Two Lives, Trevor displays once again this ability to get at the core of people. The book is two novels, each one bearing a female protagonist who is going slightly mad.
Reading Turgenev
I need to do a bit of plot here: Mary Louise Dallon marries one Elmer Quarry, for convenience, as they say. Elmer is older, a draper by profession. He lives with his two spinster sisters. Starting from the wedding night, this marriage will not be consummated and Elmer turns rather spectacularly to drink. Mary Louise turns to nostalgic whimsy. She visits her invalid cousin Robert. There are shy protestations of remembered love. The title? Well, Robert reads to her from Turgenev’s novels.
Trevor draws these characters with predictable subtle perfection. There is much to like here. Perhaps, though, I read Turgenev too long ago. The quoted passages failed to provoke an Ah-Ha! moment.
Still, I loved the dialogue, the characters. You would often be wearing a smile, reading this.
My House in Umbria
Emily Delahunty – or pick one of several assumed names – owns that house in Italy, and often takes in visitors when the hotels fill. But one day on a train, there is an ‘outrage’ – a bomb which injures and kills. Emily’s wounds will heal, enough to be hidden by make-up, just as her wounds from long ago will be masked by grappa and her own romance novels. There are other ‘survivors’, each with wounds from the bomb and from long ago. An old general lives, but his daughter and son-in-law are killed. A young German loses an arm and his fiancée. Amelie, a little girl, loses the rest of her family.
Emily herds them into that house in Umbria. The survivors heal together, ‘a skin’ forming over them.
But as they do, Trevor reveals each one. And we watch Emily fracture, slowly, with each grappa, each memory, each dream.
…………………………….
Other reviewers seem unanimous in preferring Reading Turgenev to My House in Umbria. It was the reverse for me. But the question is begged: why have the two novels been joined in one book? I think it has to do with that ‘skin’ that Trevor talked about. Trauma, injury, takes many forms, from assault to indifference. Wounds are inflicted in a brothel, in a train, in a drapery shop. And scabs, if not quite healing, can be found in a bottle, a Russian or romance novel, or retreat to an attic, surrounded by the curios of an imagined love.
October 20, 2020
3.5 stars
There is something to be said about the way we as a culture look at 'mad' women—the way we see women, and madness as their second nature; something that wouldn’t be there if it hasn’t always been; something to be anticipated, only a matter of time. It is always so that madness becomes the woman—seldom do we see her beyond the isolation of that opaque, unforgiving veil.
The stories that William Trevor traces in Reading Turgenev and My House in Umbria follow the lives of two very different women into a realm where the lines between memory, imagination, and reality are blurred; their inner worlds colliding with the outer through defining moments of rupture. It is easy to see why these two novels belong together, for the two lives they speak of seem to unfold in ways that assume a significance greater than just their individual stories.
What explains Trevor writing of these women who, both aged fifty-six and unbeknownst to each other, share an attachment to fictional worlds and memorial gardens due to momentous changes having shaken their separate worlds thirty years prior, in 1957? Happenstance, perhaps. Just life, maybe. What it makes for, in the end, is stirring literature.
Reading Turgenev
This turned out to be my favourite amongst the two, featuring a loveless marriage, secret grief, and—of course—Russian novels.
The sparse prose took a while for me to get into, but to brilliant effect—this is a story I would recommend strongly, in a solid four star kind of way, in a way that keeps you feeling something indefinable but persistent.
My House in Umbria
Here, Trevor explores the depths of defamiliarisation, so that reality and imagination become threateningly fused. As the story progresses, one begins to realise that Emily is prone to embellishing her own life's stories, while she becomes increasingly more divorced from reality. What is true, and what is trauma? This is an incredibly layered, nuanced story that would benefit from multiple readings, and definitely warrants being read at least once.
There is something to be said about the way we as a culture look at 'mad' women—the way we see women, and madness as their second nature; something that wouldn’t be there if it hasn’t always been; something to be anticipated, only a matter of time. It is always so that madness becomes the woman—seldom do we see her beyond the isolation of that opaque, unforgiving veil.
The stories that William Trevor traces in Reading Turgenev and My House in Umbria follow the lives of two very different women into a realm where the lines between memory, imagination, and reality are blurred; their inner worlds colliding with the outer through defining moments of rupture. It is easy to see why these two novels belong together, for the two lives they speak of seem to unfold in ways that assume a significance greater than just their individual stories.
What explains Trevor writing of these women who, both aged fifty-six and unbeknownst to each other, share an attachment to fictional worlds and memorial gardens due to momentous changes having shaken their separate worlds thirty years prior, in 1957? Happenstance, perhaps. Just life, maybe. What it makes for, in the end, is stirring literature.
Reading Turgenev
This turned out to be my favourite amongst the two, featuring a loveless marriage, secret grief, and—of course—Russian novels.
"A person's life isn't orderly...it runs about all over the place, in and out through time. The present's hardly there; the future doesn't exist. Only love matters in the bits and pieces of a person's life."Set in the Irish countryside, Reading Turgenev is a dismal, heartbreaking story tracing a woman's descent into grief and psychosis, who amidst the bleakness of reality tries to retain and recreate joy from a lost time. Trevor's usage of shifting perspectives gives dimension to the narrative, and allows him to subtly weave in observations and explorations to issues such as changing socio-religious dynamics in Ireland, marriages of convenience, grief and misgivings, alcoholism, the state of mental asylums, the possessiveness of families, and the nature of loneliness, amongst many others.
The sparse prose took a while for me to get into, but to brilliant effect—this is a story I would recommend strongly, in a solid four star kind of way, in a way that keeps you feeling something indefinable but persistent.
My House in Umbria
"We were in a nowhere land in my house: there was a sense of waiting without knowing in the least what we were waiting for. Grief, pain, distress, long silences, the still shadows of death, our private nightmares: all that was what we shared without words, without sharing's consolation. Ghosts you might have called us had you visited my house in Umbria that summer."I found this book somewhat tedious in parts, but in the end it, too, broke my heart. And there is reason for the tedium: My House in Umbria takes us into the mind of Emily Delahunty, a writer of romance novels who invites three fellow survivors from a train bombing to convalesce with her in her house in Italy. As they all navigate their traumatic losses and wait for their wounds to heal, Emily takes to drink and 'writing' stories about her fellow survivors in order to make sense of the world fragmenting around her.
Here, Trevor explores the depths of defamiliarisation, so that reality and imagination become threateningly fused. As the story progresses, one begins to realise that Emily is prone to embellishing her own life's stories, while she becomes increasingly more divorced from reality. What is true, and what is trauma? This is an incredibly layered, nuanced story that would benefit from multiple readings, and definitely warrants being read at least once.
June 25, 2023
Two Lives contains two novellas by William Trevor. I have elected to review and rate them separately.
Reading Turgenev here
My House in Umbria here
One of the threads that binds them together is the influence of reading/writing in a life; another is how people deal with adversity or tragedy. I found both to be excellent reads.
Reading Turgenev here
My House in Umbria here
One of the threads that binds them together is the influence of reading/writing in a life; another is how people deal with adversity or tragedy. I found both to be excellent reads.
July 5, 2011
Two short novels here. I read Reading Turgenev some years ago and liked it a lot.
Just finished My House in Umbria. There are inordinately beautiful discursive passages in the early going. Our narrator, Mrs Delahunty, English by birth and owner of said house, is on painkillers in the hospital after a traumatic event. She simultaneously recollects her abusive childhood, her years as owner of the Rose Café, a period of cohabitation with the disappointing Mr Chubbs, her rise to fame as an author of romance novels, and the dreaded event itself. The stream of consciousness technique here is masterful. We find ourselves as readers rapidly warming to the painfully frank Mrs D. by way of this admirably compressed kalidescope of recollections. After being discharged from the hospital, Mrs D returns to her house which serves as a hotel with three of the other survivors, and here the stunning Italian countryside begins to appear in the prose. Dr Innocenti, the hospital shrink, agrees that such an interlude might be conducive to healing. Mrs D is a kind, childless woman who wants to help others; though the motivation of her partner, Quinty, is solely financial. In addition to Mrs D the survivors are an elderly English general, a young man from Germany by the name of Otmar, and an eight year old girl, Aimée. In time the girl becomes of interest to the other survivors and no little source of joy as she slowly pulls out of a scarily prolonged period of silence and begins to enliven the house. Mrs D says it best: "Perhaps for the General Aimée became a daughter with whom he might begin again. Perhaps for Otmar she was the girl who had died on the train. I do not know; I never asked them. But for my own part I can claim without reservation that I became as devoted to the child that time as any mother could be." Of all the survivors only Aimée is underage; she lost her parents during the recent event, and must in time go to live with a guardian of her own family. After some weeks her uncle, a Mr Riversmith, calls from the US inquiring about the girl's well-being. What follows is fascinating. For, slowly, Trevor transforms Mrs D from someone we've come to consider reliable into a person seriously traumatized by her experience, a person delving ever deeper into self-preserving fictions as a means of staying sane. The impending departure of the girl from the house is at the heart of it. Riversmith is a handsome academic cipher, a biologist specializing in the bark ant. It seems that Mrs D, popular with men all her life, wants Riversmith to succumb to her charms; but those days are sadly over. Deeply moving. Highly recommended. By the way, the book was made into a film starring Maggie Smith in 2003. Though enjoyable it lacks the resonance of the novel for the simple reason that much of Mrs D's backstory has been cut.
Just finished My House in Umbria. There are inordinately beautiful discursive passages in the early going. Our narrator, Mrs Delahunty, English by birth and owner of said house, is on painkillers in the hospital after a traumatic event. She simultaneously recollects her abusive childhood, her years as owner of the Rose Café, a period of cohabitation with the disappointing Mr Chubbs, her rise to fame as an author of romance novels, and the dreaded event itself. The stream of consciousness technique here is masterful. We find ourselves as readers rapidly warming to the painfully frank Mrs D. by way of this admirably compressed kalidescope of recollections. After being discharged from the hospital, Mrs D returns to her house which serves as a hotel with three of the other survivors, and here the stunning Italian countryside begins to appear in the prose. Dr Innocenti, the hospital shrink, agrees that such an interlude might be conducive to healing. Mrs D is a kind, childless woman who wants to help others; though the motivation of her partner, Quinty, is solely financial. In addition to Mrs D the survivors are an elderly English general, a young man from Germany by the name of Otmar, and an eight year old girl, Aimée. In time the girl becomes of interest to the other survivors and no little source of joy as she slowly pulls out of a scarily prolonged period of silence and begins to enliven the house. Mrs D says it best: "Perhaps for the General Aimée became a daughter with whom he might begin again. Perhaps for Otmar she was the girl who had died on the train. I do not know; I never asked them. But for my own part I can claim without reservation that I became as devoted to the child that time as any mother could be." Of all the survivors only Aimée is underage; she lost her parents during the recent event, and must in time go to live with a guardian of her own family. After some weeks her uncle, a Mr Riversmith, calls from the US inquiring about the girl's well-being. What follows is fascinating. For, slowly, Trevor transforms Mrs D from someone we've come to consider reliable into a person seriously traumatized by her experience, a person delving ever deeper into self-preserving fictions as a means of staying sane. The impending departure of the girl from the house is at the heart of it. Riversmith is a handsome academic cipher, a biologist specializing in the bark ant. It seems that Mrs D, popular with men all her life, wants Riversmith to succumb to her charms; but those days are sadly over. Deeply moving. Highly recommended. By the way, the book was made into a film starring Maggie Smith in 2003. Though enjoyable it lacks the resonance of the novel for the simple reason that much of Mrs D's backstory has been cut.
April 20, 2020
Two novellas in one volume.
Reading Turgenev I'd give 4 stars to: In a small town in Ireland in the 1950s Mary Louise marries a much older man, and moves into his house above his drapers shop where his two sisters also live. She becomes desperately unhappy with her choice and realises she's in love with someone else. Interspersed with these chapters we meet Mary Louise being released back into the community - back to her husband's house in fact - after spending thirty years in a mental institution. There are moments of utter heartbreak, but I wasn't always too sure about the structure - did it give too much away?
My House in Umbria: 5 stars. From the first person view point of an unreliable narrator - Emily Delahunty relates the story of one summer when she was running a kind of hotel in Umbria, but instead of ordinary guests arriving, the place is inhabited by the survivors (including her) of a bomb blast on a train they were travelling on. Emily is such an odd and wonderful character as she slowly becomes reliant on dreams and imaginings.
Reading Turgenev I'd give 4 stars to: In a small town in Ireland in the 1950s Mary Louise marries a much older man, and moves into his house above his drapers shop where his two sisters also live. She becomes desperately unhappy with her choice and realises she's in love with someone else. Interspersed with these chapters we meet Mary Louise being released back into the community - back to her husband's house in fact - after spending thirty years in a mental institution. There are moments of utter heartbreak, but I wasn't always too sure about the structure - did it give too much away?
My House in Umbria: 5 stars. From the first person view point of an unreliable narrator - Emily Delahunty relates the story of one summer when she was running a kind of hotel in Umbria, but instead of ordinary guests arriving, the place is inhabited by the survivors (including her) of a bomb blast on a train they were travelling on. Emily is such an odd and wonderful character as she slowly becomes reliant on dreams and imaginings.
June 6, 2014
------------------------------------------------
This is arguably a single superbly written novel. But it is composed of two different novellas that William Trevor wrote at different times and later chose to combine. His talents as a writer are displayed here at their finest. Today I am feeling that after thirty years of reading his works, this is his best.
But as a reader (and human being) who learned to love the characters deeply, I found that this book can be very hard to take in emotionally. True to his pattern, William Trevor writes of significant struggles that are both contemporary and timeless. And his characters live through agonies that they sometimes grow through---and sometimes do not. Their own strengths and weaknesses are tested by the capricious storms of life that are not always within those characters powers to control. And that can be agonizing, as we all know.
This book tells two very different stories about two very different but parallel women. Two different geographies, two different dispositions, two different life stories are told. But there are a good number of shared elements--from a literary point of view. The two women are almost the exact same age at the exact same time--and completely unknown to one another. Their significant life events also occur (I think I remember) at almost the exact same times.
Elements of the two stories can be said to be opposites; but other elements can be said to be identical. Sifting through those elements is why I have decided to re-read this book. But I will not do that immediately.
I need to recover first.
This is arguably a single superbly written novel. But it is composed of two different novellas that William Trevor wrote at different times and later chose to combine. His talents as a writer are displayed here at their finest. Today I am feeling that after thirty years of reading his works, this is his best.
But as a reader (and human being) who learned to love the characters deeply, I found that this book can be very hard to take in emotionally. True to his pattern, William Trevor writes of significant struggles that are both contemporary and timeless. And his characters live through agonies that they sometimes grow through---and sometimes do not. Their own strengths and weaknesses are tested by the capricious storms of life that are not always within those characters powers to control. And that can be agonizing, as we all know.
This book tells two very different stories about two very different but parallel women. Two different geographies, two different dispositions, two different life stories are told. But there are a good number of shared elements--from a literary point of view. The two women are almost the exact same age at the exact same time--and completely unknown to one another. Their significant life events also occur (I think I remember) at almost the exact same times.
Elements of the two stories can be said to be opposites; but other elements can be said to be identical. Sifting through those elements is why I have decided to re-read this book. But I will not do that immediately.
I need to recover first.
November 2, 2020
Two very good novellas. See Violet wells's review to learn more.
did-not-finish
September 26, 2019Loved the first novella, Reading Turgenev, in a five-star way. The second one, My House In Umbria, relied on defamiliarization to such an excessive degree that it read like a fever dream, and I couldn’t be bothered to try and sort it out and quite simply loathed it. Abandoned the second novella about a third of the way in.
October 14, 2024
One of the very few works by William Trevor I didn’t like - and I have read both novellas through 3 times.
I’m still not entirely sure why this should be. The sentences click, each tale is lifelike, the characters are rounded. Perhaps it’s Trevor’s habit of framing much of the story in reported speech rather than direct dialogue that saps some of the normal vitality.
I kept wondering how much better each novella might have worked as a short story - Trevor’s best format - which would also have allowed him to quit while he was still ahead. The first tale ('Reading Turgenev'), in fact, reads like an expansion of the better short story 'Teresa's Wedding.’
I’m still not entirely sure why this should be. The sentences click, each tale is lifelike, the characters are rounded. Perhaps it’s Trevor’s habit of framing much of the story in reported speech rather than direct dialogue that saps some of the normal vitality.
I kept wondering how much better each novella might have worked as a short story - Trevor’s best format - which would also have allowed him to quit while he was still ahead. The first tale ('Reading Turgenev'), in fact, reads like an expansion of the better short story 'Teresa's Wedding.’
July 12, 2021
How can our imagination transform human life, to what extent can we fictionalise our lives? Trevor deals with these questions in the two novellas in ‘Two lives’. The first one (about a woman caught in an unhappy marriage) is excellent, the second (about surviving after a terrorist attack on a train) rather mediocre. Trevors writing cannot be surpassed, it’s immaculate as ever.
November 2, 2009
"Two Lives" is actually two novellas in one book. Both are narrated by a 56 year old woman and both take place in 1987. "Reading Turgenev" is the better of the two but both are superb.
"Reading Turgenev" is the story of a young woman growing up in rural Ireland in the early 1950's. Mary Louise is one of three children living on a family farm located on the outskirts of a small Irish country village. Being Protestant in a Catholic town isolates her even further, requiring that she attend a special school taught by a smart but cynical teacher. There are very few students, but one of them includes Robert, her first cousin, a sickly but artistically inclined young man. Mary Louise's childhood is joylous. Her parents show no affection toward their children, there is no play, little laughter. There are cows to be milked and work to be done. Despite dreaming of a better life working in a small store in the village, Mary Louise has no skills. Emotionally stifled she cannot advocate for herself. She is passive, a victim of circumstance. Powerless. Eventually she is courted by an equally repressed and noncommunicative older man who is a draper, having inherited the family fabric business. Living with his two nasty, single sisters he decides he should marry to carry on the family name. Sadly he has sexual issues he has never addressed and his marriage to Mary Louise is never physically consummated. None of this is ever discussed. He begins to drink.....very Irish.
Painful, lonely years pass and Mary Louise reconnects to her cousin Robert, now a frail eccentric young man living alone with his widowed mother some miles away. He collects toy soldiers and loves to read. They spend innocent hours together and his friendship and warmth thaw Mary Louise's frozen soul until tragically he dies suddenly, his death for her being an unbearable loss. She never recovers. She begins living in an internal world and it is the depiction of that world that distinguishes this work. Trevor nails the world of those mentally ill. What is real, what isn't? If the real world is void of joy, who could be blamed for reinventing a parallel existence within the safe confines of one's mind.
The second novella "My House in Umbria" continues that theme. Mrs. Delahunty, the main character has become a romance novelist after a storied past. She has bought a home in Umbria that she sometimes rents out to guests. Mrs. Delahunty is not her real name. Her story is equally tragic but is it true? One cannot tell. She maintains that her "Carnival" parents "sold" her to an adoptive family. "Her "father" begins sexually abusing her and finally as a teenager she runs away with a man promising to show her the Wild West. Years of prostitution on multiple continents lead her to Italy where she begins to write pulpy romance novels. They all have happy endings. Traveling by train alone, Mrs. Delahunty often imagines the lives of her fellow travelers. She observes their interactions and fabricates possible stories...on one such trip there is an explosion from a terrorist bomb causing her injuries and killing many fellow travelers. Three survivors move into her home as they begin their recovery. One is a young female child who has lost both of her parents. Reality and imagination blur here. The treating physician's name is Dr. Innocentia, the young girls's American uncle is from Virginsville, Pennsylvania. Mrs. Delahunty drinks and imagines more stories and believes her imagined version of their lives versus the truth. Does she believe returning little Aimee to her uncle will result in her sexual abuse? Who is Aimee? Who is Mrs. Delahunty? What did happen to her? Where is the truth? She embellishes and exaggerates her own life's experiences internally creating her own story, fictional but one with the happy ending she dreams of. This is a layered story worth more than one reading in order to grasp its nuances. Trevor is a master storyteller.
"Reading Turgenev" is the story of a young woman growing up in rural Ireland in the early 1950's. Mary Louise is one of three children living on a family farm located on the outskirts of a small Irish country village. Being Protestant in a Catholic town isolates her even further, requiring that she attend a special school taught by a smart but cynical teacher. There are very few students, but one of them includes Robert, her first cousin, a sickly but artistically inclined young man. Mary Louise's childhood is joylous. Her parents show no affection toward their children, there is no play, little laughter. There are cows to be milked and work to be done. Despite dreaming of a better life working in a small store in the village, Mary Louise has no skills. Emotionally stifled she cannot advocate for herself. She is passive, a victim of circumstance. Powerless. Eventually she is courted by an equally repressed and noncommunicative older man who is a draper, having inherited the family fabric business. Living with his two nasty, single sisters he decides he should marry to carry on the family name. Sadly he has sexual issues he has never addressed and his marriage to Mary Louise is never physically consummated. None of this is ever discussed. He begins to drink.....very Irish.
Painful, lonely years pass and Mary Louise reconnects to her cousin Robert, now a frail eccentric young man living alone with his widowed mother some miles away. He collects toy soldiers and loves to read. They spend innocent hours together and his friendship and warmth thaw Mary Louise's frozen soul until tragically he dies suddenly, his death for her being an unbearable loss. She never recovers. She begins living in an internal world and it is the depiction of that world that distinguishes this work. Trevor nails the world of those mentally ill. What is real, what isn't? If the real world is void of joy, who could be blamed for reinventing a parallel existence within the safe confines of one's mind.
The second novella "My House in Umbria" continues that theme. Mrs. Delahunty, the main character has become a romance novelist after a storied past. She has bought a home in Umbria that she sometimes rents out to guests. Mrs. Delahunty is not her real name. Her story is equally tragic but is it true? One cannot tell. She maintains that her "Carnival" parents "sold" her to an adoptive family. "Her "father" begins sexually abusing her and finally as a teenager she runs away with a man promising to show her the Wild West. Years of prostitution on multiple continents lead her to Italy where she begins to write pulpy romance novels. They all have happy endings. Traveling by train alone, Mrs. Delahunty often imagines the lives of her fellow travelers. She observes their interactions and fabricates possible stories...on one such trip there is an explosion from a terrorist bomb causing her injuries and killing many fellow travelers. Three survivors move into her home as they begin their recovery. One is a young female child who has lost both of her parents. Reality and imagination blur here. The treating physician's name is Dr. Innocentia, the young girls's American uncle is from Virginsville, Pennsylvania. Mrs. Delahunty drinks and imagines more stories and believes her imagined version of their lives versus the truth. Does she believe returning little Aimee to her uncle will result in her sexual abuse? Who is Aimee? Who is Mrs. Delahunty? What did happen to her? Where is the truth? She embellishes and exaggerates her own life's experiences internally creating her own story, fictional but one with the happy ending she dreams of. This is a layered story worth more than one reading in order to grasp its nuances. Trevor is a master storyteller.
September 29, 2009
Every time the great Irish writer, William Trevor publishes something new, critics everywhere say it's the greatest thing he's ever written. And it is. Until he writes something else, that is.
Two Lives, however, has won a special place in my heart, and while I love everything Trevor writes, I doubt that anything will ever top Two Lives for me.
Two Lives is composed of two elegant and elegiac novels, each centering on a fiftysomething woman and each taking place during the summer of 1987.
At first glance, the lives of Mary Louise Quarry and Emily Delahunty couldn't seem more different. Mary Louise, an Irish farm girl and the heroine of "Reading Turgenev" has lived in a home for the mentally and emotionally disturbed and impaired for the past thirty-one years. Repressed and emotionally fragile, the only experience Mary Louise has ever had of love, despite an early and ongoing marriage, revolves around her dying cousin, Robert, who lived with his mother in a crumbling Irish country house and who shares his love of Turgenev with Mary Louise.
While Mary Louise's life constantly turns inward, Emily Delahunty, the outgoing romance novelist who takes center stage in "My House in Umbria," looks to others for emotional sustenance. The abandoned daughter of carnival performers, Emily's always made her own way in the world, and unlike Mary Louise, she's had a great deal more experience of love than most. At least the "business" side of love, and it's this business side that's paid for her charming villa in the Umbrian countryside not far from Siena.
When we first met both Mary Louise and Emily, each woman is dealing with a traumatic event that has, at least temporarily, turned her world upside down. Trevor tells us each woman's story as he moves from the present to the past and back to the present once again. Little by little, we learn how these two women, who've lived such extraordinarily different lives on the outside are, at their core, so very, very similar. Each woman constructs her life around fantasy, and though Emily Delahunty may, at first, seem the stronger of the two, as we read on, we learn this isn't necessarily true. Mary Louise's inner resources might not be so much in evidence, but there's no doubt they run deep. In the end, a perceptive reader can reach no easy conclusions about either woman or the people with whom she shares her life and interacts. The line between reality and fantasy is deliberately blurred. But that's William Trevor. In the master writer's hands, nothing is clear-cut, nothing is easy, and nothing is quite as it seems.
Although there are mirrors and echoes of each novella in the other, Trevor has said he didn't set out for this to be so. He didn't plan a book containing two novellas, each revolving around a woman who needs to construct a fantasy life in order to survive. Instead, Trevor tells us "one tends to write out of an obsession and the obsession didn't end when I finished the first one."
The "first one" was "My House in Umbria," the story of Emily Delahunty, though most readers consider "Reading Turgenev" the superior novella. Certainly the Booker committee did when they shortlisted it for the prize in 1991.
Both "Reading Turgenev" and "My House in Umbria" are gorgeously wrought novels. Each is infused with Trevor's trademark melancholy, bleakness, insight, subtle wit, and above all, his tremendous compassion for the entire human race.
Once again, William Trevor has shown us there's no finer author writing in the English language today.
Two Lives, however, has won a special place in my heart, and while I love everything Trevor writes, I doubt that anything will ever top Two Lives for me.
Two Lives is composed of two elegant and elegiac novels, each centering on a fiftysomething woman and each taking place during the summer of 1987.
At first glance, the lives of Mary Louise Quarry and Emily Delahunty couldn't seem more different. Mary Louise, an Irish farm girl and the heroine of "Reading Turgenev" has lived in a home for the mentally and emotionally disturbed and impaired for the past thirty-one years. Repressed and emotionally fragile, the only experience Mary Louise has ever had of love, despite an early and ongoing marriage, revolves around her dying cousin, Robert, who lived with his mother in a crumbling Irish country house and who shares his love of Turgenev with Mary Louise.
While Mary Louise's life constantly turns inward, Emily Delahunty, the outgoing romance novelist who takes center stage in "My House in Umbria," looks to others for emotional sustenance. The abandoned daughter of carnival performers, Emily's always made her own way in the world, and unlike Mary Louise, she's had a great deal more experience of love than most. At least the "business" side of love, and it's this business side that's paid for her charming villa in the Umbrian countryside not far from Siena.
When we first met both Mary Louise and Emily, each woman is dealing with a traumatic event that has, at least temporarily, turned her world upside down. Trevor tells us each woman's story as he moves from the present to the past and back to the present once again. Little by little, we learn how these two women, who've lived such extraordinarily different lives on the outside are, at their core, so very, very similar. Each woman constructs her life around fantasy, and though Emily Delahunty may, at first, seem the stronger of the two, as we read on, we learn this isn't necessarily true. Mary Louise's inner resources might not be so much in evidence, but there's no doubt they run deep. In the end, a perceptive reader can reach no easy conclusions about either woman or the people with whom she shares her life and interacts. The line between reality and fantasy is deliberately blurred. But that's William Trevor. In the master writer's hands, nothing is clear-cut, nothing is easy, and nothing is quite as it seems.
Although there are mirrors and echoes of each novella in the other, Trevor has said he didn't set out for this to be so. He didn't plan a book containing two novellas, each revolving around a woman who needs to construct a fantasy life in order to survive. Instead, Trevor tells us "one tends to write out of an obsession and the obsession didn't end when I finished the first one."
The "first one" was "My House in Umbria," the story of Emily Delahunty, though most readers consider "Reading Turgenev" the superior novella. Certainly the Booker committee did when they shortlisted it for the prize in 1991.
Both "Reading Turgenev" and "My House in Umbria" are gorgeously wrought novels. Each is infused with Trevor's trademark melancholy, bleakness, insight, subtle wit, and above all, his tremendous compassion for the entire human race.
Once again, William Trevor has shown us there's no finer author writing in the English language today.
December 23, 2021
I discovered William Trevor through his short stories a couple of years ago, and am now working my way through his novels. His writing is so subtle and understated, and yet he manages to capture the fragility, the vulnerability and the randomality of the human experience.
Each and every one of his novels that I have read is outstanding, and these two novels are no exception. Reading Turgeneyev, one of the novels in this book, breaks your heart in its slow burn story of the life of one woman whose seeming fragility is in fact a focused and determined force. So far, this is my favorite of his novels.
Each and every one of his novels that I have read is outstanding, and these two novels are no exception. Reading Turgeneyev, one of the novels in this book, breaks your heart in its slow burn story of the life of one woman whose seeming fragility is in fact a focused and determined force. So far, this is my favorite of his novels.
November 16, 2019
I started to read William Trevor’s books in the late 1990s and consider him as one of my favorite authors. His fiction and short stories are equally good. I joined GoodReads about 2 months ago and wanted to start to build up my library/books read here, since I do enjoy reading.
My 3 star rating was discrepant from the individual book ratings since Two lives is a 2-in-1 work of fiction. For Reading Turgenev I gave it 5 starts, and for My House in Umbria, 3 stars (a C+).
My 3 star rating was discrepant from the individual book ratings since Two lives is a 2-in-1 work of fiction. For Reading Turgenev I gave it 5 starts, and for My House in Umbria, 3 stars (a C+).
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January 14, 2018بعد از سفر فلیشیا کتاب دومی بود که از ترور میخوندم، و چیزی که توی هردو کتاب اذیتم میکرد بی احساسی و کمرنگی شخصیت ها بود. احتی در پرهیایو ترین صحنه هاشون هم هیچ حسی بهم منتقل نمیشد. چه لحظه ی توصیف قتل ها توی فلیشیا و چه توی صحنه ی زار زار گریستن برای عشق کودکی توی دنیای تورگنیف
July 25, 2025
This book consists of two character based novellas, ‘Reading Turgenev’ and ‘My House in Umbria. ‘Reading Turgenev’ is about Mary Louise Dallon, a woman who is trapped in a loveless marriage to Elmer, a man much older than her. The story is set in Ireland in the 1950s. Mary finds comfort in Turgenev’s stories. With time she becomes delusional living a solitary life with a husband she doesn’t communicate with. She has no children, being quiet and introverted. She lives in her husband’s house with his two sisters, Rose and Matilda. Rose and Matilda treat her with distain, regarding her as useless. Mary Louise longs to escape the family she has married into. Elmer, previously a teetotaller, starts drinking alcohol during their honeymoon, and continues drinking secretly upon returning to their home. Mary Louise begins cycling out to visit her poor aunt and her invalid cousin, Robert, with whom she has been in love with since she was a young girl.
In ‘My House in Umbria’, Miss Emily Delahunty, a romantic novelist, childless, who owns a villa in Italy in the 1980s, takes into her home survivors of a train bombing, including a young girl named Aimee. Miss Emily Delahunty is friendly and jovial and delights in the company of her new family. Aimee is now an orphan and has retreated into silence. The weeks pass gently, then everything is disturbed when Aimee’s uncle, Thomas Riversmith, arrives to take his niece back home to the USA.
An interesting, engaging book.
‘Reading Turgenev’ was shortlisted for the 1991 Booker Prize.
In ‘My House in Umbria’, Miss Emily Delahunty, a romantic novelist, childless, who owns a villa in Italy in the 1980s, takes into her home survivors of a train bombing, including a young girl named Aimee. Miss Emily Delahunty is friendly and jovial and delights in the company of her new family. Aimee is now an orphan and has retreated into silence. The weeks pass gently, then everything is disturbed when Aimee’s uncle, Thomas Riversmith, arrives to take his niece back home to the USA.
An interesting, engaging book.
‘Reading Turgenev’ was shortlisted for the 1991 Booker Prize.
on-hold
July 20, 2020First story: Reading Turgenev (60%)
Rating: 3.5/5
Review: My first short from this renowned Irish author was a bit of a mixed bag. While I enjoyed reading about the Irish countryside and its capricious townsfolk, I could not condone a lot of actions carried out by some of the key characters in the name of "plot-device". I felt like Mary Louise, the lead, lacked agency, rather, she wasn't given any to begin with, and that may be more reflective of my pragmatic thinking + feeling unreceptive to the peculiarities of the era (ideologies that seem blasphemous now but not uncommon) rather than her traits.
And now for the good parts (that have convinced me to return to this author): The evocative writing, the manner in which some of the characters were written, the Irish setting, passages from the Russian author Turgenev's works (whom also I plan to read in future), and the overall feel of the novel (which made me feel sympathy, adoration, exasperation, and fulfillment all the same), which seemed quite endearing after all.
Rating: 3.5/5
Review: My first short from this renowned Irish author was a bit of a mixed bag. While I enjoyed reading about the Irish countryside and its capricious townsfolk, I could not condone a lot of actions carried out by some of the key characters in the name of "plot-device". I felt like Mary Louise, the lead, lacked agency, rather, she wasn't given any to begin with, and that may be more reflective of my pragmatic thinking + feeling unreceptive to the peculiarities of the era (ideologies that seem blasphemous now but not uncommon) rather than her traits.
And now for the good parts (that have convinced me to return to this author): The evocative writing, the manner in which some of the characters were written, the Irish setting, passages from the Russian author Turgenev's works (whom also I plan to read in future), and the overall feel of the novel (which made me feel sympathy, adoration, exasperation, and fulfillment all the same), which seemed quite endearing after all.
June 24, 2017
I found both stories difficult to get into at the beginning, but again with both once I had gotten into them I found them to be very beautiful. If sadness can be beautiful that is, as they were both tragically sad. Not in a way that they had me crying but in a way that I just felt so very very sorry for the main characters in them. Both stories that remind you of life's greatness when you do live it the way that you want to live it. It made me very grateful of being in a wonderful relationship full of love which all of the characters in these two stories missed deeply. Very powerful. It also reminded me of the last Irish Writer I read, Banville, I found the way of storytelling to be very similar. We were given the stories piece by piece and in the end they formed a whole, or an almost whole. A writer who I will be reading more of, eventually....
February 28, 2017
Reading Turgenev was great, My House In Umbria was not.
June 12, 2018
I originally started to read Trevor because Yiyun Li spoke so highly of him in her wonderful book, Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life, and this is the book she talks about the most. I can understand why: Trevor's prose is beautiful, never putting a foot wrong, and his characters are beautifully constructed. These two stories typify his exploration of characters who are out of place in the world, and are full of the sense of unease that Trevor is so good at capturing. Trevor's main characters in the two novellas contained in this book are both women unhappy in their lives, who struggle with traumas: this is a typical character for Trevor, though she never becomes a stereotype. Trevor's themes are always subtle, but both these novels capture the struggle of living within a patriarchy, and the pressure and distress of the two women whose lives feel out of their control. It's compelling, but distressing reading, and I was completely gripped as I am always with Trevor.
February 14, 2016
Reading Turgenev is a simple, but deeply moving story about a profoundly lonely young wife of an older man with evil sisters. The town thinks she has lost her mind and she does do strange things, but is living one's life the way one wishes "crazy"?
October 22, 2022
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This book was my eighth by William Trevor.
I guess you could call him a favourite, a go to author for me.
Sometimes I love to sit awhile watching a bird totter around the garden, or listen and follow the water flowing in a stream, or watch the wind blowing through the grasses and heathers when I walk up Kinder Scout - often this is how it feels to me to read this author.
Whereas some authors take you away from yourself and from your life
With Trevor, his writing for me, is a grounding experience
He focuses me in the moment,
in my now,
and invites me into the characters and their now.
It’s a mindful and meditative experience.
The absolute joy of William Trevor is that he can elevate the ordinary, the mundane, the frankly tedious and boring of life, into something so beautiful to read.
I don’t know how he does it but he seems to imbue an elegance to life’s humdrum.
There were two books in this collection Reading Turgenev and My House in Umbria. I am curious as to whether the author or the publisher decided they should belong together.
My experience with the first, Reading Turgenev, was exactly as I described above and how I associate my best times with this (usually reliable for me) author and I would rate that one a 4.5!
And that is why I feel so bereft that the second book My House in Umbria went so badly wrong in my brain, I just couldn’t connect with the story, the pages seemed stuck in treacle and didn’t want to turn, and even when I prised them apart, the words on the pages may as well have been a blurry mess because my brain couldn’t taste them - so, sadly, like a much anticipated favourite meal that just tasted sour I have had to abandon My House In Umbria to the DNF pile.
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