[The above video is mostly a reading of the text below, with
an occasional aside thrown in for good measure as they strike me as
relevant. I welcome questions, comments,
or concerns about the material contained in this video.]
This review contains spoilers.
I read this quickly after finishing my first book by Trevor, his previous novel “The Story of Lucy Gault” (2002). While I didn’t find “Love and Summer” to be as spectacular, it was still wonderful, treating many of the themes – the irrevocably of decisions made and unmade, forced conformity to social standards, and institutional decline – with the same sensitivity and honesty.
While we usually associate funerals and death with separation, “Love and Summer,” William Trevor’s fourteenth novel, shows how it can just as easily lead to passionate connections. On the death of Mrs. Eileen Connulty, the young amateur artist Florian Kilderry intends to photograph the funeral procession through the town of Rathmoye. He stops to ask a young woman, Ellie Dillahan, for directions, and they are mutually taken with one another. Ellie, a foundling raised from childhood in a nearby convent, has been taken in as a housekeeper and was eventually married to Mr. Dillahan, a kindly, older, loving farmer with good intentions, but whose slow, regular life fails to satisfy the young Ellie. The death of his first wife and their child in a horrible farm accident also hunts him constantly. During their first encounter, Florian is taken with Ellie’s innocence, and she is drawn to him because he stands for something – anything – outside of her small farm and her life of daily routine.
Florian idles for much of the book, occupying his parents’ house while he waits for a buyer to appear, all the while thinking about his meetings with Ellie and his parents’ artistic pasts. Over time, they meet more and begin an affair. He eventually tells her that, after selling the house, he plans to move to Scandinavia. Ms. Connulty, the daughter of the deceased woman whose funeral originally brought Florian and Ellie together, watches what she perceives to be Florian’s encroachment on Ellie’s life with suspicion. Ms. Connulty and a curious, verbose man by the name of Orpen Wren cast a shadow over the relationship of Ellie and Florian. In the middle of the night, Ellie slips out of the farmhouse to meet Florian on the road to give Florian one last embrace before assuming the only choice she ever really had – to live out the rest of her life with her harmless, unexciting, damaged husband.
It may just be the sentimentalist in me, but Trevor captures the poignancies and ambiguities in life with a wonderful tenderness. He can catch those feelings that pass between the quick silences in conversations that we so often look over, and a beautiful way of making even the pedestrian occurrence highly poetic. I already have “Fools of Fortune” and “Death in Summer,” two of his other novels, and very much look forward to reading and reviewing them soon. For those new to Trevor, I recommend “The Story of Lucy Gault,” his second-to-last novel, and probably the best work of fiction that I’ve read in the last year.
I read this quickly after finishing my first book by Trevor, his previous novel “The Story of Lucy Gault” (2002). While I didn’t find “Love and Summer” to be as spectacular, it was still wonderful, treating many of the themes – the irrevocably of decisions made and unmade, forced conformity to social standards, and institutional decline – with the same sensitivity and honesty.
While we usually associate funerals and death with separation, “Love and Summer,” William Trevor’s fourteenth novel, shows how it can just as easily lead to passionate connections. On the death of Mrs. Eileen Connulty, the young amateur artist Florian Kilderry intends to photograph the funeral procession through the town of Rathmoye. He stops to ask a young woman, Ellie Dillahan, for directions, and they are mutually taken with one another. Ellie, a foundling raised from childhood in a nearby convent, has been taken in as a housekeeper and was eventually married to Mr. Dillahan, a kindly, older, loving farmer with good intentions, but whose slow, regular life fails to satisfy the young Ellie. The death of his first wife and their child in a horrible farm accident also hunts him constantly. During their first encounter, Florian is taken with Ellie’s innocence, and she is drawn to him because he stands for something – anything – outside of her small farm and her life of daily routine.
Florian idles for much of the book, occupying his parents’ house while he waits for a buyer to appear, all the while thinking about his meetings with Ellie and his parents’ artistic pasts. Over time, they meet more and begin an affair. He eventually tells her that, after selling the house, he plans to move to Scandinavia. Ms. Connulty, the daughter of the deceased woman whose funeral originally brought Florian and Ellie together, watches what she perceives to be Florian’s encroachment on Ellie’s life with suspicion. Ms. Connulty and a curious, verbose man by the name of Orpen Wren cast a shadow over the relationship of Ellie and Florian. In the middle of the night, Ellie slips out of the farmhouse to meet Florian on the road to give Florian one last embrace before assuming the only choice she ever really had – to live out the rest of her life with her harmless, unexciting, damaged husband.
It may just be the sentimentalist in me, but Trevor captures the poignancies and ambiguities in life with a wonderful tenderness. He can catch those feelings that pass between the quick silences in conversations that we so often look over, and a beautiful way of making even the pedestrian occurrence highly poetic. I already have “Fools of Fortune” and “Death in Summer,” two of his other novels, and very much look forward to reading and reviewing them soon. For those new to Trevor, I recommend “The Story of Lucy Gault,” his second-to-last novel, and probably the best work of fiction that I’ve read in the last year.
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