Death in Summer by William Trevor

Death in Summer Reviews

• 
  Orsodimondo

  REGOLE D’AMORE
  
  
  Foto di Jeff Cottenden, autore anche di quella sulla copertina.
  
  Una morte avvia il racconto: quella di Letitia, la moglie di Thaddeus, uccisa in un incidente stradale, lascia il marito vedovo con una bambina piccola da crescere, Georgina.
  Thaddeus s’era sposato per interesse e s’era sforzato d’essere un buon marito. Ma essere anche un buon genero è tutt’altra cosa, la suocera e lui non si sono mai piaciuti, lei forse aveva capito subito che Thaddeus mirava ai soldi, e lui probabilmente sapeva che lei sapeva.
  Ma di fronte alla morte della figlia, e per il futuro della nipotina, la signora Iveson mette fine alla tregua armata, supera l’ostilità e propone a Thaddeus di andare a vivere nella sua magione. Inutile dire che il genero accetta, ma certo senza fare salti di gioia.
  
  
  Foto di Jeff Cottenden.
  
  Comincia il casting della babysitter. Ma nessuna è all’altezza, nessuna ha i requisiti necessari.
  Solo che una delle candidate bocciate, cresciuta in un sinistro orfanotrofio e smaniosa d’amore, s’invaghisce di Thaddeus e comincia a studiare un piano per prendere il posto della suocera e nonna Iveson.
  Ci sono altre due morti. E un sequestro, davanti al quale si forma un’insperata alleanza.
  
  
  Foto di Jeff Cottenden.
  
  Ma il giallo sembra più che altro un pretesto, il thriller presta l’atmosfera di crescente minaccia, ma Trevor sembra interessato ad altro
  Con tono sommesso, con studiata lentezza, muovendosi nell’ombra, e tra le ombre, con calma e occhio penetrante, Trevor non abbandona mai l’indulgenza per l’umanità che racconta. La domanda di base suona tragica: chi è cresciuto senza amore, può provare amore, può amare?
  Ma attenzione, la domanda non riguarda solo Pettie, l’aspirante babysitter orfana, che mette paura ma al contempo grazie all’abilità di Trevor ispira empatia: coinvolge lo stesso Thaddeus che fino alla nascita della figlia Georgina sembrava capace unicamente di riprodurre l’ambiente anaffettivo nel quale era cresciuto.
  
  
  Foto di Jeff Cottenden.
• 
  Blair

  My first pick of a William Trevor novel was perhaps not the best place to start off. Beggars can't be choosers at my local library. The title warned me that this wouldn't be a happy story, and Mr. Trevor certainly excels at ennui and despair. Written in a poetic, sometimes muddled prose, it is the story of Thaddeus Davenport and the tragedy that visits him one summer in his beloved historical Quincunx House where he lives in the flatlands of Essex, England. It is a suspenseful story of damaged people, the limits of our ability to perceive this brokenness in others and the repercussions of our helplessness in the face of it all.
  I liked it enough to want to seek out more of his more notable work. There is some very fine writing here that at times is marked by some confusing passages and awkward sentences forcing you to go back and slow down. It does pay off though. I'll look forward to more William Trevor.
• 
  zumurruddu

  Non sono sicura che la scrittura di Trevor sia proprio la mia tazza di tè: dominata da un tono incolore e monocorde (che in verità ben si addice all’anaffettività e alle emozioni trattenute di alcuni personaggi), a volte difficile da seguire, ermetica o “sfocata”, dato che entra nei ricordi e nei pensieri dei personaggi, il punto di vista ben annidato nel loro mondo interiore. Devo tuttavia ammettere che ha una sua efficacia.
  La storia inoltre mi è piaciuta, e anche i personaggi, pur conservando molte zone d’ombra, hanno tratti che restano ben impressi e una loro “tridimensionalità”. E tra morte, disgrazie, ossessioni, dolori sordi e silenziosi, miseria e vite fallite, dopo aver letto il libro con una costante e appiccicosa sensazione di disagio, alla fine rimane un tepore, un alito tiepido di vita, il soffio della compassione.
  Tre stelle e mezza, quasi quattro.
  
• 
  Laysee

  An English house with cherry trees at each corner of the garden. Flowers and vegetables thriving in the summer sun. Three women. All in love or obsessed with the same man. One insipid man. Tragedy three times over. Wasted lives.
  
  Death In Summer has a hollow ring to it. It nettles me because it is a story by one of my well-loved authors. I love Trevor's prose but I find this story implausible and unconvincing.
  
  Trevor writes with language that is deliberately incongruent with the story. It assumes an understated subtlety - languid and almost hushed – a prose style that accentuates the chilling nature of the tale. Each death sneaks up on the reader and were it not for the hint in the title, one would be utterly shocked. The obsession of Pettie (a prospective nanny) with Thaddeus Davenant (the master of the house) reminds me of snippets in Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love. Trevor is a keen observer of human behavior. I marveled at how shifts in countenance or mood or atmosphere of a place are lucidly captured. In an episode where gratitude gives way to annoyance, we read, "A moment ago she kept looking at him, but now the only movement's a frown coming and going in her forehead. Her voice has changed, a crossness in it now..."
  
  There is not one character I care about in this story. Thaddeus, the main character, lives in guilt that shadows all his relationships. He appears to be emotionally stunted and is incapable of making decisions of his own volition. It makes me cringe to read that “Pettie holds a shine for him.” Not just Pettie but also his generous wife, Letitia, and a former lover, Mrs Ferry. What is being described is not love but a creepy obsession.
  
  Death In Summer is a disquieting novel. The unsettling nature of this story calls to mind The Children of Dynmouth. It dawned on me that Trevor is a master at telling stories that are disarmingly genteel.
• 
  Claire Fuller

  I just can't get enough of Trevor's novels. But I'm already sad that one day I will run out. I loved this, perhaps not my absolute favourite, but still a good one. It's very sad. Is that enough of a review to make you go and read it?
• 
  Julie

  9/10
• 
  Bettie

  Mr. Trevor struck a tuning fork on the marble fireplace then laid it in its holder - the resonance echoed through me.
  
  Again I find myself out of step because I thought this was brilliant along the lines of
  If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things crossed with
  The Remains of the Day
  
  Fabulous writing - and I get the odd wink of authorial twinkle shining through.
• 
  Mark Joyce

  Creepy, suspenseful and ultimately tragic, but not in the ways you initially expect. There are sections in the first half of the book that I had to work quite hard at, with the point of view shifting in a way I found disorientating. But this was clearly the author’s intention and once I got my ear in with the various characters' voices I found it to be an effective and affecting device. There are two or three scenes of almost unbearable tension, much of it built up through dialogue. There are also some strong stylistic similarities with
  Kazuo Ishiguro (unspoken tragedy, backstairs tensions and much of the underlying horror built up implicitly rather than referred to head on) and
  John Banville (a seemingly grievous crime broken down into its multiple human dimensions and rendered morally complex and relatable as a result). This was my first William Trevor novel but enough to show that he is clearly in the same league as those two great writers. I’ll definitely be returning for more.
• 
  Julie

  William Trevor's characters walk in shadows, moving with the somnambulistic pace of the half-alive. It is his style to remain detached, writing as one observing from an opaque distance, even when he is deep in the minds of his often-disturbed characters. This works to haunting effect in Felicia's Journey, where Trevor dispassionately portrays a monster, and in The Story of Lucy Gault, where epic political conditions mirror household tragedies. But sometimes you ache for more connection -- you want the characters to look you in the eye, instead of constantly shifting their gaze or changing the subject. Death in Summer holds you just outside arm's length, preventing you from shaking the characters awake.
  
  Death in Summer, set in a small village on the Cumbrian coast of western England, opens with a funeral, one of three deaths that involves the residents of the once-stately Quincunx Manor in a short, disturbing summer. Thaddeus Davenant buries his young wife, Letitia, whom he acknowledges he never loved. His sorrow at his failure to reciprocate her devotion is at least as great as his widower's bereavement. Letitia leaves him her fortune. She also leaves behind Georgina, their infant daughter for whom Thaddeus develops a fierce and tender love.
  
  Letitia's mother, Mrs. Iveson, arrives at Quincunx to help Thaddeus find a nanny. After a series of unsatisfying interviews with unsuitable young women, Mrs. Iveson determines she is the best caregiver for her granddaughter. She takes up residence at the manor; besides Thaddeus and his daughter, the other residents are an elderly couple who have served as caretakers of Quincunx for many years.
  
  One of the young women interviewed for nanny is Pettie, a street kid who has found refuge with a sweet, slightly simple, pal Albert. They are former residents of a corrupt group home that sheltered orphans. It also prostituted them. Pettie recalls her "Sunday Uncles" in passages that are sickening in their subtlety. Pettie speaks of their affections with longing; she is starved for love.
  
  Pettie becomes fixated on Quincunx, certain that there was some misunderstanding and she was really meant to be Georgina's nanny. She returns in secret to the manor over several weeks, sleeping in the abandoned greenhouse, observing the residents' routines and befriending Rosie, Thaddeus's hapless dog.
  
  A moment of opportunity presents itself on a warm, sleepy afternoon and with an impulse borne of loneliness, Pettie's obsession becomes criminal. The tragedy that follows takes multiple victims. Some emerge physically unharmed, but none is left untouched. Albert, Trevor's foil for the hollow and broken characters who inhabit Quincunx, takes on an almost Biblical role as angel, prophet, saint and savior.
  
  It took me a couple of starts-stops to connect with this understated thriller. It takes the right state of mind to slip into Trevor's subtle, graceful prose. His writing feels out of a time long gone by; it is often a challenge to place the era of his stories. His characters speak in cadences and with tones that aren't unnatural, just not of the modern world. He metes out small clues. First you read of a car accident or someone turns on a television in their cold-water flat, then you realize girls are wearing mini-skirts, and eventually you catch a reference to turmoil in Croatia. So you know that here, at least, you are in the mid-1990s. But how important is that, really? In Trevor's world of quiet menace, disappointment, violence and heartbreak are always present, redemption is fickle, but compassion is timeless.
  
  
  
  
  
• 
  Trishita (TrishReviews_ByTheBook)

  This is my third book (one short story collection and two novels) by William Trevor, and in my experience of him so far, there are some common threads running through his narratives, long and short. He’s a master at building atmosphere, always taking me places with his words. Small towns and everyday affairs are also his specialty, and I devour those, so we get along very well. Most distinctly though, he seems to have a soft spot for those on the outskirts, the luckless, the so-called outsiders, even the downtrodden, as he tries to assimilate them into our consciousness by narrating their stories, only this time, that story has a twisted edge. Death in Summer is a suspense story that quietly and compassionately unveils its complex layers of the imperfect human condition. I say quietly, because here, as always with Trevor, emotional reticence speaks the loudest.
  
  What could have turned into a campy nanny obsession drama becomes, with Trevor’s handling, a moving tale of misguided sense of love, and inability to escape the inherent. Tragedy seeps in from within the commonplace, unlikable characters are somehow sympathised with, and little things like repressed feelings, misapprehensions and faint inklings order the plot around.
  The narrative flits between multiple perspectives, which is easy enough to follow but also slightly dizzying.
  
  I’ve seen many not getting along with this author, and it’s totally understandable, I think maybe not everybody likes the small, subdued, or the silently resonant. Sometimes, when I read him, I’m not always too deeply affected, but after I turn the last pages, the story lingers, and really unfolds in ways it didn’t while reading. I have a soft spot for the quiet ones, the unpretentious ones, the authors who just pour out their self sincerely, and in doing so, their books may all sound like they are the same, and in so many ways they are, but also always intense and intricate, multidimensional and heart wrenchingly human. William Trevor is that old-world kind of author who makes the real, unjust, predictable world of everyday, artfully apparent. 3.5 stars!
  
• 
  Chris Gager

  "I saw Pettie in the sky"... Is William Trevor not the "King of Pain and Suffering"(apologies to Gordon What's 'is Name)? Another gut-wrencher to go along with "Felicia's Journey" and all the rest. Written in a curious prose/poetic style that requires close attention and backtracking. I'm going to re-read it as soon as my schedule will allow. Pettie and Thaddeus are both victims of abuse/neglect/abandonment but to differing degrees. The book is about death and surviving and survival. About compassion and understanding and being present in the world and to other people. And yes, WT is his usual manipulative self. The omniscient narrator pulling our strings and those of his characters. Some gaps in credulity are there. He does as he pleases. A beautiful book but beware. Even though by the end you kind of know what's coming(the front jacket blurb comes to close to TMI and spoilers) it still shatters. A beautiful companion piece to "Felicia's Journey". If you didn't like that you won't like this. Pettie is a combination/reworking of both Hilditch and Felicia. A walking, talking, bleeding psychic wound. From reading other reviews and ratings I can see why WT is not better known despite all the awards. He's a writer's writer like Alice Munro. Not for everyone I guess. Just finished my re-read. Such a quiet book, like the house itself. The theme of class difference and determinism comes up. Thaddeus get's that in the end. "He pities and is angry".
• 
  LaCitty

  Ho faticato ad entrare in sintonia con questo libro. I primi capitoli raccontano due linee narrative che sembrano staccate tra loro. Ovviamente non è così e quando cominciano ad intrecciarsi, il romanzo decolla e uno non si staccherebbe più per la curiosità di vedere come finisce.
  È una storia di famiglie mutilate, negate. Inizia e finisce con una morte e sebbene sia presente un tenue filo di speranza, alcune cose non cambiano mai.
• 
  Kathy

  I have enjoyed other books by this author, but not this one very much. The characters seem wooden to me in their extreme portrayals of all that is peculiar, unfulfilled and disenfranchised. Sketch - involves man sleepwalking through his life, married to lovely and lively woman who brings money to the marriage as well as a child but is then dies in bicycle accident, a strange couple in service to the household, a musty mother-in-law who decides to move in to be the nanny after her daughter's death, a strange young woman who cannot understand when she is not chosen to be the nanny and commits child abduction among other bad acts...
• 
  JimZ

  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.
  
  This was one of those rarities for me where I gave a piece of work by William Trevor only a likable rating...I wish I could remember why I was not more enthusiastic.
• 
  Jrobertus

  i didn't much care for this novel. it is about a deranged girl who takes a nannies job in order to steal a baby.
• 
  Jacqueline Burns-Walters

  Beautiful, haunting, lyrical perfection.
• 
  Kitty

  The man is a master!
• 
  Nick Garbutt

  Another great short novel from the master of the form.
  Death in Summer is genuinely chilling and creepy building tension and drama from page to page as it unfolds.
  As with all his novels William Trevor shows an ability to bring people, places and time to life with is meticulous descriptions.
  This exploration of a sordid English underworld of desperate poverty, child abuse and secret bedsit passion is a compelling and compulsive read.
  It took me no time at all to finish and unsettled me enough to disturb my sleep.
  William Trevor was one of the very best writers to come out of Ireland and a supreme exponent of short form prose. It is such a shame that he appears to be fading from memory.
  
• 
  Sandie

  Inspire of the 3 star review, the writing had a distinguished, haunting quality that I was drawn to. Sounds like Lucy Gault should be my next Trevor.
• 
  Susan

  I didn't finish this book. I read about 1/3 of it, but it was so depressing I have decided to put it aside. It was like having a grey cloud invade your life to pick it up and carry on with these highly isolated and damaged characters, and I can't will myself to push through.
• 
  Realini

  Death In Summer by William Trevor, author of the mesmerizing The Story of Lucy Gault
  http://realini.blogspot.com/2022/07/t...
  10 out of 10
  
  
  This note is started before reaching the end of this wondrous novel, so it might be interesting for me, if nobody else, to see when the last page will have been turned first of all what happens to the main characters, and then how much, if anything will be anticipated correctly in the sequence of events, which seem to this reader to announce some catastrophe, which should be an easy guess, if we consider the title, but on the other hand, the Death in Summer announced in the tile could be that of Letitia.
  
  Letitia Iveson is killed in a car accident early on, just as she went out on her bicycle, travelling along the lanes (something her mother, Mrs. Iveson, would find hard to accept and consider that her son-in-law should have prevented it) to get some small chicks, and when she took them back in a basket attached to her bike, before a turn in the road, she looked back to check on the small birds and a car killed her.
  Thaddeus Davenant, her husband, has to raise their only child, Georgina, now just a few months old, alone as a widower, and his mother-in-law says that he needs a nanny and she will help him to find the best candidate, once he will have advertised for the position and a few women will have called to be interviewed…four will arrive at the house, all by the same train, only none will be found satisfactorily skilled.
  
  Hence, Mrs. Iveson decides to take over the charge of caring for her grandchild herself and says so to the father, who was called Thad by his wife and friends, including a woman that will play a supporting role in the plot, writing some letters to ask for help, which will be coming upon the wish of Letitia, whose money is needed for running the house; Thaddeus will visit the ailing woman, who had been briefly a lover, would like to be sexually intimate again, notwithstanding the fact that the man is not interested anymore.
  Among the women who come to get the job, there is one peculiar case, of a young, outré figure, Pettie, who thinks she has fallen in love with Thaddeus Davenport and that she will get to be the nanny of his daughter, showing a disregard for reality, indeed, choosing to live in a sort of alternative reality, where she keeps imagining herself sharing tender moments with the man who could be her father, an Electra complex perhaps.
  
  She is also the shotgun that Chekhov refers to in his famous quote "If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired…Otherwise don't put it there’ at least she looks to me as if she is ready to do some serious damage, if she is prevented from seeing her dream come true.
  
  Pettie hates Mrs. Iveson, for she (Pettie) thinks that the grandmother stands in the way of her happiness with Thaddeus Davenport, because if it were not for the old woman (who is anyway not fit to care for the baby she tells the man she thinks she loves and she is obsessed with) she would have a clear path to victory over the heart of the man she is infatuated with, but this is explained in the psychology classic Games People Play by Eric Berne
  http://realini.blogspot.com/2013/09/g... where we find that this is the most common interaction in couples If It Weren’t For You
  However, when partners in couples blame the other for the insuccess they may have, the failures they face, they should read the opus to find that in reality, we appear to choose a spouse because we want somebody to prevent us from doing something we do not really want anyway, and thus the blame can be reassigned, and in the case of the girl in summer, she blames Mrs. Iveson, but she looks like not getting her prize anyway.
  
  This is speculation, not spoiler here, for I have no idea how all this will end, or I claim to see in the future, but just like any other (or almost all other) clairvoyant, the crystal ball I am using is a flawed, it is a question of intuition, the experience of reading novels with similarities, using the Chekhov rule, and last but not least, the fact that I have read The Story of Lucy Gault and Reading Turgenev
  http://realini.blogspot.com/2021/06/m... and especially the former (spoiler alert) offers readers a glorious tale, but incredibly sad, Lucy Gault tries to take a little trip to make her parents change their minds about moving from Ireland, which was then in the middle of the Troubles, the war for independence and they have been the target of young men who had wanted to burn the house, and she is trapped in the forest, because of a serious accident and cannot return in time
  The parents find clothes on the beach and they think they know what had happened, their daughter must have been in the water and drowned, so they leave the house and the island, traveling to Europe and not finding that she has been found alive and they could return, and when Captain Gault eventually returns, after his dear wife will have died, it seems for a while that there may be redemption, the girl, now a young woman, may find some happiness and find the right man and we reach a happy end…if only
  
  Pettie claims that she had lost a ring, when she came for the interview, in her efforts to try and get close to Thaddeus Davenport, and she comes to the house like a stalker, watching over the residents, and waiting for the moment when she will be able to take her place as the nanny, and from there become the lover and probably more…it looks at this point as if she has to and will do something drastic, she has had a troubled childhood, she was abused by her ‘Sunday uncle’ and research shows that those with a traumatized childhood are much more likely to become violent in their turn and abuse others…if this happens, I will have to wait and see…
  Yes, there is a massive surprise, actually two, and Pettie does not kill the grandmother (spoiler alerts) but does something equally horrendous, if not more, in an attempt to gain favor with the man she thinks she loves…now, is she crazy, or suffering from some mental condition, we do not know, unless we are talking about readers that have degrees in the field, however, there is something quite disturbing about the poor girl
  
  http://realini.blogspot.com/2022/02/u...
  
• 
  Erin

  Three point five stars is actually what I would give this book. William Trevor is an incredible writer, but there were parts that seemed irrelevant to me. The emergence of this newfound dislike for extraneous and irrelevant details in novels has me rather perplexed because I think maybe it is in those parts that I deem useless that the true story lies. Maybe it serves as character development. Of course, when I say that about a novel like DEATH IN SUMMER it does not carry the same weight as what I would say about TWILIGHT. The first novel could cut out several paragraphs whereas the second could've sliced 100 pages from the middle and not taken away anything from the story line or character development.
  
  DEATH IN SUMMER is about two people essentially who struggle with their inability to love deeply. The two paths combine because the main character's wife passes away. The second character comes to his home to apply for a position as a nanny. Her childhood as a sexually abused orphan has unravelled her mental state to such a degree that she becomes obsessed with the main character. This all plays out in a nail-biting manner with a tragic end.
  
  I feel that William Trevor is an author whose works should be studied because I often feel that I am missing much of the depth that exists in his work.
• 
  Chris

  I consider this quiet book to be a thriller. It has suspense, surprise and twists that are very satisfying. But rather than being a genre novel, it is a story of human frailty and the universality of the need for love, as well as the consequences of love denied. Ireland in the late 20th century is a world different from mine, with rural or religious characters I might not otherwise know than through Trevor's books. But even beyond his plots and people, it is Trevor's mastery of the sentence--of showing rather than telling--that draws me in and amazes me.
• 
  James Wall

  This is my second reading of this novel, the first nine years ago. Love Trevor’s prose and his wonderful characterisation. Great novel