| Title | : | Love and Summer |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 0670021237 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780670021239 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Hardcover |
| Number of Pages | : | 211 |
| Publication | : | First published January 1, 2009 |
| Awards | : | Booker Prize Longlist (2009), International Dublin Literary Award (2011) |
It’s summer and nothing much is happening in Rathmoye. So it doesn’t go unnoticed when a dark-haired stranger appears on his bicycle and begins photographing the mourners at Mrs. Connulty’s funeral. Florian Kilderry couldn’t know that the Connultys are said to own half the town: he has only come to Rathmoye to photograph the scorched remains of its burnt-out cinema.
A few miles out in the country, Dillahan, a farmer and a decent man, has married again: Ellie is the young convent girl who came to work for him when he was widowed. Ellie leads a quiet, routine life, often alone while Dillahan runs the farm.
Florian is planning to leave Ireland and start over. Ellie is settled in her new role as Dillahan’s wife. But Florian’s visit to Rathmoye introduces him to Ellie, and a dangerously reckless attachment begins.
In a characteristically masterly way Trevor evokes the passions and frustrations felt by Ellie and Florian, and by the people of a small Irish town during one long summer.
Love and Summer Reviews
-
Set in a small town in Ireland as most of Trevor’s novels are. We open at the funeral of a well-off lady. Her son and daughter are there. They run a hotel and boarding house and the daughter takes over the operation of the family business after the mother’s death. We soon learn that the dead mother despised her daughter and the daughter hates her brother. What kind of family is this?
A photographer appears taking pictures of the town and the people at the funeral. This causes a stir because this is a new thing in this small town. He raises eyebrows further when he asks permission to photograph inside a derelict, burned-out theater. The burned-out building is somehow connected to the death of the father of the brother and sister.
We meet a farmer who has a new wife because his previous wife and child died. Why does he go out of his way to avoid walking near a certain portion of the farmyard?
We have the homeless town crazy who walks the streets with a stack of papers bending everyone’s ear with stories of bygone people. He acts as the historian filling us in on things we need to know.
Like many characters in this and Trevor’s other books, they are aloof, lackadaisical and don’t seem to really care. Many seem sexless. This farmer is a classic: his sisters start talking about bringing a young girl from the orphanage to be his housemaid and he and everyone knows their intention is that if she “works out” he’ll marry her. They ask him to go with them to meet the girl before they bring her out and he declines, saying “I’m sure she’ll be fine.” And of course she is.
The young woman who comes to the farmhouse is an orphan raised by nuns. What’s an orphan in Trevor’s dictionary? “Child of an institution, child of need and of humility, born into nothing, expecting nothing…”
Trevor’s prose matches his characters. It is dreamy, hazy, understated. He is a master at stating the tiniest sign of affection; the brother meets with his secretary to sign papers: “He shifted slightly on his chair while he reached for it and for a moment Bernadette was aware of the edge of a trouser turn-up on the calf of her leg and knew that it was accidentally there.” In Trevor’s novels, people will go on for decades hoping for the touch of a cuff on their calf but do nothing to make it happen. They say “the maid is casual with him” but that could just be talk.
The core of the novel becomes the relationship between the just-married young woman and the photographer. When the young woman realizes she kept her wedding ring out of sight of the photographer, consciously or unconsciously, the voices of the nuns from school come back to her: “Be careful what you do not knowing you were doing it, the nuns would say: no matter what, it was yourself doing it.”
Photo of Irish village from ruraltourismmarketing.com -
Three, phwit, four, five
The components are simple and plain, but Trevor is a master storyteller, skilled at pacing. For 124 pages (58%), I thought this would be a good but unremarkable 3*. I was immersed in the ordinary, waiting for the promised plot to start.
When the tension was almost too much, phwit: Trevor let slip Cupid’s arrow, and the book became a firm 4*. I was captivated by what was tantalisingly understated and opaque, feeling like Miss Connulty, peering through net curtains: will they, won’t they… did they?!
The fickle Irish breeze meant I was never sure exactly where the arrow would land nor what the consequences would be. When I closed the book, the arrow was still in flight. A a clear 5*.
Image: Silhouette of a man firing an arrow, at sunset/sunrise (
Source)
The quotidian sucks you in
“Farmers brought in livestock on the first Monday of every month, and borrowed money from one of Rathmoye’s two banks. They had their teeth drawn by the dentist who practiced in the Square.”
To
paraphrase Douglas Adams, for a while, nothing happened. Then, after a little longer, nothing continued to happen. I came to know the town and its inhabitants with intimate detachment: ordinary people doing ordinary things, in great detail.
There is also a vagueness that lends a mythical air. It’s set:
“Some years after the middle of the last century.”
The town mythologises itself:
“It was an exaggeration when people said that the Connultys owned half of Rathmoye.”
People even mythologise how little happens there:
“Nothing happened in Rathmoye, its people said, but most of them went on living there. It was the young who left – for Dublin or Cork or Limerick, for England, sometimes for America. A lot came back. That nothing happened was an exaggeration too.”
It reminds me of Kent Haruf’s novels (see my reviews
HERE), set in the small fictitious town of Holt, Colorado: simple prose for people with apparently simple lives.
“They sat not speaking, and time seemed not to pass.”
In Rathmoye and Holt, what really matters is rarely spoken of: the things people don’t admit, even to themselves. Sometimes it’s trivial, and other times it’s profound, but either way, there’s a bewitching elusiveness.
Ingredients
Characters that could be caricatures, or at least clichéd, are instead utterly credible. Most are integral to the novel (with the possible exception of Bernadette and John Paul), but knowing how they will affect the plot is like guessing which raindrops on a windowpane will merge, which will not, and which will reach the windowsill first: fascinating but unknowable.
• A young farmer’s wife, raised by nuns in a home for foundlings.
• A good man, haunted by tragedy.
• A directionless young man, alone in the world, casting aside what little he has left.
• A nosey and embittered spinster who runs a guest house.
• A wise fool.
• A small town, a farm, a big house, and bicycles.
• A few summer months.
• Not much religion (and the nuns at the foundling home were kind).
Image: Raindrops falling down a windowpane (
Source)
Love from death
“The day advanced in Rathmoye. Disturbed by death, the town settled again into its many routines.”
This is described as being about “forbidden love and the possibility of starting over”. And it is. But it’s just as much about the aftermath of death: it opens with a funeral, key characters meet because of it, and all the main figures are in their current situation (geographical, relationship-wise, and mental/emotional) as a direct consequence of death. When Florian dabbles in photography, it’s unpeopled abandonment (the charred remnants of a cinema) and dilapidation (his family home) that draw his focus. He has a black dog.
“Mrs Connulty’s daughter fondled the jewellery that now was hers…
Delicious death had been a richer compensation than she had ever dreamed of. She was in charge, and today she wore the pearls.”
The past steals happiness and sometimes pain; it stores secrets and loss, and sometimes it gives opportunity. All the main characters are tentatively feeling its boundaries, wondering if they can be free. All, apart from Orpen Wren, who contentedly lives more in the past than the present.
The end may be a beginning
• What happens next?
• Who deserves happiness?
• Who will be happy and how?
• Which secrets can and should remain secret, and at what cost?
• Is love at (nearly) first sight possible, and can it last?
• Is dull contentment a more reliable alternative?
Despite the big questions, the shadow of death, doubts about the integrity of some of the characters, and the lack of a happy ending, it’s told with the light touch of the titular season.
Image: Old bicycle outside old Irish cottage (
Source)
Quotes
• “A child of exiles as he was - to become an exile himself.”
• “Their faded dazzle belittled the rows of photographs.” [old watercolour sketches]
• “He knew now he would exploit imagination’s ragged bits and pieces, tease order out of formless nothings, begin again, and then again.”
• “Content but for her childlessness.”
• “A fly crept about on the ceiling and idly he watched it… He continued his observation of the rambling fly as it went about whatever task it had set itself.”
• “He had made a hell for her… Pity now was nourished by his greater guilt.”
The rest are poignant and worth noting, but contain moderate spoilers: -
Precioso libro como solo pueden serlo las historias tristes. Perfecto en su simplicidad, en su concisión. En él, Trevor nos narra historias de amor insatisfechas, de lealtad, de soledad, donde lo que no se dice nos emociona tanto como lo que se dice. Una gran novela.
-
At first I couldn’t enter this story. I thought it was too fragmented, excessively focused and too detailed about daily activities, too mundane in fact for the novel with such title. But slowly I found myself attracted by its flow and quiet narration. I felt drawn to its protagonists from among every one had own story that needed to be told.
Miss Connulty, embittered old spinster, holding grudge against people and world for her unhappy bygone affair and its effects that influenced her life . Or somewhat cranky old librarian from nonexistent any more old manor, Orpen Wren , convinced that it is him who is now guardian of memory and papers of his lordship. Or middle-aged farmer Dillahan who due to tragic accident lost wife and child some years back. And here again Ellie Dillahan, foundling brought up by nuns, firstly housekeeper, at present wife of the farmer. And finally Florian Kilderry, son of talented watercolourists, still mourning for them and unrequited love for cousin Isabel, undecided and lacking true aim in life, successor of deteriorated, now put up on sale house.
At first glance it is a simple and unimpressive story set in Rathmoye, provincial Irish town, with its unchanged, rather boring rhythm, where any deviation from the daily routine is immediately noticed and commented, but somewhere under that surface troubles are brewing. Orpen Wren is sure that heir of the estate is back in the town, Ellie falls in love with young Florian while the latter is in fact one leg outside not only the town but Ireland actually.
Love and Summer is a delicate and low-key story, told with tenderness and melancholy, with pictures, that Trevor draws with such subtlety, blurred and faded as paintings in Florian’s house. Summer and Love , what a clichéd title one could say, pulsates with tension and sweet poignancy, sadness of recognition and futility our expectations. Though it’s my first novel of William Trevor but I somewhat sense that it is also typical of him. Both in writing style and themes and motifs. Just my feeling.
3.5/5 -
A Perfect Summer Read
I've read one or two short stories by the prolific Irish writer William Trevor, who died in 2016, but this is the first novel I've read by him. It definitely won't be the last.
Set in the mid-1950s in and around the fictional Irish town of Rathmoye, the short but dense book follows half a dozen people who are all lost in their own solitary private worlds.
The opening pages follow the funeral of the prosperous Mrs. Eileen Connulty, owner of a respectable lodging house. Soon we meet her unmarried children: her daughter, whom Mrs. Connulty hated, and her son, whom she adored. We hear about the tragedy of her husband's death in an old cinema, which the Connulty family also owns.
We also meet the patrons of the lodging house, and the woman who takes care of the bookkeeping and accounts.
And gradually, oh so gradually, we start to see the main narrative emerge, involving Ellie Dillahan, a young woman who delivers eggs to the Connultys, and Florian Kilderry, a mysterious cyclist who shows up with a camera taking pictures of the old movie house.
Ellie was a foundling raised by nuns, and after Dillahan's wife and child were killed in a tragic accident, she was sent out to work as a housekeeper for him, later becoming his wife. Kilderry is a restless poetic sort who is living in a nearby estate inherited by his now-deceased artist parents. Miss Connulty sees the two of them talking and immediately suspects hanky panky (she has a history, it turns out, with roguish men).
Trevor relays all this detail in a quiet and unassuming way, and before you know it you'll feel like one of the inhabitants of this quaint, if claustrophobic town.
Ellie is an unforgettable character. She was grateful to be hired by Dillahan, a decent, kind (if unimaginative) farmer; but after she meets Florian, with his slightly exotic background (his mother hailed from the Italian aristocracy), she experiences love for the first time, and the way Trevor captures her shifting feelings is thrilling. He'll give you a bit of exposition, interwoven with her thoughts, and the result is like a more accessible form of stream-of-consciousness.
And while at times you need to reread passages to appreciate what he's doing, once you figure it out it's deeply satisfying.
There's another character with the intriguing name of Orpen Wren who figures in the tale and who helps move along the plot. The only reason I'm not giving this 5 stars is because of a scene involving him near the end. I just didn't fully grasp what was going on.
Still, if you're in the mood for unspoken passions, nature in full bloom and lives kept in check by gossip, propriety and Catholicism, you'll enjoy a day or two with Love And Summer. -
If a class of would-be writers sat before me and asked 'how', I would give them this slip of a book and say 'like this'. Here is a world where everything matters, every word counts, and cadence connects us all.
-
Quietly beautiful writing telling us of ordinary lives in a small Irish village in the 1950's. Of course, ordinary lives are only ordinary to the people observing them, but, as is often the case, the townspeople don't know everything. Major upheavals in emotional landscapes are often hidden, never to be known by anyone but the ones who experienced them.
I think Trevor may have had Thoreau's quote in mind when he was writing this novel: "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation". But did Thoreau ever ask himself why that was the case? Did he ponder whether decisions made for someone else's happiness and contentment might be more important in the long run than following your own passion? How living with yourself because you made the right decision might be just as important?
That William Trevor can make you ask these questions because of a story where, on the surface not much happens, in a mere 200 pages, is testament to his genius. This is only my second novel by him, and I have read none of his short stories, but I am glad to know he is so prolific because that means I have a lot of reading pleasure ahead. -
I don't think I've ever read anything I didn't like by Trevor, and this is no exception. It's subtle and beautifully written, of course, and with one of my favorite themes -- that of what goes on inside people that others never know. It reminded me a little bit of Tóibín's
Brooklyn (which I loved) though here we see the interior life of more than just the one young woman, as it is also the story of one placid little Irish town. As with anywhere, though, it may seem quiet, but there's a lot going on 'beneath.' -
O verão de todas as mudanças e recordações.
Uma história de amor contada num tom tranquilo, contido com uma exímia divisão em capítulos que dão voz aos cidadãos de Rathmoye, Irlanda.
Tudo começa num fim de tarde de Junho, em meados do século passado. Florian Kilderry fotografa um enterro e conhece Ellie Dillahan, casada com um homem mais velho, proprietário de uma quinta, para a qual ela tinha sido inicialmente admitida como criada depois de abandonar um orfanato.
O relacionamento de amor começa, mas os planos de Florian estão decididos: abandonar a Irlanda depois de vender a casa dos seus falecidos pais.
«Se te tivesse dito mais cedo, estragava o nosso Verão.»
«O resto do Verão», disse como se ela tivesse perguntado. «Há-de chegar o dia. Oh, daqui a muito tempo. Em Outubro, talvez.»
.«Nunca vou esquecer que fui amado por ti», disse ele.«Não me odeies, Ellie, Por favor, não me odeies.»
Ellie prendeu-me – não só ela como todas as personagens do romance – porque a tragédia da condição humana é talvez mais terrível que a renúncia ao amor.
Vítima de um amor que prometeu mais do que pode dar não culpa o amante negligente. Nunca dirá o que não pode ser dito, como se a sua penitência fosse a sua tranquilidade, o seu destino e a compaixão pelo seu marido.
William Trevor sugou-me para um ambiente que agitou a minha imaginação, paixões e entendimento de cada um dos intervenientes com infortunadas e desventuradas histórias de vida, mas capazes - cada um a seu modo - de se libertarem:
«Cantam em surdina uma canção que sabem que não devem cantar, e perguntam-se mal me quer bem me quer.»
( They sing in their heads a song they mustn't sing, and wonder who it is who doesn't want them.)
Foi a minha primeira obra do autor, mas não será decididamente a última. Fecho o livro e despeço-me da Irlanda com os seus rochedos, giestas, pequenos portos , campos de alfazema, o farol distante.
«Há pessoas que fogem para poderem estar sozinhas», disse ele. Algumas pessoas precisam ficar sozinhas.» -
"Love and summer" is an ordinary story of common people set in the Ireland of the fifties, when women weren't able to choose and lives were spent working and doing your duty without thinking too much about what could have been.
Ellie is a young married woman, whose husband is a farmer, a widower much older than she. He is a good person, he treats her alright, meaning he doesn't abuse her. After having tried for some years to have children and not being able to, Ellie has accepted her fate and she is sort of contented with her ordinary life in the farm.
Everything changes when she meets a young photographer, Florian, with whom she falls in love almost at first sight. As the illicit affair develops, and she gets more and more tangled, Florian continues with his own plans of abandoning Ireland for good, wanting to leave his past and Ellie behind.
A sad and unromantic story, a cross of paths which don't leave track, lacking chemistry and imagination.
The dialogues were rather dull and slow and the characters were only described on the surface, I felt as I didn't know them well enough to judge.
The book fell too short from my expectations, I wouldn't recommend it as a good reading, not even for a boring Sunday evening. -
Update (21 Nov 2016)
Re-posting this review in honour of William Trevor who passed away on 20 Nov 2016. "Love and Summer", his last novel, was published in 2009 and was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. What a loss!
In this much awaited first novel after The Story of Lucy Gault, Trevor once again, in his parsimonious and elegant prose, created a sensitively written story of a passing summer friendship.
Love and Summer is a good book to read in any season. -
Trevor (1928–2016) was considered a writer’s writer and a critic’s dream for the simple profundity of his prose. I had long meant to try his work. This short novel is set over the course of one summer in a small Irish town in the 1950s, and opens on the day of the funeral of old Mrs. Connulty. A stranger is seen taking photographs around town, and there is much murmuring about who he might be. He is Florian Kilderry, who recently inherited his Anglo-Italian artist parents’ crumbling country house. It’s impossible to pay the debts and keep the house going, so he plans to sell it and its contents as soon as possible and move abroad, perhaps to Scandinavia.
But he hasn’t passed through Rathmoye without leaving ripples. Ellie Dillahan, a young farmer’s wife who was raised by nuns and initially moved to Dillahan’s as his housekeeper, falls in love with the stranger almost before she meets him, and they embark on a short-lived liaison. Blink and you’ll miss that the relationship is actually sexual; Trevor only uses the word “embraced” twice, I think. That reticence keeps it from being a torrid affair, yet we do get a sense of how wrenching the thought of Florian leaving becomes for Ellie. Trevor often moves from descriptions of nature or farm chores straight into Ellie’s thoughts, or vice versa.“In the crab-apple orchard she scattered grain and the hens came rushing to her. She hadn’t been aware that she didn’t love her husband. Love hadn’t come into it”
“He [Florian] would be gone, as the dead are gone, and that would be there all day, in the kitchen and in the yard, when she brought in anthracite for the Rayburn, when she scalded the churns, while she fed the hens and stacked the turf.”
This is quietly beautiful writing – perhaps too quiet for me, despite the quirky secondary characters around the town (including the busybody Connulty daughter and the madman Orpen Wren) – but I would recommend Trevor to readers of Mary Costello and Colm Tóibín. I would also like to try Trevor’s short stories, for which he was particularly known; I think in small doses his subtle relationship studies and gentle writing would truly shine. -
The New York Times described Trevor's Love and Summer as, "a thrilling work of art." I would have to disagree. "Thrilling" is not a word that should be anywhere near this book. Another reviewer I read said, "William Trevor's languidly paced novel is like summer itself: brief but charged with the beauty and passion of that longed for season." This was my first Trevor novel and his hallmark seems to be noticing the ordinary. For me, the novel's simplicity and subtlety fell over the line from art into boring. It felt more like an author's writing exercise in description, not the careful unfolding of a story. In fact, sometimes it gets a little muddy in its telling because it's so caught up in descriptive detail. Even the warm, authentic Irish accent of the audio version's reader couldn't bring this book to life for me. Bottom line: I never cared about the characters enough to feel their emotions or care about their ultimate outcomes. I will likely try Trevor again, maybe some of his short stories, but I'm not in a rush to do so.
-
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.
I gave this an A in my rating system. I have the UK hardcover edition, shows a young woman and man in a meadow. On the back of the dustjacket an observation by a review from The Observer: No one now writing understands better than William Trevor the quiet working of fate and time on an individual life.
Wow I read this book 10 years ago almost to the very day! -
Μια γλυκιά,μελαγχολική ιστορία που μιλάει για μοναξιά και ματαιωμένα όνειρα.Μια ήρεμη αφήγηση,χωρίς εξάρσεις,χωρίς μελόδραμα και χωρίς να γίνεται καταθλιπτική, με πολύ όμορφες περιγραφές της ιρλανδικής υπαίθρου και της ζωής στο χωριό.
Είναι ένα βιβλίο γεμάτο ευαισθησία και μου άρεσε πολύ! -
En el poblado rural de Rathymoye, el narrador va presentando a los personajes a través de sus acciones y unas pocas invocaciones a su pasado, y a través de sus interacciones se va construyendo una historia de amor y dolor. La novela no tiene estridencias, lugares comunes ni resoluciones descabelladas de las historias. Trevor hace una excelente construcción de personajes, a partir de lo cual se pone en marcha una historia común, que en un estilo mesurado, adquiere un gran dramatismo.
Una novela que no deslumbra, pero proporciona, a través de la maestría del autor un bella (y triste) historia humana. -
He reached for her hand, but it wasn't there.
He would have destroyed her, he said. Not ever meaning to, he would have. He knew it, in the way of knowing something that couldn't be explained.
'People run away to be alone,' he said. Some people had to be alone. -
This brief novel is why some of us read novels. An elegant, lean, serious but wry telling of a simple interval in lives made large, the books delighted me with it poignant grace.
-
Being an avid follower of William Trevor’s short stories, I was disappointed in this novel. I wondered whether he is only the master within the tight frame of 20 (or so) pages, but when liberated to a wider canvas ten times that size gets lost?
From what I gathered through the characters who meander through this story without leaving any lasting impressions, the matriarch of a prominent family in an Irish village, Mrs. Connolly, dies and people gather for her funeral. There is the young wife Elie, sourced as a wife for the older farmer, Dillahan, by his sisters. Ellie is attracted to the reporter Florian Kilderry who has shown up in town to ostensibly take photographs of the funeral. Okay - the scene is set - but nothing happens except for random conversations between various town folk who come across as a chorus of voices; they all seem to know of Florian under his present or another name. I was chomping at the bit by the end of the first third of the book. With nothing happening, I decided to put this book down. Obviously Trevor was trying to write a book far too clever for my sensibilities; for example, I picked this up from the Wikipedia reference on his final novels:
'Instead of one central figure, the novels feature several protagonists of equal importance, drawn together by an institutional setting, which acts as a convergence point for their individual stories. The later novels are thematically and technically more complex. The operation of grace in the world is explored, and several narrative voices are used to view the same events from different angles. Unreliable narrators and different perspectives reflect the fragmentation and uncertainty of modern life. Trevor also explored the decaying institution of the "Big House."'
All these elements are there in Love & Summer, but they do not for a satisfying novel make. It seemed to me that Trevor was having difficulties pushing his principal actors to get out of the wings and start making mistakes on the stage, and thereby he missed some early cues. Or, this being one of his last books, he was at a stage of literary decline where his agent should have urged him to stop rather than milk Trevor for one more book, that in my opinion, did not enhance the renowned author’s reputation. Or, as Wikipedia says, this new form was everything to him, and he embraced it over all else, readers notwithstanding. -
Whenever I pick up a new book by William Trevor, whether it’s a novel or a collection of short stories, I have to admit, I’m prejudiced. William Trevor is my favorite author. I know I’m bound to love whatever he writes. And, I loved his newest book, the 2009 Booker longlisted novel Love and Summer.
Love and Summer takes place in the quiet Irish village of Rathmoye in the mid-1950s and revolves around Ellie Dillahan, a young girl who was raised by nuns in an orphanage. When Love and Summer opens, Ellie, who left the orphanage to keep house for a lonely widower she later married, is seen by the town gossip, the middle-aged Miss Connulty, talking to a strange young man who, we later learn, is Florian Kilderry.
Florian, although a stranger in Rathmoye, grew up only seven miles from the town. Now, with both his parents dead, Florian, who’s always been a master dilettante, wants only to sell their once lovely manor house and leave Ireland behind forever. But until that happens, there’s the summer and there’s Ellie.
For Florian, the gorgeous, sultry summer begins as a dalliance, for Ellie, it’s an awakening, leading her to a revelation and a choice she never thought possible. Central to this revelation is Dillahan, Ellie’s husband. Dillahan has been a kind husband, but one whose life is still consumed by a tragic loss he suffered years before, a loss for which he unjustly blames himself. His union with Ellie has been a quiet one, one of friendship and mutual respect rather than passion.
Slowly, as summer progresses, Florian and Ellie become closer. Their romance, however, isn’t as secret as they want it to be – or believe it to be. Unknown to the lovers, Miss Connulty – when she isn’t arguing with her brother, with whom she shares a love/hate relationship – watches from behind lace curtains, fingering the jewels she inherited from her recently deceased mother and remembering the long ago day her own father took her to Dublin – a day that causes her to form an unusual bond with Ellie Dillahan.
But Love and Summer is more than the story of Florian and Ellie and Dillahan and Miss Connulty. It’s also the story of Rathmoye, itself. Trevor has woven the tapestry of the entire village into Ellie Dillahan’s summer awakening. At first, we may feel as thought we’re looking at the tapestry from the wrong side, but Trevor is such a masterful and assured writer, that by the time we finish the book, though questions remain, we know all is as it should be.
Love and Summer is a gentle, delicate, almost fragile novel. This is vintage Trevor, writing beautiful, incandescent, and totally assured prose. Every sentence seems to be a sentence that’s needed; every word seems to be the best one Trevor could have chosen. And just when we think the master couldn’t get any better, he tops himself. Consider this sentence, which comes near the end of the book:
They sing in their heads a song they mustn’t sing, and wonder who it is who doesn’t want them.
The characters, too, are beautifully composed, not only Florian and Ellie, but Dillahan, Miss Connulty, her brother, the local priest, and even the strange and strangely amusing Orpen Wren, a man who sees all, yet knows nothing and offers a sadly comic note to an otherwise elegiac novel. Like all of the people who inhabit Trevor’s books, the people of Rathmoye are ordinary people, yet Trevor delves so deeply into their soul that they become extraordinary. They, like Love and Summer, become unforgettable.
Note: Love and Summer was longlisted for the 2009 Man Booker Prize, marking the fourth time a work by William Trevor has been either long- or shortlisted. -
Some books are fully orchestral symphonies that swoop and buck from piano to fortissime: this exquisite translucent jewel is more like a quartet, where each sweet and poignant voice can be distinguished. The subject may be a simple one, baldly stated in the title, but William Trevor gives the tale of Ellie and Florian's summer of love resonance and vibrato, setting it off against those other voices that move in and out of their narrative. The overall effect is to make this much, oh so much more than a tender love story: each of us is locked inside our own little world of our memories, wishes and fantasies and we either fail to comprehend the workings of others' minds, or if we do manage to touch their lives, we often cause involuntary havoc. Mr Trevor makes you work a little, he reveals without telling, he hints and makes you work out the rest, but this only adds to my enjoyment. Sheer magic.
-
Very well-written novel which is almost an historical romance. Trevor is skillful but his talents here are quite muted. Perhaps that is the point— the writing does not show off, but is confident and quiet.
Writers who achieve the confidence not to flaunt their talents are a treasure. -
I’ve been on a bit of William Trevor kick lately, starting with two of his early books, The Boarding-House and The Old Boys, and now his final novel, Love and Summer, first published in 2009. It’s interesting to see how Trevor’s style has evolved over the years, moving from those darkly comic early works to the delicately elegiac stories of his twilight years. What seems to unite much of this author’s fiction is a perceptive insight into human nature – the day-to-day dramas that shape our lives in the most poignant and wrenching of ways.
Love and Summer is a quiet, subtle novel set in the idyllic Irish countryside of the 1950s. The story focuses on Ellie, a shy young woman who is married to a kindly farmer, Dillahan, a decent man still haunted by the death of his first wife and child in an accident on the farm some years earlier. (Dillahan unjustly blames himself for a momentary loss of concentration that contributed to the tragedy – as such he now prefers to avoid interactions with the local community as much as possible for fear of speculation about his part in the incident.) Ellie had initially been sent to the farm to keep house for Dillahan following the death of his wife and mother, but then the pair agreed to marry a few years later, formalising a relationship built on mutual respect and understanding as opposed to any sense of passion or love.
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A little gold nugget of a novel, it becomes unputdownable at a certain point. And, the prose, oh, the prose, exquisite and picturesque.
This is my second Trevor novel, the first being Lucy Gault and I thought this to be the far better novel. -
Spoilers in this review.
I loved this book. William Trevor is a consummate story teller and his narration, never forced, proceeds at a deceptive pace and the gentle lyricism hides the rapidity of the events unravelling. Throughout the story the all-seeing Miss Connulty, bitter and wounded by tragic circumstances, now witnesses events through her window. The tension mounts because the reader doubts this pernicious observer has any good intentions. Instead the timeless questions posed by would-be lovers exercise Miss Connulty and the reader. Will history repeat itself ? Will true love never be found ? Will tragic consequences self-perpetuate in rural Ireland ? Will the lovers elope or will the all seeing eye of the landlady at Number 4 The Square betray the lovers? Will Ellie be denied of her one chance of emotional fulfilment ?
Instead with a wonderful and adroit repositioning of the reader the perceptive Miss Connulty becomes the true friend of womanhood, her intuition evident through her own bitter experience and tragic pain. She is determined to prevent the same thing happening to Ellie that bedevilled her own life, and she wants to prevent her suffering the same fate.
Love and Summer is a story of sacrifice and Ellie, amongst others in this story, cannot escape her upbringing and from a sense of duty she stands by her husband and forgoes the forbidden pleasures of romantic love. The stark choices and tragic narratives of the central characters live in the memory and prevent the novel from the charge of sentimentality. -
I didn't love this book at first. But it came together for me as it drew to a close. Trevor's portrayal of Miss Connulty and her regret, and her love and fear for Ellie who she hardly knows, is masterful.
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This is probably the first book I have ever given a 5 star on Goodreads that held such a diffident mood and unexceptional characters. Not likeable for me, either aspect- so passive to be almost icky. But the language, the central nuance of personality was phenomenal. He just nailed it- every insecurity, every unsure self-belief, every emotion of self-protection or façade of conceit. And that is so very difficult in the realm of such ordinary people and their smallish lives.
Underachievers with idealist concepts of fulfillment and secret skills of rationalization to get by. Ordinary people exposed. For me, Ellie's story inflames the plot and cores the book.
Not at all my preferred type of reading, SO based in the theoretical and psyche driven with such little real action of physicality or accomplishment. Masterful writing by Trevor and I had to give it a 5, regardless of the slowness and hubris that I usually so dislike. -
"Dejaron las bicicletas allí mismo. Sí, tenía tiempo, dijo Ellie mientras se alejaban, tiempo de sobra. No era como estar en Rathmoye, en la calle, entre la gente, asustada. Allí reinaba la paz y Ellie, como si estuviera sola, se sentía parte de ese silencio.
Florian sostuvo el alambre de púas para que pasara, y volvió a ayudarla donde había un árbol caído en medio del paseo: cuando le tendió la mano, se tocaron por primera vez, y la paz seguía allí." WT -
Beautifully written; quiet subtle love story. The most interesting characters played too small a role. I thought Florian was a drip. But I love Trevor's writings and am looking forward to the next read
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This was the first William Trevor book I read many years ago before I was a writer, and I remember thinking that it was OK. I didn't love it. I didn't really remember it. But then more recently I started on some of his other books which I absolutely loved, and so I've just tried this again. There are some that I like more, but I did appreciate the subtleties and the atmosphere so much more this time around.
