Friday, February 26, 2010

Book Review - Love and Summer

Something about all this snow on the ground...I just haven't been in the mood for hobby stuff, but I am plowing through books like there's no tomorrow. I finished William Trevor's novel Love and Summer (2009) last night. It is another excellent effort from the Irish short story and novel master. It is set in rural Ireland sometime after the turn of the "previous half century", so the 1950s or 60's, and is the story of a doomed love. Like Yarbrough's book I just finished, this is very evocative of time and place, and gives you that sense of being elsewhere in addition to being a good, well-written story.

4 stars out of 5.

Books read: 10 [totalling 2129 pages]
New authors: still 6
Published this year: still 3
Classics: still 3

A good quote from Safe From the Neighbors:

"I couldn't understand why he'd done any of this. After all, it wasn't as if he'd caused his son's death. As for his wife, well, she'd figured out her sexual nature was different from what she'd thought. Sometimes, I reasoned, things just happen, and as long as you're not at fault, why blame yourself? At the age of twenty, I failed to grasp the difference between guilt, which can be atoned for, and grief, which can only be borne." (p.226)

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