In theme: Both are about women who are victims of appalling abuse, and who find not just liberation but a sort of greatness through their imaginations.
They have the same theme, in part, and certainly the same soul. The second, “My House in Umbria,” begins with the voluble and evasive narrative of a middle-aged woman-a silly person, seemingly, and one who is going to great effort to cover some dim tracks.īut the two stories are properly joined. The Irish story, “Reading Turgenev,” begins, for example, with the deadly stillness of a genre painting-largely brown-of some dark provincial interior. His works are considerable journeys, and at the start he inflicts a certain reluctance to take them, a sense that it will be a long and emotionally demanding trip even if by the end we will have become addicted passengers, and sorry to stop. They read very differently they are approached very differently by the reader, though both carry Trevor’s characteristic admission fee. Yet they are presented, under the title “Two Lives,” as if they were a single work in two parts. They are set, respectively, in the dim constraints of a rural Irish town of 30 or 40 years ago, and in the nervy rootlessness of English expatriates in present-day Italy.
They are entirely distinct, and differ-as far as may be conceivable with a writer of such coherent sensibility as William Trevor-in style, taste and mood.
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