This novella is more like a long story, and I loved every minute I spent with it. Trevor’s writing is as it always is: gorgeous. It’s never filled with overwrought metaphors, but is spare and elegant, instead and filled with the deepest compassion for humanity. It’s so beautiful, it always, or almost always, brings me to tears. READING TURGENEV is one of the most heartfelt and beautiful stories I have ever read, and I have no doubt it will remain so. I don’t appreciate my work being analysed to that extent,” he might say. “I just want people to enjoy it."

Janet Malcolm was a journalist, biographer, collagist, and staff writer at The New Yorker. She is the author of In the Freud Archives and The Crime of Sheila McGough, as well as biographies of Gertrude Stein, Sylvia Plath, and Anton Chekhov. The absolute joy of William Trevor is that he can elevate the ordinary, the mundane, the frankly tedious and boring of life, into something so beautiful to read.

When Seth began reconstructing their story, more than 10 years ago, he did so with little sense of where it might lead. By then Henny was dead and Shanti, 85 and in poor health, needed the stimulus of some project. In the event, as he sat down, laptop at the ready, to conduct his interviews, it was Seth who was stimulated - and made to grasp how many events and intellectual currents of the 20th century intersected with the lives of Shanti and Henny. Two Lives” couldn’t be a more befitting title for this book, for it consists of two stories narrated by middle-aged women who review past events to make sense of their dismal present. Such title could also be interpreted as the alternative existences both protagonists create in their minds to cope with the unsparing reality that has robbed them of their youthful illusions. Shanti, meanwhile, had joined the Army Dental Corps and, after spells in Egypt and Syria, wound up at Monte Cassino, where his right arm was blown off while he was sitting in a tent. Opportunities for one-armed dentists are limited, but after the war, as an adviser to the Amalgamated Dental Company, Shanti kept up his research. Inspired by an amputee dentist who had suffered a similar fate during the first world war, he began to practise again, with his left hand. The handicap made him concentrate all the harder with his patients, and he soon built up a successful practice. By the end of the 1940s, his life had fallen into a pattern: from nine to five he worked for the Amalgamated in central London, and from six to 10pm he saw patients at home in Hendon. In 1958 Trevor published his first novel, A Standard of Behaviour, to little critical success. Two years later, he abandoned sculpting completely, feeling his work had become too abstract, and found a job writing copy for a London advertising agency. 'This was absurd,' he said. 'They would give me four lines or so to write and four or five days to write it in. It was so boring. But they had given me this typewriter to work on, so I just started writing stories. I sometimes think all the people who were missing in my sculpture gushed out into the stories.' He published several short stories, then his second and third novels, which both won the Hawthornden Prize (established in 1919 by Alice Warrender and named after William Drummond of Hawthornden, the Hawthornden Prize is one of the UK's oldest literary awards). A number of other prizes followed, and Trevor began working full-time as a writer in 1965. Larry Elder opens the door to the area of his life where his relationship to his father and in many ways the rest of his family exists. The story is brutal in its honesty. The lesson in this story is a true diamond in the rough.

But as a reader (and human being) who learned to love the characters deeply, I found that this book can be very hard to take in emotionally. True to his pattern, William Trevor writes of significant struggles that are both contemporary and timeless. And his characters live through agonies that they sometimes grow through---and sometimes do not. Their own strengths and weaknesses are tested by the capricious storms of life that are not always within those characters powers to control. And that can be agonizing, as we all know. I cannot imagine his life growing up. Nor can I imagine his father Randolph's life either - who was forced out of his house when he was 13 after his mother and her then current boyfriend thought he was too much trouble. Randolph always worked hard at whatever he did. He took pride in his work and seems to have instilled those values in two of his sons (the third Dennis died of drug related problems). The small diner he owned for a couple of decades did everything from scratch and was a neighborhood institution. The bottom line: a book nearly as curious as Stein herself, but far briefer. It was a great read, with rich insights. Malcolm’s essays here document both fact and process; we are introduced to a few of the leading lights in “Stein-ology” as Malcolm does her research and struggles to make sense of the famous duo. The book also underlines how much of the couple’s life is still open to interpretation although Malcolm is not hesitant to judge. Her harsh appraisal of Stein and Toklas centers to a large extent on their sublimation of their Jewish identity and the mystery of their comfortable and confident survival in occupied France during WWII. Trevor earns his readers‘ trust and time with every line. A book I will have to reread though I rarely ever do so.The stories that William Trevor traces in Reading Turgenev and My House in Umbria follow the lives of two very different women into a realm where the lines between memory, imagination, and reality are blurred; their inner worlds colliding with the outer through defining moments of rupture. It is easy to see why these two novels belong together, for the two lives they speak of seem to unfold in ways that assume a significance greater than just their individual stories. Two Lives contains two novellas by William Trevor. I have elected to review and rate them separately.

Hero of the Fleet: Two World Wars, One Extraordinary Life - The Memoirs of Centenarian William Stone At first glance, the lives of Mary Louise Quarry and Emily Delahunty couldn't seem more different. Mary Louise, an Irish farm girl and the heroine of "Reading Turgenev" has lived in a home for the mentally and emotionally disturbed and impaired for the past thirty-one years. Repressed and emotionally fragile, the only experience Mary Louise has ever had of love, despite an early and ongoing marriage, revolves around her dying cousin, Robert, who lived with his mother in a crumbling Irish country house and who shares his love of Turgenev with Mary Louise.There is something to be said about the way we as a culture look at 'mad' women—the way we see women, and madness as their second nature; something that wouldn’t be there if it hasn’t always been; something to be anticipated, only a matter of time. It is always so that madness becomes the woman—seldom do we see her beyond the isolation of that opaque, unforgiving veil. For all of the particularity of Henny and Shanti's lives, they were extraordinarily ordinary, and that is perhaps what makes this book reverberate on such a deep level for all of us. In Two Lives we see in sharp relief how two people never compromised their true temperaments, whatever the circumstances, and as a result built a positive, connected life. If that meant accommodation, generosity, unexpressed anguish, devotion, hard work, so be it. This is certainly not Seth's most lyrical effort; he knows it cannot be if he's to integrate the vast detail of geography, culture, language, and time shifts that span nearly 80 years in a straightforward way. Seth's own raw pain at his uncle's anomalous behavior in his confused old age is just one more example of the book's humanity, of the complicated, unexpected twists that characterize every fully-lived life. Still his father set a mostly good example of what a father is... what a father does. How he protects and guides his children. Two Lives' is an amazing book. It takes you into different worlds and lives. It is a story of author' Uncle Shanti who came to Germany from India to study dentistry, not knowing that he would live his entire life abroad. His whole journey was extraordinary. However, the author was least aware of the significant aspects of his uncle's history till his parents showed him letters that uncle Shanti wrote to his German wife, Henny. Even as a young boy, the author knew his uncle and aunt, and in fact had stayed with them in his teens. Consequently, the rest of his life he remained close to them, he was particularly fond of his aunt, Henny. Since the couple did not have a child of their own, they also grew attached to Vikram. While Vikram knew them as his uncle and aunt, he did not know about their past and what they went through in their early lives. The first time his parent showed him uncle Shanti's letters after his death, the writer in Vikram found enough material for a book. There was much in these letters that made him write about these two extraordinary lives. This is not the book I had understood it to be, which is my fault. This is purely an academic work, and if you're not familiar with Stein's writing, then you will be at a loss. I also have to say I don't really care much for the style of the author of this book. It's more about name dropping. There's focus on her subjects in there, but she's much more interested in the historiography of the subjects than her subjects themselves.