SUMMER BOOKS

'The Lovers,' by Vendela Vida
It's my favorite read of Summer

Like 2007's "Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name," Vida's "The Lovers" follows a woman who travels far from home on an emotional quest. This time, it's Yvonne, a 53-year-old high school history teacher from Vermont; her destination is the coast of Turkey. Yvonne’s story can be seen from the start as an unusual and engrossing exploration of marriage, parenthood and the accidents that can end and reconfigure lives.

We are presented with an American woman abroad who is less interested in her exotic surroundings than in mapping out the equally mysterious terrain of her past.

To begin, Yvonne isn’t sure she raised her children fairly or understandingly enough. She and her son barely know each other, and her daughter has been severely troubled from an early age. Nor can she pinpoint what part of her was lost or subsumed in marriage, or if the relationship was on the whole a success. Underlying these questions is her desire to know whether she’s lived as she should have. As a teacher of history, she would be familiar with Solon’s admonition to Croesus of Lydia — no one’s life can be deemed happy until it is over — which makes her hope for answers equally fascinating and futile.

Vida, who is married to the writer Dave Eggers, is a subtle writer with a spare and authoritative voice, and her third novel is further evidence that she can fashion characters as unpredictable as they are endearing. Although its ending is a little rushed (some situations feel arbitrarily abandoned), the book is a satisfying, often brilliant portrait of a woman searching for relief from things that will not, she discovers at last with something like acceptance, go away. From New York Times Sunday Book Review, July 1st, 2010


The book advances itself with echoes and variations on themes. A woman who travels alone will see couples everywhere, and there are an overwhelming number in this book. The owls had mated for life, couples sunbathe on a beach, Yvonne's children are twins, and there is an excessively smug pair on a boat trip that Yvonne takes to Cleopatra's island. Lovers, appropriately for a book of this title, surface often, with the furious menage a trois between the house owner and his wife and mistress, Yvonne's love story with her husband, and, most importantly, the book that Yvonne is reading, Marguerite Duras' stunning short novel, "The Lover."

Duras' book gives a reader a key to the deeper aims of Vida's work. Throughout her life, Duras rewrote, in a number of ways, her autobiographical story of a young girl in French colonial Vietnam who takes an older Chinese lover. There is a small echo of the story in Yvonne and Ahmet's friendship: as innocent as it is to Yvonne, theirs is an unequal relationship based on money, and it does appear sinister to outsiders.

Vida's first novel, "And Now You Can Go," is a swift, funny story about a young woman whose life falls apart after she is held at gunpoint in a park, and how she slowly heals after a volunteer surgical trip to the Philippines. Vida's second, "Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name," is about another young woman who flees to Lapland when the man she has always believed was her father dies, leaving her parentless and unsure of her own identity. "The Lovers," Vida's new novel, is the story of yet another woman who, in the aftermath of trauma, travels in order to heal herself.

It is only in light of Duras' lifelong project - to refine her story by retelling it - that we understand that Vida's project over her three novels is quite ambitious, even if her methods are quiet. In the end, by pushing deeper into her refrains of grief and travel, Vida's work becomes clearer and more sophisticated with every book she writes; and "The Lovers" is her best and most disturbing novel yet. From SFGate.com, June 20th, 2010