Death In
Summer by William Trevor, author of the mesmerizing The Story of Lucy Gault http://realini.blogspot.com/2022/07/the-story-of-lucy-gault-by-william.html
10 out of
10
This note
is started before reaching the end of this wondrous novel, so it might be
interesting for me, if nobody else, to see when the last page will have been turned
first of all what happens to the main characters, and then how much, if anything
will be anticipated correctly in the sequence of events, which seem to this
reader to announce some catastrophe, which should be an easy guess, if we
consider the title, but on the other hand, the Death in Summer announced in the
tile could be that of Letitia.
Letitia
Iveson is killed in a car accident early on, just as she went out on her bicycle,
travelling along the lanes (something her mother, Mrs. Iveson, would find hard
to accept and consider that her son-in-law should have prevented it) to get
some small chicks, and when she took them back in a basket attached to her
bike, before a turn in the road, she looked back to check on the small birds
and a car killed her.
Thaddeus
Davenant, her husband, has to raise their only child, Georgina, now just a few
months old, alone as a widower, and his mother-in-law says that he needs a
nanny and she will help him to find the best candidate, once he will have
advertised for the position and a few women will have called to be interviewed…four
will arrive at the house, all by the same train, only none will be found
satisfactorily skilled.
Hence, Mrs.
Iveson decides to take over the charge of caring for her grandchild herself and
says so to the father, who was called Thad by his wife and friends, including a
woman that will play a supporting role in the plot, writing some letters to ask
for help, which will be coming upon the wish of Letitia, whose money is needed
for running the house; Thaddeus will visit the ailing woman, who had been
briefly a lover, would like to be sexually intimate again, notwithstanding the
fact that the man is not interested anymore.
Among the
women who come to get the job, there is one peculiar case, of a young, outré figure,
Pettie, who thinks she has fallen in love with Thaddeus Davenport and that she
will get to be the nanny of his daughter, showing a disregard for reality,
indeed, choosing to live in a sort of alternative reality, where she keeps
imagining herself sharing tender moments with the man who could be her father,
an Electra complex perhaps.
She is also
the shotgun that Chekhov refers to in his famous quote "If in the first
act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be
fired…Otherwise don't put it there’ at least she looks to me as if she is ready
to do some serious damage, if she is prevented from seeing her dream come true.
Pettie
hates Mrs. Iveson, for she (Pettie) thinks that the grandmother stands in the
way of her happiness with Thaddeus Davenport, because if it were not for the
old woman (who is anyway not fit to care for the baby she tells the man she thinks
she loves and she is obsessed with) she would have a clear path to victory over
the heart of the man she is infatuated with, but this is explained in the
psychology classic Games People Play by Eric Berne http://realini.blogspot.com/2013/09/games-people-play-by-eric-berne.html where we find that this is the most
common interaction in couples If It Weren’t For You
However,
when partners in couples blame the other for the insuccess they may have, the
failures they face, they should read the opus to find that in reality, we
appear to choose a spouse because we want somebody to prevent us from doing
something we do not really want anyway, and thus the blame can be reassigned,
and in the case of the girl in summer, she blames Mrs. Iveson, but she looks
like not getting her prize anyway.
This is
speculation, not spoiler here, for I have no idea how all this will end, or I claim
to see in the future, but just like any other (or almost all other)
clairvoyant, the crystal ball I am using is a flawed, it is a question of
intuition, the experience of reading novels with similarities, using the
Chekhov rule, and last but not least, the fact that I have read The Story of
Lucy Gault and Reading Turgenev http://realini.blogspot.com/2021/06/mesmerized-by-reading-turgenev-by.html and especially the former (spoiler
alert) offers readers a glorious tale, but incredibly sad, Lucy Gault tries to
take a little trip to make her parents change their minds about moving from
Ireland, which was then in the middle of the Troubles, the war for independence
and they have been the target of young men who had wanted to burn the house,
and she is trapped in the forest, because of a serious accident and cannot
return in time
The parents
find clothes on the beach and they think they know what had happened, their
daughter must have been in the water and drowned, so they leave the house and
the island, traveling to Europe and not finding that she has been found alive
and they could return, and when Captain Gault eventually returns, after his
dear wife will have died, it seems for a while that there may be redemption,
the girl, now a young woman, may find some happiness and find the right man and
we reach a happy end…if only
Pettie
claims that she had lost a ring, when she came for the interview, in her
efforts to try and get close to Thaddeus Davenport, and she comes to the house
like a stalker, watching over the residents, and waiting for the moment when
she will be able to take her place as the nanny, and from there become the
lover and probably more…it looks at this point as if she has to and will do
something drastic, she has had a troubled childhood, she was abused by her
‘Sunday uncle’ and research shows that those with a traumatized childhood are
much more likely to become violent in their turn and abuse others…if this
happens, I will have to wait and see…
Yes, there
is a massive surprise, actually two, and Pettie does not kill the grandmother
(spoiler alerts) but does something equally horrendous, if not more, in an
attempt to gain favor with the man she thinks she loves…now, is she crazy, or
suffering from some mental condition, we do not know, unless we are talking
about readers that have degrees in the field, however, there is something quite
disturbing about the poor girl
http://realini.blogspot.com/2022/02/unique-in-world.html?q=unique+in+the+world
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