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Rose Tremain awakens the senses in this magnificent and diverse collection of short stories.
Trapped in a London apartment, Beth remembers a transgressive love affair in 1960s Paris. The most famous writer in Russia takes his last breath in a stationmaster's cottage, miles from Moscow. A young woman who is about to marry a rich aristocrat instead begins a torrid relationship with a construction worker. A father, finally free of his daughter's demands, embarks on a long swim from his Canadian lakeside retreat. A middle-aged woman cares for her injured mother at Christmas. And in the grandest house of all, Danni the Polish housekeeper catches the eye of an enigmatic visitor, Daphne du Maurier.
Rose Tremain awakens the senses in this magnificent and diverse collection of short stories. In her precise yet sensuous style, she lays bare the soul of her characters - the admirable, the embarrassing, the unfulfilled, the sexy, and the adorable - to uncover a dazzling range of human emotions and desires.
1.
All day long, lying on the sofa in the sitting room of her parents' London mansion flat, Beth hears the clunk of the elevator doors opening and closing.
Sometimes, she hears voices on the landing people arriving or departing and then the long sigh of the elevator descending. She wishes there were no people, no elevator, no pain. She stares at the old-fashioned room. She stares at her crutches, propped up against a wing chair. In a few months' time she is going to be thirty.
There is a Portuguese maid, Rosalita, who comes in at two o'clock every day.
She is never late. Rosalita has a gentle face and plump, downy arms. As she sprays the furniture with beeswax polish, she will often talk about her old life, and this is the only thing that Beth enjoys hearing about Rosalita's old life in a garment factory in Setúbal, making costumes for matadors. The places Rosalita describes are hot and bright and filled with the sound of sewing machines ...
I highly recommend The American Lover to any reader who loves literary short stories, characters intricately drawn, and narratives that take you into the far-away lives of others while tethering you to the familiarity of such humanity that you will begin to see your own life in a new and clearer light. It would be a great book club choice...continued
Full Review (734 words)
(Reviewed by Sharry Wright).
In the story "The Jester of Astapovo," from The American Lover, a simple stationmaster's life is turned upside down when the world-famous author Count Leo Tolstoy, arrives, near death. The elderly and ailing Tolstoy really did die at the remote train station after fleeing his wife weeks earlier. His obituary in The New York Times began: Tolstoy Is Dead: Long Fight Over. ASTAPOVA, Sunday, Nov. 20, 1910 — Count Tolstoy died at 6:05 this morning. The Countess Tolstoy was admitted to the sickroom at 5:50. Tolstoy did not recognize her."
Nearly a month earlier, Leo Tolstoy, one of the most famous men in Russia, had vanished from his home in the middle of the night and turned up two days later at Shamardino Convent where his sister ...
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When men are not regretting that life is so short, they are doing something to kill time.
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