Available:*
Library | Call Number | Status |
|---|---|---|
Searching... Monmouth Public Library | Fic Tremain, R. 2010 | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... McMinnville Public Library | Tremain, R. | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Newberg Public Library | FICTION TREMAIN | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Salem Main Library | Tremain, R. | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
In a silent valley in southern France stands an isolated stone farmhouse, the Mas Lunel. Aramon, the owner, is so haunted by his violent past that he's become incapable of all meaningful action, letting his hunting dogs starve and his land go to ruin. Meanwhile, his sister Audrun, alone in her modern bungalow within sight of the Mas Lunel, dreams of exacting retribution for the unspoken betrayals that have blighted her life. Into this closed world comes Anthony Verey, a wealthy but disillusioned antiques dealer from London. When he sets his sights on the Mas, a frightening and unstoppable series of consequences is set in motion.
"Rose Tremain's writing is so good, she makes us hear English anew," writes the San Francisco Chronicle. This powerful and unsettling new work reveals yet another dimension to Tremain's extraordinary imagination.
Author Notes
Rose Tremain was born in London, England on August 2, 1943. She has written several novels including The Way I Found Her, Merivel: A Man of His Time, and The American Lover. Restoration was adapted into a movie in 1995 and a stage production in 2009. She has won numerous awards including the James Tait Memorial Prize and the Prix Femina Etranger for Sacred Country, the Whitbread Novel of the Year Award for Music and Silence, and the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2008 for The Road Home. She was made a CBE in 2007.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Two pairs of siblings and their twisted pasts converge in this gripping, dark novel from Orange Prize-winner Tremain (The Road Home). In the southern French Cevennes region, Audrun lives a peaceful if bitter life in a small bungalow a stone's throw from her family home. She's been cast out, either by inheritance or some terrible transgression; her drunken, spiteful brother, Aramon, who still resides there, hopes to sell the home to foreign tourists, an act that would further uproot Audrun. Meanwhile, Anthony Verey, a once-renowned London antiques dealer, having reached an existential precipice, descends on his sister, Veronica, who lives near the Cevennes with her lover, Kitty. As Anthony and Kitty quietly battle for Veronica's affections, Audrun and Aramon struggle with their history and land. Anthony wants a home in the region, hoping it will fill his void, and he joins the wave of foreigners hungrily circling the area. Soon, a series of rash decisions impacts all of their lives in brutal, unforgettable ways. Tremain renders this untamed area with haunting prose, but the affecting sense of dread she builds makes her tale at times unrelentingly grim. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
Two very different sets of siblings, one French, one English, seek resolution to their fraught upbringings and present discontent in this latest tale of intertwining lives from Tremain (The Road Home, 2008, etc.).When his success as a London antiques dealer wanes, Anthony Verey, solitary but for his sexual proclivity for young men, travels to southern France where his sister, Veronica, lives and gardens with her partner and lover, Kitty, while writing a book titled Gardening without Rain that Kitty, a mediocre watercolorist, intends to illustrate. Anthony decides, much to the dismay of his sister's lover, to purchase property nearby. His interest falls on the Lunel family homestead, where the Lunel siblings live locked in antipathythe alcoholic Aramon in the filth and decay of the family's once fine home, and his sister, Audrun, relegated to a squalid cottage beside the wood that is her meager birthright. Aramon plans to sell the house to a rich foreigner, and Audrun, tired of cleaning up his messes, loathes him for his mistreating his land, property and animals, but most of all for plotting to convert their home into cash. The proximity of Audrun's cottage to the Mas Lunel is an obstacle to its sale and so he contests their property boundaries. Audrun wishes Aramon dead; Kitty has similar hopes for Anthony, who has proven himself an apple of discord thrown into their paradisiacal existence. As the dry mistral desiccates the landscape, tensions strain until, quite suddenly, Anthony disappears. Tremain sensually, intricately depicts the landscape, gardens and woods of southern France. The author's latest is worth reading for its flights of interior narration and iridescent, vivid descriptions. There's a solid story to boot.A well-executed, intense tale of dark family secrets coming to light in a sunny place.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
The word trespass takes on multiple meanings in Tremain's emotionally searing novel. The lives of two pairs of aging siblings converge and overlap in a lushly neglected valley in the Cévennes region of southern France. With his once-successful career as a London antiques dealer on an increasingly downward spiral, Anthony Verey decides to visit his sister Veronica, now cozily ensconced in the valley with her lover, Kitty. Disillusioned by the negative trajectory of his life and charmed by the feral beauty of the area, he decides to purchase a home nearby, causing friction between Veronica and Kitty. What appears to be the perfect property, the Mas Lunel estate, is haunted by the brutally abusive past of sibling-owners Aramon and Audrun. As these characters trespass on one another physically, emotionally, and psychologically, Tremain ratchets up the suspense, setting the stage for an appropriately dark and bitter denouement.--Flanagan, Margaret Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
IN his 1943 study of E.M. Forster, Lionel Trilling described "Howards End," published in 1910, as a novel "about the rights of property, about a destroyed will-and-testament and rightful and wrongful heirs. It asks the question, 'Who shall inherit England?'" A century later, the British novelist Rose Tremain has given us "Trespass," a dark and unflinching novel that is also about rights of property, in this case to a former silkworm hatchery called the Mas Lunel, in the Cévennes region of France. The question, however, is not "Who shall inherit France?" It is "Shall France be inherited by its occupiers?" "Trespass" is set in the last years of the first decade of this century. The British economy is in recession, and Anthony Verey, a London-based antiques dealer in his 60s, has lost his way. Business is bad. Once a power broker in interior design and a sought-after dinner guest - he recalls with pleasure his habit of leaving parties "ostentatiously early" just to "sniff for a second the dark scent of disappointment he left hanging in his wake" - he lives entombed among his "beloveds," objects with impressive pedigrees ("French, late Louis XV pastoral, by Aubusson") that he can neither bear to part with nor, in the current economic climate, afford to sell. Somewhat on the spur of the moment, he decides to pay a visit to his sister, Veronica, a landscape architect, and her lover, Kitty, at their farmhouse in southern France, Les Glaniques, where they are collaborating on a book to be entitled "Gardening Without Rain." While the prospect of Anthony's arrival delights Veronica, it is less than welcome to Kitty, who fears (rightly) that he will drive a wedge between them. Like most of the characters in "Trespass," Kitty is neither attractive nor generous. A mediocre watercolorist, "the only child of sad parents who had spent their lives trying to run a guest house on the Norfolk coast," she lives in a state of chronic artistic malaise for which the late-blooming erotic fulfillment of her partnership with Veronica provides only partial compensation. As the baby brother whom Veronica has always adored and protected - especially against their petulant mother, Lal, whose memory he cherishes - Anthony threatens to undermine not just the couple's conjugal equanimity but Kitty's fragile self-confidence. (It is indicative of her nature that she presumes herself to be no match for Anthony, and that the obverse of her self-deprecation is cold-heartedness. "As Veronica ordered crème caramels and coffees, Kitty thought how she'd like to march Anthony Verey down to the bridge below them and shackle his feet to stones and tip him into the raging water.") Anthony's object in coming to France, however, is not merely to trouble the placid waters of Kitty's French idyll. It is to buy and restore a house of his own, specifically the Mas Lunel, which Aramon Lunel has put on the market for 450,000 euros at the urging of a pair of raptorial mother-and-daughter real estate agents. Like the despairing and alcoholic Aramon, the Mas is maimed, possibly beyond cure: two of its original three wings are missing, and there is a worrisome crack in the wall that Aramon has disguised with mortar and plaster. Meanwhile, within sight of the Mas, in an ugly bungalow like a guilty conscience, lives Aramon's sister, Audrun, to whom he and their father once did unspeakable violence. Like "Howards End," "Trespass" proves that the vagaries of real estate can make for dramatic fiction. Unwilling or unable to overlook the blight of Audrun's bungalow, Anthony tells the real estate agents that he will make an offer on the Mas only if the bungalow is demolished. This ultimatum, in turn, leads Aramon to hire a surveyor to see if the bungalow might be built on the wrong side of the property line separating Audrun's land from his, in the hope of forcing her to sell. For her part, Audrun would sooner murder Aramon than be pushed off her land, to which she is deeply attached. (Her first plan for his removal - which Tremain describes with a grisly matter-of-factness to rival Patricia Highsmith's - involves barbiturates, an enema and a wine cork.) Then there is Kitty, unsure whether the best means of ridding herself of Anthony would be to encourage him to buy the Mas (which would get him out of Les Glaniques but leave him within driving distance) or discourage him from buying the Mas (in which case he might, but might not, return to London). Intensifying the mood of impending violence are some hunting dogs that Aramon keeps locked up and starving in his barn, a shotgun that mysteriously contains two spent cartridges, and Audrun's susceptibility to what she calls "episodes": seizures during which "the dead, becoming formless, also became agile and could seep not only into your dreams, but into the very air you were breathing." "Trespass" is a precision-tooled novel. The author of 15 works of fiction, among them the Booker-shortlisted "Restoration," Tremain knows how to work the authorial searchlight, which in this case she keeps squarely directed at the question of expropriation: literal (Aramon's desperate ploy to get Audrun out of her bungalow); emotional (Anthony's hijacking of Veronica away from Kitty); sexual (Audrun's abuse at the hands of her father and brother); and cultural (a local mayor's campaign to stop wealthy foreigners from buying up all the region's country houses). Echoes of the German occupation repercuss - there is a hint that Audrun may be the child of a German SS officer and a "putain de collabo" - as do warnings against the maltreatment of the natural world by both sellers like Aramon and buyers like Anthony, who in their desperation "to make real and tangible . . . the fugitive wonders that flickered into their minds" unwittingly contribute to the ravishment of the very landscape by which they are seduced. In Audrun's view, these buyers are "helpless. . . . They begin by believing they can care for it all by some means. But in fact, they don't understand one single thing about the earth." Of course unwanted kittens are also helpless, which would not stop a woman like Audrun from drowning them. None of the characters in "Trespass" are likable. On the contrary, to a one, they are self-interested, embittered and vindictive. At times, Tremain's exposures, always merciless, verge on the assaultive. So authoritative is her storytelling, however, that I kept reading, until in the final pages a wholly unexpected (and wholly earned) mood of redemption suffused the narrative, and I understood her bold and risky design. As in any novel of property, it is the threat of eviction - from home, from a sense of self, from consciousness - that hangs most heavily over the characters in "Trespass" and impels them to act with such unexpected ruthlessness. In 1910, Forster shocked his bourgeois readers by forcing them to look at the world through the eyes of the wretched and disenfranchised Leonard Bast, to inhale, in Forster's words, "odors from the abyss." A hundred years later, Rose Tremain goes further. She grabs her readers by their ankles and dangles them over the abyss. She spares us nothing and she never lets us go. 'Trespass,' like 'Howards End,' proves that vagaries of real estate can make for dramatic fiction. David Leavitt is the author, most recently, of "The Indian Clerk." He teaches at the University of Florida.
Library Journal Review
Two pairs of siblings, all in late middle age, are set on a trajectory to collide with one another. The English Vereys meet the French Lunels in the Cevennes region of southern France. Anthony Verey is winding down his once successful career as a dealer in fine antiques now that the bottom has fallen out of the market. On a visit to his sister and her lesbian lover, he makes the fateful decision to buy a home nearby. This puts him in the direct path of Aramon and Audrun, a brother and sister who share an inherited property and whose relationship has been poisoned by years of sexual abuse perpetrated by the brother. He now wants to sell the old stone house left to him by their parents while his sister schemes to get it from him. Verdict No Tremain novel is like any other. This one is much darker but no less compelling than the celebrated The Road Home. Read her for her lushly descriptive settings, her deeply flawed but intensely interesting characters, and her imaginative plots. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 6/1/10.]--Barbara Love, Kingston Frontenac P.L., Ont. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.