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Rose Tremain's prize-winning books, including The Road Home, The Gustav Sonata, Merivel, and The American Lover, have been published in thirty countries. Chancellor of the University of East Anglia, Commander of the Order of the British Empire, and member of the Royal Society of Literature, she lives in Norfolk, England with the biographer Richard Holmes.
The American Lover
by Rose Tremain
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ISBN-13:
9780393246728
- Publisher: Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
- Publication date: 02/16/2015
- Sold by: Barnes & Noble
- Format: eBook
- Pages: 256
- File size: 519 KB
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“A collection of stylish daring, tonal mastery and smart, tough love.”—New York Times Book Review
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.
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The New York Times Book Review - Mary Gordon
Reading Rose Tremain's stories is like sipping a Campari and soda in the bar of an elegant hotel that manages to be up to the minute without being a slave to fashion: the Carlyle, the Algonquin, the Plaza before it was turned into condos. There is a bracing acerbity to her voice, and a refusal to reduce the important human experiences to simple categories. Everything is less or more than it seems—itself, its opposite and something in between. Marriage can be a hideous entrapment or a paradisal enclosed garden or an updated form of prostitution. Sex doesn't bring happiness, unless it does. Mothers can't bear to be parted from their children or would do almost anything to get away from them…over all, this is a collection of stylish daring, tonal mastery and smart, tough love.Publishers Weekly
★ 12/22/2014In the title story, which kicks off this collection from Tremain (Man Booker Prize shortlisted for Restoration), Beth, a British author nearing 30, has recently been in a car accident that broke both her legs. Recuperating at her parents’ apartment, Beth takes to waiting for Rosalita, the housekeeper, who comes by every afternoon and listens to the story of Beth’s life, while dusting and sharing some stories of her own. In Paris at age 19, Beth was seduced by an older, aloof American who left her bereft after his sudden departure. Beth then depicted their relationship in what became a global sensation of a novel, which made her rich but no less forlorn. “The Housekeeper” features a former servant in a grand English estate recounting the betrayal of a lover. In “Extra Geography,” two high school girls, both field hockey players, set their sights on a young female teacher. The breadth of subjects and settings is matched by Tremain’s exquisite prose. Readers might just want to take a break between stories, to savor the language and the images. (Feb.)
Peter Cameron
How wonderful to have a new book of Rose Tremain’s stories. Like her novels, they are brilliant in both their execution and their variation. I know no other fiction writer who is so smart and so wise about so many different places and people. This book contains a thrilling world of stories.San Francisco Chronicle
Rose Tremain’s writing is so good, she makes us hear English anew.Brad Hooper - Booklist
In this season of outstanding story collections… this one occupies space in the top drawer… Tremain’s adeptness at not only drawing in page-length but also, and more important, reducing theme and plot to a smaller scale while simultaneously creating a compelling narrative tension is to be admired.Library Journal
12/01/2014Tremain's baker's dozen stories are beautiful depictions of the messy interiors of human emotions. In her title story, a once-popular author, now crippled after a devastating accident, reflects on the obsessive love affair that both made and destroyed her. In "The Jester of Astapovo," a depressed 1910 Russian stationmaster stuck in a shriveled marriage while pining for an unattainable "other" is caught up in the drama of hiding a desperately ill Leo Tolstoy from his madly controlling wife. "The Housekeeper" moves forward 26 years, presenting the story behind the story of Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca. The narrator, Mrs. Danowski, is asked by her employer, Lord de Whithers of Manderville Hall, to give visiting guest du Maurier a tour of the estate. A stop at the summerhouse on the grounds triggers an explosive, albeit secretive affair between the women that ultimately leads to shocking literary betrayal. VERDICT Award-winning novelist Tremain (The Road Home) has written an exquisite collection of stories that span decades, continents, and the thin line between reality and imagination, with each piece fleshing out conflicts of the heart with masterly strokes.[See Prepub Alert, 8/22/14.]—Beth Andersen, formerly with Ann Arbor Dist. Lib., MI
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2014-12-07Loneliness and lust eddy through the pages of a dexterous collection of short stories by Tremain (Merivel, 2013, etc.). It opens with the title story, in which a British teenager, Beth, is seduced by an American photographer named Thaddeus, a man her father's age, in 1960s London. He takes her to Paris, where they stay in a skimpily furnished apartment overlooking Montparnasse Cemetery and go to bed with a woman named Fred. Back in London, Thaddeus vanishes just as Beth realizes she's pregnant. After an abortion, she turns their affair into a roman à clef that brings fame and fortune but no closure. The written word proves altogether more potent in "The Housekeeper," which imagines a passionate relationship between "Miss du Maurier" and one Mrs. Danowski, the fictitious inspiration for Rebecca's Mrs. Danvers. Years later, living slenderly in a room by the sea, Danowski reflects on how she's been shaped by du Maurier's decision to make a villain out of her: "I think I am probably frightening to look at, ugly in fact, as ugly as she made me in the book." Lost love of all varieties drives other stories, too. Debt forces a man to sell the apple orchards he grew up among; a war widow is forced to part with her only child when her in-laws pay for a posh boarding school; an adolescent girl observes her friend stride on ahead toward adulthood without her. Throughout, melancholy is offset by Tremain's worldliness, her quick wit and the sheer joy that's to be had from characterization as deft as this: "She was a stumpy little person, optimistically named Patience." Wholly enthralling, these stories gleam with human desire and malice and hope as they move between Tolstoy's Russia, World War II France and present-day London.