The Lovers

How does a narrator develop voices for Turkish characters who are supposed to be speaking English with a heavy accent--and do so in a way that listeners can understand? Vendela Vida's novel centers on Yvonne, a teacher from New England who is reeling from the loss of her husband in a car accident. Yvonne goes to Data, Turkey, where she spent her honeymoon, intending to contemplate her married life. The city is changed--it is now rubbish ridden, and the ocean is polluted. Suzanne Toren's resonant and dignified tone captures Yvonne's aloofness and search for connection. Although some minor English-speaking characters have dodgy accents, Toren successfully conveys the Turks speaking English, especially her landlord's wife, Ozlem (the Turkish face of Dove soap), who is both friendly and manipulative. A.B. (c) AudioFile 2010, Portland, Maine

March 8, 2010
The overwrought latest from Vida (Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name
) concerns itself with paradoxes of intimacy: isolation within a closely tied family and the unexpected affection between strangers from different cultures. Twenty-six years after her honeymoon in Datça, Turkey, recently widowed Yvonne returns to the Turkish peninsula not to relive the early happy days of her marriage but “to remember” them. Instead, she finds herself haunted by the many struggles she and her husband faced, above all the wedge driven between them by the antics of their alcoholic daughter, Aurelia. As Yvonne explores the town and its surrounding beaches, she starts to settle into her new identity as a widow and finds herself under a microscope as an American tourist traveling alone. A fast friendship with a young Turkish boy eases Yvonne's loneliness, but it also sparks the disapproval of several locals, leading to a climactic conversation and a quiet epiphany. It's a slow, self-involved story, nearly every page of which is marred by Vida's strained attempts to create high art.

Starred review from March 1, 2010
A widow vacationing in Turkey becomes slowly awakened to the tensions in the lives surrounding her and in the ones she left behind.

Like Vida's previous book, Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name (2007), this novel concerns a woman eager to escape a host of emotional frustrations back home in the United States. But instead of Northern Lights' chilly Lapland, this story is set on the sunny southwest coast of Turkey, where Yvonne has retreated after her husband's death in a car accident; there, she intends to catch up with her daughter, a recovering addict, and her well-adjusted son. But the narrative deals with Yvonne in isolation, and again Vida shows she's supremely talented at tracing the drifts of memory and emotion that course through a person. The small town where she's rented a house is near where she and her late husband spent their honeymoon some three decades earlier, and it takes little to get her thinking about her past as a wife and mother. The rented house also affects her imagination. Evidence of the owner's sex life is poorly hidden in the rooms, and when his estranged wife visits, Yvonne gets further clued into the emotional and sexual tug of war she's unwittingly stepped into. Though it briefly seems that the novel might take a more sensual turn (the book appears to take its title from Marguerite Duras' The Lover, Yvonne's beach reading), the story soon becomes more complicated. The brief friendships Yvonne strikes up with shop owners, fellow tourists and a young boy on the beach all question how useful it is to try and shed our concerns by pursuing a change of scenery, and Vida's clear, simple prose exposes how Yvonne's feelings of loss emerge despite her best efforts. A plot turn following the boy's disappearance intensifies the emotional pitch, leading to Yvonne's subtle but powerful revelation about the role she's played in others' lives.

An elegant consideration of how death and distance tightens human connections—a big theme that Vida addresses with sure-footedness and charm.

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May 15, 2010
Is it wise to return to the scene of your honeymoon after the sudden death of your spouse? Thats what Yvonne, a seemingly sensible history teacher, decides to do in Vidas polished and unnerving third novel. Founding coeditor of The Believer, winner of the Kate Chopin Writing Award, and coauthor of the screenplay for Away We Go (2009), Vida has created a brilliant, topsy-turvy, twenty-first-century variation on E. M. Forsters Passage to India. Dodging her adult children, the mismatched twins glossy Matthew and rehab-veteran Aurelia, Yvonne, in deep shock, rents a fancy house on the coast of Turkey built by the landlord for his mistress. Yvonne is befriended by zlem, the landlords aggressively inquisitive ex-wife, and becomes attached to Ahmet, a boy who collects and sells seashells. As she tries to adjust to widowhood while navigating perplexing social situations and painful memories, things go disastrously wrong. Vida creates an atmosphere at once molten and chilling as she deftly exposes the wounding reverberations of timeless conflicts between men and women, parents and children, East and West, appearance and truth.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)