Reviews for Perfect Timing

The average rating for Perfect Timing based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2013-04-27 00:00:00 Kimberley K Williams William Trevor is meticulous in every tiny detail, psychologically very profound and to him human lives are open books� A person�s life isn�t orderly, it runs about all over the place, in and out through time. The present�s hardly there; the future doesn�t exist. Only love matters in the bits and pieces of a person�s life. Love may either make one happy or bring the bitter unhappiness: the heroine�s marriage turns into an excruciating disaster so she tries to hide in her dreamworld but a dreamworld is so brittle� Life in Reading Turgenev is mournfully sorrowful. Once, somewhere, I have seen a painted frieze continuing around the inside walls of a church � people processing in old-fashioned dress, proceeding on their way to Heaven or to Hell, I�m not sure which. Over the years the tourists who have come to my house have lingered in my memory like that. The heroine is a guesthouse proprietress and an author of some pink novels � she and her guests are trying to recuperate after a terrible gory calamity. Judging by the human nature depicted in the novel the people on the frieze are heading for hell� Life in My House in Umbria is sorrowfully mournful. Two Lives, thousand destinies, million fates � every facet of human existence is precious.

Review # 2 was written on 2016-10-20 00:00:00 Christy Raupp Two women. Two lives. Multiple realities. �Two Lives� couldn�t be a more befitting title for this book, for it consists of two stories narrated by middle-aged women who review past events to make sense of their dismal present. Such title could also be interpreted as the alternative existences both protagonists create in their minds to cope with the unsparing reality that has robbed them of their youthful illusions. Told in the first-person narrative, the reader is dragged away in a deluge of unreliable memories that blends with the accounts of the grim lives these women recite in muffled resignation, as if they tried to convince themselves that the traumatic experiences they went through didn�t actually befall on them. Trevor presents two heroines that couldn�t be more opposed in character, background or aspirations. Whereas Mary Louise is docile, Emily is feisty. Whereas the former is innocent but of a strategic frame of mind, the later is sexually experienced but gullible. One is barely touched by her older husband, who drowns his shame in whisky, while the other is abused by her foster father at the tender age of eight, a fact that sets the doomed course for the rest of her lifetime. What do these women have in common besides their age, then? That they both seek refuge and consolation in words, in literature, in parallel universes they can access through the power of their inextinguishable imagination. Be it Turgenev�s short stories or romantic paperbacks that provide make-believe solace, these women take a stand and preserve their quiet courage without betraying their ideals. They also challenge the morals of a collectively established authority with stoic endurance. Thus, these same illusory worlds allow them to remain true to themselves in spite of the silent anxiety, the indescribable humiliations that are intuited in-between the silences that pulsate in this low-keyed narration, which wrings the reader�s heart until it seems it will take flight from the chest. Trevor�s outwardly modest prose does the trick. The subdued melancholy that pervades these stories evokes a strong sense of place impregnated with almost supernatural timelessness, making them undeniably Irish because of the asphyxiating atmosphere so distinctive of the isolated rural communities of the Emerald Isle, which in turn relates naturally to the dual quality of the dissatisfied love-hate feelings that haunt Trevor�s characters. Their yearnings, their feverish daydreaming, their wasted passions remain irredeemably bound to a land that simultaneously imprisons and gives them reason to be. And such is the burden of readers; that of juggling several realities and inescapable ends without losing the zest for their one and only life while reincarnating people from vanished worlds to grant them the acknowledgment they were denied at the time. Burden and escapism at once, that is the contradictory nature of those who juggle boundless fiction and limiting circumstances.