Shirley Curran
We never learn the name of the intelligent French woman that Boris, Mia’s husband has chosen for his affair. She is humorously known as ‘the pause’ by Mia right through this entertaining account of how, after 30 years of marriage, Mia copes with being abandoned.
Mia’s initial shock leads her to a psychiatric unit but from that point onwards, she slowly regains her sanity and her courage to survive. She teaches a poetry course, for the summer, to seven adolescent girls. Their interaction with each other is devilish and Mia has to cope with a crisis caused by teenage nastiness.
Her mother’s reading group of wise old ladies provides crises and humour of a different kind and the neighbou’s rocky marriage needs Mia’s intervention and support. Slowly, she comes to value herself in her summer without men.
Boris is clearly painted for the reader and we read emails from this figure who has no ability to express his emotions. Daisy, the daughter, is longing for her parents to be reunited and functions as a go-between. However, in this very feminine novel, the readers are not so sure that Boris should be allowed back into the world Mia has managed to reconstruct.
The final pages give us a fine conclusion.
Siri Hustvedt is the wife of another well-known US author, Paul Auster.
GenevaLunch, 17 October 2011.
Filed under: Fiction
Tags: siri Hustvedt, The Summer Without Men
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October 17th, 2011 at 9:49 am
I just finished this book, my first ever on an e-reader (new iPad), and I loved it, both the book and the e-reading experience. The perfect travel/airplane book, with characters who are very real – imperfect, flawed and yet with redeeming features, including their way of dealing with the painful parts of relationships.