This book recommendation comes rather late in the day, but - what can I say? - I'm keeping my own time. So, I just read Two Lives by William Trevor. It was first published some 20 years ago and consists of two novels in one: Reading Turgenev and My House in Umbria. Both of them are superb. They're quite separate stories, but sit well together for both being about the life of a woman, and both women illustrating the way in which the lives we live in our heads can so mark the lives we live, period, as to make the boundary lines difficult to interpret and to navigate. Trevor's writing is, as always, deft and economical. Each of the two stories has enough drama in it to keep the reader's attention fastened upon the lives he's created.
And here this post does a turn and becomes interrogative. Because it struck me that Trevor often writes about women, and women with difficult or unusual lives. Drawing just on those of his books I've read, there are, apart from, Reading Turgenev and My House in Umbria, Felicia's Journey, The Story of Lucy Gault and Love and Summer. And then I thought also of Sebastian Barry and Annie Dunne, The Secret Scripture and On Canaan's Side; and of Colm Tóibín and The Blackwater Lightship and Brooklyn; and of John McGahern and Amongst Women and the special - beloved - place of his mother in Memoir.
And, now, I know there's a certain selectivity in this exercise, but it just strikes me that here are Irish male writers often basing their writing upon central women protagonists. My question, then, is: have I identified a real phenomenon in this or is it just a result of the selectivity? Do Irish male writers write more about women than other male writers do? And if it's a real phenomenon, where does it come from? Is there something specific to Irish culture here? The expression 'I'm only asking' truly applies in this case. I am. I have no theories to offer, merely questions.