Vendela Vida’s The Lovers Looks Back in Unconscious Anger

Vendela Vida is founding editor of The Believer, a literary magazine. The Lovers (Ecco Books) is her third novel. She will be at the University Bookstore (4326 University Way NE) on Thursday, July 15th at 7 p.m. to read and sign, and probably answer questions.

A few weeks ago I was in the electronics department of my local Costco when I realized that I was a time traveler. Somehow, without even noticing what was happening, I had skipped a decade: the world that I thought I knew had changed, and I knew nothing. I was as adrift as a headhunter in a Safeway. It was terrifying, but I survived.

I remembered that moment, and all the moments in my life when I’ve felt lost among the superficially familiar, while reading The Lovers, Vendela Vida’s stark and graceful novel set on the Turkish Riviera.

With simple, restrained language Vida sketches out a few days in the life of Yvonne, widowed, purposeless, and simmering with an anger that she refuses to acknowledge. Her aimlessness lands her in Datca, in pursuit of memory, or the memory of a memory.

Though the room was empty, it still felt alive, as though a great number of people had congregated there the night before and departed in the early hours of morning.

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Other characters drift into what is indisputably Yvonne’s narrative: they speak, drink tea, act as semi-mystical guides, then drift away, leaving barely a dent in Yvonne’s internal dialogue. Yvonne is so cocooned in the stories she has told about her life that she has stopped seeing the reality of it: “She felt she was tracing an unravelled ball of string to its source. She had been so happy at the beginning.” This schism gives the novel a sense of detachment that emphasizes the drama of the climax.

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Although it is set in a coastal village, The Lovers is not the sort of novel that I would characterize as a “beach read.” It ends on a slightly up note, but overall the story is haunting and sad, far better suited to reading on a cool, rainy day in a comfortable chair with a nice cup of tea. And maybe with a box of tissues conveniently nearby.