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Trespass (Vintage Contemporaries)
Two women, Chloe Dale, an artist comfortably ensconced in bucolic suburbia, and Salome Drago, a wily, seductive refugee from a country that no longer exists, confront each other in a Manhattan restaurant, and the battle lines are drawn. Toby Dale, son of the artist and ardent suitor of the refugee, is in no position to choose sides. Outside, the drumbeats for the impending...more
Paperback, 304 pages
Published
September 23rd 2008
by Vintage
(first published January 1st 2007)
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As Valerie Martin’s novel opens, Chloe Dale is lunching in a chic Manhattan restaurant just before the second Iraq war. She is there to meet her son Toby’s girlfriend, Salome Drago, for the first time. Salome, an intense, brusque Catholic Croat, is a refugee, along with her brother and father, from the Balkans. To Chloe, she is also “the vengeful orphan, the ungrateful outsider, the coming retribution of the great underclass" who mirrors Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights, the book Chloe, an a...more
I’ve read several novels by Valerie Martin and have enjoyed and admired them; I don’t think Trespass is quite as good as others I’ve read. The novel deals with Chloe, an illustrator whose affluent and peaceful life is threatened by dual causes: a poacher on the grounds of their home and the fact that her son Toby has become engaged to Salome, a Croatian refugee. The story includes multiple viewpoint characters and extends to Louisiana, where Salome’s father now lives, and ultimately to Trieste, ...more
This novel had, in the abstract, very little plot, but was fully captivating--even almost a page-turner because I cared deeply what happened to the characters. In the plot, such as it was, a mother is troubled by her college-aged son's choice of a new girlfriend, while the father, a history professor who's struggling to find meaning in his work, tries to mediate. In a side story, the mother, an artist (specifically, a book illustrator who's working on illustrations for a new edition of Wuthering...more
Valerie Martin is a wonderful writer. Somehow she grabs you from the first sentence, makes you love her characters, and holds your interest to the very end. Each of her novels is different: Mary Reilly features the maid of Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde, Italian Fever is a ghost/mystery story; and Property involves a slave and her owner before the Civil War (she won the Orange Prize for this one, beating Zadie Smith and Donna Tartt). Yet Martin brilliantly mines the intimate relationships of her characte...more
She's a good writer but I hated every single character, so I pretty much skimmed this one. Also, it contained entire chapters in &%$ing italics. Chapters! I'm not reading 13 pages of italics! I'm old, and I need to save my eyeballs.
If you want to tell a story from an another character's POV, and you want to make that clear, just call the chapter something like "Listen UP! Now It's That Croat Chick Talking!"
If you want to tell a story from an another character's POV, and you want to make that clear, just call the chapter something like "Listen UP! Now It's That Croat Chick Talking!"
Critics hail Trespass as a "stunning" work (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette), with the potential to introduce Valerie Martin (best known for her 2001 novel Mary Reilly) to a wider audience. The novel combines the drama of family relationships with larger themes of xenophobia, war, and genocide; it also juxtaposes the comfort of the American middle class with the horrors suffered by victims of ethnic cleansing in other parts of the world. Although a couple of reviewers found the plot forced at
...more
This book was strange but very engaging. Just prior to Desert Storm, an American family gets caught up in the aftermath of Croatian survivors after the war with Serbs in Yugoslavia. The Croatian mother's story of her past is intermingled with the present as mother and daughter are reunited with unexpected consequences for the Americans. There is an underlying motif of WUTHERING HEIGHTS since the American mother Chloe is working on illustrations for a reprinting of the novel. With a different...more
The first shot fired in this multi-layered novel about battlefields and victims, is over a basket of rolls in an expensive New York restaurant. Chloe Dale has met her beloved only son Toby's new girlfriend, and his girlfriend's first crime is being named Salome Drago, her second, being foreign. Despite identifying as a liberal, and despite her endless reserves of love and devotion Chloe has for her husband and son, the woman still cannot shake the itchy hand of upper class prejudice as she appr...more
Whew. This one was strange and kind of a slog. All the characters were woodenly stiff, unlikeable, oddly disconnected (and yes, I get that this is a theme hammered in by the constant presence of THE WAR and THE PRESIDENT and RACISM and FEAR that hums in the not-so-subtle back ground of every story) and the narrative gave up on all its tensions for a tidy, pretty unbelievable ending. All in all, a disappointment - but not such a grave one. It's more like this book just happened to me over the pas...more
Chloe’s son Toby is a junior at New York University. He seems to have met the love of his life in Salome Drago, a Croatian classmate. Eager to have his girlfriend and mother meet, they arrange for lunch and immediately Chloe can't stand Salome. She thinks Salome's peculiar and hostile. And despite Toby’s best efforts at refereeing the two, Chloe walks away with the suspicion that Salome's using Toby. As if her encounter with Salome weren't enough, she returns home only to be reminded of a p...more
Multi-layered story that raises many complex issues, including the question of 'foreignness,' and the fascination and fear that the 'outsider' can inspire. I esp enjoyed how this theme is drawn out with the art one of the characters is creating for an illustrated edition of "Wuthering Heights."
It starts off a bit slow (which didn't bother me), but very quickly becomes hard to put down. And while it may seem that the ending is all tied up in pretty bows for the characters (...more
It starts off a bit slow (which didn't bother me), but very quickly becomes hard to put down. And while it may seem that the ending is all tied up in pretty bows for the characters (...more
Toby is the 21-year-old only son of Chloe, a book illustrator, and Brendan, a history professor. When Toby falls in love with, impregnates, and marries a brash, slightly untamed Croatian-American student named Salome, Chloe is horrified. She is certain Toby has been "trapped" by a woman she sees as unsavory and a threat. Meanwhile, Salome's past in war-torn Croatia suddenly rears up, creating havoc for her and Toby. Finally, Chloe is obsessed with a poacher (she's convinced he's "...more
This book sounded interesting but as I read it, it never really went anywhere. It's basically about a mother and a daughter-in-law that don't really like each other. But, they spend little time together. In fact, the characters often spend the book lost in their own thoughts about each other instead of actually interacting, so the dramatic tension is a little mushy. Also, the resolution is, not quite cliche, but kinda pedestrian and too easy.
This book was recommended to me by the school librarian and all during the first half of the book I kept wondering if I should bother to finish it. However, because it was recommended to me I persevered and was glad I did as it did get better. It's a book to read when you want something quite serious, as the subject matter is quite heavy. While I was glad I finished it, I'm not sure if I would recommend it to anyone else.
This book had an interesting plot, but a strange way of solving problems. It was just not believable. Even the death of the main character was treated more like a convenience, solving a myriad of problems, than the tragedy it should have been. The ending was even more bizarre; all life's problems can be solved with "love". It might make a good movie, but it was not a great novel.
I liked the characters in this book. The detailed descriptions of the recent war in the Czech Republic and its affects on the lives of the people there were almost more graphic than I could stand. But it served as a reminder that war ALWAYS does this to the victims. A grim reminder to pray and act for Peace.
A very satisfying read. Well written. Keeps your interest throughout. Makes you think about a lot of things--relationships within families, among colleagues, and between natives and immigrants. It also visits current events (ethnic wars and atrocities). Definitely worth the time spent and I'll check out other books she's written.
A little disjointed initially, flitting between Chloe, Brendan, Salome, Toby and the 'unknown' story from Croatia. However, as it all comes together and the 'unknown' story reveals itself, it becomes an interesting and thought provoking novel. I thoroughly enjoyed it.
I liked the author's writing style, in fact, I couldn't put the book down. But I'm not sure I could recommend it to anyone. I read someone else's comments that I would have to agree with - I'm not sure I came away with anything. Months from now, I probably won't remember much about it.
The author's gift is that of language. The reader gets insights into the characters through carefully and sparingly chosen words allowing a picture that comes into focus as though through a lens adjustment on a camera. After I finished reading the book, I could have bid the characters goodbye without a backward glance; it was the remembered phrases that took me back to the book with highlighter in hand: "Something drops from one of the trees near the pond, something heavy, ponderous, a ch...more
Recommended by a book review: When NYU student Toby Dale introduces his girlfriend, Salome, to his mother, things don’t go well between the two women. Chloe Dale’s distrust of Salome deepens when the young Croatian woman becomes pregnant, marries Toby, and then disappears to Europe to find her mother, who she thought was dead. Throughout the novel, the young couple’s romance is juxtaposed with Chloe’s marriage to Brendan, a detached history professor. The Dale family’s story is interwoven, in tu...more
I liked this book at the beginning: interesting, smart characters, nice prose style, good sense of place but then about half way through, the plot took a strange turn which made the second half of the book much different than the first half. And not in any way that worked for me. Disappointing.
Written beautifully, with descriptions that come alive, this novel has nearly no redeeming characters. Each person is either irritating or dumb, and it's difficult to build a relationship with them until the last page (literally) of the book. I very much felt removed from feeling anything from the characters, even those whose journeys were tragic and therefore supposedly heart-tugging. It was as though I was watching everything through a window (hmm) or trespassing, if you will. These feeling...more
Strangely, I identified with the prospective mother-in-law, the narrator, not the rejected girlfriend. I did not think the sojourn into the former Yugoslavia really worked. But still, worth reading. Am starting to think Martin is especially gifted and narrating male characters.
not nearly as good as Property. I really tried to like this book because Martin does write well but I couldn't give a rats about the characters and the story wandered. but she sure does produce elegant sentences.
Two families and their involvement with two different wars are contrasted in this novel. Very political point of view and I suspect the book club's discussion will be lively. Americans are painted as removed from their own wars (true) and indifferent to and ignorant about world affairs (true.)
While this suffers from an inscrutable ending, its topical discussion of the war in the former Yugoslavia as well as current political realities in the West is unique and provocative.
This book was very unevenly written - the author tries pull together many different settings, atmospheres, and characters ostensibly around the theme of dealing with "otherness", but she fails to say anything interesting. A weird blend of literary analysis of Wuthering Heights (only thinly veiled as the thoughts of one of the main characters), petty family squabbles in a family with a doting mother who clearly cannot let her son grow up, and graphic war scenes, this novel never really ...more
It was alittle confusing at times, jumping back and forth between places and characters so I didn't think I would finish it, but I did and finally got the storyline. I liked Ms. Martin's book, "Property"
better.
better.
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