Josh Emmons
Vida is a subtle writer whose voice is spare and authoritative, at times sounding like a less gothic Paul Bowles, and her third novel is further evidence that she can fashion characters as unpredictable as they are endearing. Although its ending is a little rushed (some situations feel arbitrarily abandoned), the book is a satisfying, often brilliant portrait of a woman searching for relief from things that will not, she discovers at last with something like acceptance, go away.
—The New York Times
Carolyn See
Sometimes, it seems as if a man would rather struggle into a pair of pantyhose than read a novel by a woman, but everyone might want to take a look at this book. Its title is misleading, perhaps purposefully so; it's really about travel and the frailty of our own identities…The Lovers is somber, seductive, reflective, unsettling. All our lives are journeys, come to think of it. Hopefully, we shed some of our ignorance along the way. Vida writes—so beautifully!—about this process.
—The Washington Post
Publishers Weekly
The overwrought latest from Vida (Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name) concerns itself with paradoxes of intimacy: isolation within a closely tied family and the unexpected affection between strangers from different cultures. Twenty-six years after her honeymoon in Datça, Turkey, recently widowed Yvonne returns to the Turkish peninsula not to relive the early happy days of her marriage but “to remember” them. Instead, she finds herself haunted by the many struggles she and her husband faced, above all the wedge driven between them by the antics of their alcoholic daughter, Aurelia. As Yvonne explores the town and its surrounding beaches, she starts to settle into her new identity as a widow and finds herself under a microscope as an American tourist traveling alone. A fast friendship with a young Turkish boy eases Yvonne's loneliness, but it also sparks the disapproval of several locals, leading to a climactic conversation and a quiet epiphany. It's a slow, self-involved story, nearly every page of which is marred by Vida's strained attempts to create high art. (July)
Kirkus Reviews
A widow vacationing in Turkey becomes slowly awakened to the tensions in the lives surrounding her and in the ones she left behind. Like Vida's previous book, Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name (2007), this novel concerns a woman eager to escape a host of emotional frustrations back home in the United States. But instead of Northern Lights' chilly Lapland, this story is set on the sunny southwest coast of Turkey, where Yvonne has retreated after her husband's death in a car accident; there, she intends to catch up with her daughter, a recovering addict, and her well-adjusted son. But the narrative deals with Yvonne in isolation, and again Vida shows she's supremely talented at tracing the drifts of memory and emotion that course through a person. The small town where she's rented a house is near where she and her late husband spent their honeymoon some three decades earlier, and it takes little to get her thinking about her past as a wife and mother. The rented house also affects her imagination. Evidence of the owner's sex life is poorly hidden in the rooms, and when his estranged wife visits, Yvonne gets further clued into the emotional and sexual tug of war she's unwittingly stepped into. Though it briefly seems that the novel might take a more sensual turn (the book appears to take its title from Marguerite Duras' The Lover, Yvonne's beach reading), the story soon becomes more complicated. The brief friendships Yvonne strikes up with shop owners, fellow tourists and a young boy on the beach all question how useful it is to try and shed our concerns by pursuing a change of scenery, and Vida's clear, simple prose exposes how Yvonne's feelings of loss emerge despite her bestefforts. A plot turn following the boy's disappearance intensifies the emotional pitch, leading to Yvonne's subtle but powerful revelation about the role she's played in others' lives. An elegant consideration of how death and distance tightens human connections-a big theme that Vida addresses with sure-footedness and charm.
Zoe Heller
Vendela Vida writes with elegance and economy. In this engrossing novel, she has managed to combine a stingingly acute portrait of grief, a moving meditation on love (both filial and romantic) and a page-turning adventure.
New York Times Book Review
[Vida’s] third novel is further evidence that she can fashion characters as unpredictable as they are endearing...[THE LOVERS] is a satisfying, often brilliant portrait of a woman searching for relief from things that will not, she discovers at last with something like acceptance, go away.
Washington Post
THE LOVERS is somber, seductive, reflective, unsettling. All our lives are journeys...[and] hopefully, we shed some of our ignorance along the way. Vida writes—so beautifully!— about this process.
San Francisco Chronicle
Vida’s work becomes clearer and more sophisticated with every book she writes; and THE LOVERS is her best and most disturbing novel yet.
Vanity Fair
Vida is an elegant, droll writer who gets the strangeness and self-consciousness of traveling alone just right....[THE LOVERS] deserves a place right up there beside [Marguerite Duras’s THE LOVER], for it too is a slender and necessary book of great depth and reach.
Booklist
A brilliant, topsy-turvy, twenty-first-century variation on E. M. Forster’s A PASSAGE TO INDIA...Vida creates an atmosphere at once molten and chilling as she deftly exposes the wounding reverberations of timeless conflicts between men and women, parents and children, East and West, appearance and truth.
Francine Prose
Vendela Vida’s The Lovers is a spare and haunting meditation on how travel can bring us full circle back to the place from which we should have started. I read it over two days and dreamed about it the second night.
Miranda July
THE LOVERS pulls you out to sea with a masterful hypnosis. I was so enthralled by the grief, the sticky and sandy details, and especially the perfect articulation of feminine self-awareness that I didn’t realize how deep in I was. I read the last page with a tearful gasp.
Linda Grana
There’s a certain genre in fiction; the ‘woman traveling alone in foreign country when things start to go wrong’ story...not every writer can capture...that sense of impending doom and suspense that is almost Graham Greenish. Vendela Vida has nailed it.” (Rating: 5 out of 5)
Daily Candy Chicago
Vida’s rich imagery and deep, skillful dives into tangled emotions will keep you riveted.
Carrie LaGree
A beautiful, complex journey....Ideal for book clubs...it’s filled with rich, luminous prose, and its deceptively delicate plot and pacing provide ample topics for discussion.” (Rating: 5 out of 5)
The Daily Beast
A captivating account of a woman seeking escape and discovering emotional clarity...THE LOVERS is both a meditation on grieving and a gripping page-turner.
Vogue
A languorous meditation on how accidents of fate shape a life.
Aleksandar Hemon
A wise and generous book.
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
[Vida] has an eye for understated details that leap from the page and linger in the soul...Vida deftly weaves the power of description into the broader tapestry of Yvonne’s journey...THE LOVERS, slim and transportive, is an invitation to join Yvonne on her journey. It’s worth the trip.
Stephen Elliott
Stunning. A masterful meditation on grief and love. The Lovers is a sensational novel from one of our finest writers at the height of her craft.
Time Out New York
Haunting....Vida, a cofounder and coeditor of literary magazine The Believer, has a gift for probing the workings of memory.
People
Quietly provocative, The Lovers explores the perils of self-involvement and the ease with which we destroy one another’s lives.
People Magazine
"Quietly provocative, The Lovers explores the perils of self-involvement and the ease with which we destroy one another’s lives."
