SOURCE: Krist, Gary. “Other Voices, Other Rooms.” Hudson Review 45, no. 1 (spring 1992): 146-48.

In the following excerpt, Krist praises the complementary relationship between the novellas Reading Turgenev and My House in Umbria.

While Gordimer's collection [Jump and Other Stories] would certainly be in the running, I have to admit that the best book I read this quarter—among the best I've read in several years—was something written by one of those venerable white males I had intended to avoid this time out. But the pull of Two Lives, William Trevor's latest, proved too strong for me, and now that I've read it I cannot let it pass without notice, even in a chronicle that purports to be about underheard voices. Two Lives (a rather innocuous title, I think, for such a disturbing book) consists of two shortish novels, each focusing on the life of a woman who has...