I think this latest collection of William Trevor's stories - his 11th, as good as ever and as recognisable as ever - has the wrong title. He's chosen it from a story of muted London adultery, in which the inconclusive lovers part for no very good reason, sad, but sustained by how well they've behaved and by "the delicacy of their reticence".
Who needs a bit on the side?
Though not the strongest story in the collection, it displays all the "delicacy" and wisdom we've come to expect from Trevor, and to praise in him, over many years. Perhaps he chose the teasing, slangy title as a way of resisting the rather deadening, pious genuflections we reserve for our literary monuments, whom we'd like to think of as venerable and benign.
Trevor is not a benign writer. There has always been a frightening, uncomfortable, cruel side to his work, particularly in his sensationalist appetite which he shares with one of his great predecessors, Elizabeth Bowen, who gets a mention here for seedy criminals, sadists, and confidence-tricksters. In this volume, some tame jackdaws have their necks wrung, a girl pushes her mother's lover down two flights of stairs, a maniac pursues his estranged wife with a fantasy of revenge, and a con man replies to a series of lonely-hearts ads to get himself a driver and a free meal.
These distressing inventions deal in festering anger and injured lives: But above all they deal in solitude, and how people try to break through it.
bit on the side
In the story called "Solitude" which I wish had been the title story , the daughter who has witnessed her wealthy mother's love affair and caused the lover's death spends much of her adult life with her parents reconciled for her sake , wandering from one European hotel to another like the parents in The Story of Lucy Gault , but these have kept, not lost, their daughter. After their deaths, she feels the need to confess her history to strangers she meets.
- Mémoires contre M. Goëzman (French Edition).
- Booking Nick: a light contemporary romantic suspense romance novel;
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Most people recoil from the truth, since in one of the baroque phrases Trevor sometimes allows himself: There are, poignantly, a number of widowed characters who now have to look after themselves, with no one to talk to: As the Russian novelist was the inspiration for Trevor's marvellous novella Reading Turgenev, so Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier - the saddest story, told by a narrator who can never quite explain or understand it all - is the guiding spirit for these tales.
In one of the best, "Sitting with the Dead", the long cruelty and strangeness - and inexplicable trace of residual love - of a harsh, claustrophobic marriage is narrated by a recently widowed woman to two do-gooding Catholic sisters who make a life's work of "sitting with the dead". But they understand little of what they have heard.
Who needs a bit on the side? | From the Observer | The Guardian
In that story and elsewhere, some of the deepest of these solitudes are lived out in provincial Ireland, Trevor's habitual terrain. As in Lucy Gault , this is an Ireland that is changing, but not for these characters. A priest who has lost his authority and his congregation finds his only solace in the devoted presence in his church of a backward, illiterate local girl.
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- Falsa relación (Jazmín) (Spanish Edition).
- bit on the side!
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A young man with a talent for carving saints has to find work lettering gravestones. There's no future in Ireland now for employment or consolation from "the holy world that was lost". The stories where Trevor seems most at home are set in the Irish past, or what feels like the past: No one does these time-trapped scenarios better not even John McGahern , like the uncle's terrible, mouldering farmhouse "old bedsteads blocked the holes in the hedges, there was a taste of turf on the water you drank" or the dingy window displays in the small town's main street: As a new kind of Irish fiction - international, postmodernist, multiracial, secular - takes over, there's a danger that, for all the lambent depth, beauty and tenderness of his writing, Trevor's Ireland, preserved in the amber of exile, is coming to seem distant and marginal - a bit on the side?