5 thoughts on “Last Stories – William Trevor”



  1. THE PIANO TEACHER’S PUPIL
    “All that, she sensed, was true.”
    All that she sensed was true. Without the commas’ false notes.
    A story as a moving portrait of an unassuming woman, someone often lacking all the better things that many of us would have said she deserved, and who finally learnt that the gestalt of life prevailed, and in her case she was thankful for it. Half of the piano keys were her father’s dark chocolate, the other half the milky bar kid’s. But that is my oblique, hopefully meaningful, reflection on the story, but I am not necessarily assuming that the story ever made that clear. And what of the pedals?
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  2. THE CRIPPLED MAN
    “Survival was their immediate purpose, their hope that there might somewhere be a life that was more than they yet knew.”
    Stucco repaired, sashes eased in the windows, ladders hired, this is another story in this book where its gestalt quietly prevails over its buried seeds, and transformations in Ireland more stoically endured than effectuated. A literary storytelling as a sort of humble, yet richly told, religion, holy or holistic saints be thanked. A whiskey tale. One with storyteller dolls fitting a pattern set for them in a tantalising laid-back texture. Cousins (one crippled) are coupled ill-fittingly for deadpan pragmatic concerns. A couple, too, of Polish (or not) gypsy men disarmingly hired to supplant the back bacon for paint, too much paint, enough to outlast, via Irish weather fronts, the cripple, if not the whole couple.
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  3. AT THE CAFFÈ DARIA
    “She puzzles over ‘concentric circles’ that might be ‘flower petals,’…”
    That is the only crossword clue in this story that is not given a solution. After scratching my head, I think I have the answer, an answer which also seems serendipitous bearing in mind that I recently reviewed here a book of stories inspired by W.B. Yeats. This story, meanwhile, is probably the most poignant one about an ageing lady (here, indeed, two ageing ladies) that I have read since I read Anita Brookner. Indeed, one of them bears the name Anita! The other, Claire. Two ladies, friends infrequently passing time together in the tellingly backstoried London caffè, ladies who seem to have lived with the same man at different times, a man who has now died. Anita reads typescripts for a publisher, and I wonder if she picked up the unfinished typescript by her late ex-husband in the house for sale where Claire is supposed to still be living,… Utterly perfect story. If you can have degrees of perfection, especially when depicting this book’s prevailingly downbeat or deadpan gestalt of lives lived, a gestalt of resignation and making the best out of less than better.
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    1. nullimmortalis
      January 8, 2020 at 2:50 pm Edit
      TAKING MR RAVENSWOOD
      “Hollows beneath the eyes were what she dreaded, dark as graves they could be;”
      These pages represent fearfully frayed strands of the story of Rosanne, her sporadically present ‘man’, the child they had together, their domestic pennydrift, and, a third party, the eponymous, disarmingly rich male customer of hers, a customer at the bank where she works — and arbitrarily, one day, this customer invites her for a meal at a restaurant. One or two of these strands lead to things I worry about. Teased, yes, worried, and teazled. And I have spent hours, since reading this story, fitting the various presumably completed loose-ends together into a bespoke story, to go with the base story on these pages. Or I will do so.
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    2. nullimmortalis
      January 9, 2020 at 1:48 pm Edit
      MRS CRASTHORPE
      “No street lights burn at night in Falter Way,…”
      The eponymous lady, respected, scornful of her late husband’s plans for his obsequies as they duly pan out dully. Another man, disconnected, meets her by chance when she asks the stranger that he is for road directions. And we gradually learn more of her and her hankerings. A world of restaurants with chops and two veg, Eastbourne to London, this is a telling portrait of the lady’s hinterland and her eventual faltering fate and how the direction stranger – the one with fair hair she fleetingly fancied – did well in missing the connections missing from our faulty omniscience, connections ever that ply all the characters and places in this text like texture. Did we manage ‘to guess our way through the mystery’ of Mrs C? And, if so, are the resultant solutions different for each reader seeking such directions in them while trawling for träumerei?
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    3. nullimmortalis
      January 10, 2020 at 8:33 pm Edit
      THE UNKOWN GIRL
      “They lived in a time-being, and accepted that.”
      Books are mentioned in passing during this tantalising work. Emily is killed in a road accident, and widowed Harriet, until she learnt about that death, wondered where her cleaner (Emily) had got to, and what relationship she once had with Harriet’s twenty something son Stephen who lived in the same house as his mother – especially when Harriet finds out that Emily’s death may have been a suicide.
      I wrap myself in all the names of flowers from the end of the story, to stop me fretting, along with Harriet, about the meticulous cleaning jobs and what Emily had in mind when doing them, and why time-being from childhood onward for all of us often contains more regrets and guilts than anything else, none of them fully understood. (The earlier mention of achondroplasia, I guess, was a red herring.)
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    4. nullimmortalis
      January 11, 2020 at 2:00 pm Edit
      MAKING CONVERSATION
      “His eyes were the features you noticed: softly brown, they had a moist look, suggesting a residue of tears, and yet were not quite sad.”
      …like, at the other end, his toes, too, moist from oozy sand? This story was ignited back-when by a road accident as in the previous story, well at least a falling accident in the road, if not with another vehicle involved. Olivia is helped to get up by a man who subsequently stalks her, obsessed with loving her. This all told to his wife by Olivia in alternation with an omniscience telling us more of the details, wrapped up with all the possible misunderstandings involved and how the past and present and future all sadly echo each other. Just the details change. Time’s surface covering for motives and inevitable fates or forces. Mahler’s First Symphony sounding out from the bathroom is just some oblique observation that makes life seem fuller than it actually is, I guess.
      “; her back and arms peeled one summer, not covered in time.”
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    5. nullimmortalis
      January 12, 2020 at 7:48 pm Edit
      2677AD47-669B-4A3C-A5F1-3E25785882C0
      GIOTTO’S ANGELS
      “When privately he considered his life — as much of it as he knew — it seemed to be a thing of unrelated shreds and blurs, something not unlike the damaged canvases that were brought in for attention.”
      He clung to a place called St Ardo’s, ever seeking it as a mnemonic of self. A malleable man, an ageing painting restorer, ironically and methodically cannot restore his own personal memory, fading fast, tantamount to amnesia, and, due to some misunderstanding, is accompanied home by Denise (not Demise) who thinks he is going to pay her for sex. Touching interaction between them, an almost dead depiction of sexless angels, I guess, being representative of a cross, I further guess, between the sexes, a faded icon balanced between their clumsy greeds and unrequitals or regrets, stirring Denise to go back and restore the money she stole from him.
      “Write everything down, only sometimes he’d forget. But the way it was, he’d never forget a picture.”
      ===============================
      According to his biographer, St Ardo Smaragdus, ‘Grace made St Benedict of Aniane sensible of the vanity of all perishable goods…”
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    6. nullimmortalis
      January 13, 2020 at 3:40 pm Edit
      AN IDYLL IN WINTER
      “It made her sad that the summer had to end. He said it never would, because remembering wouldn’t let it.”
      That is a most perfect statement of patience. A story of a man employed for a summer at a farm as a tutor for a 13 year old girl, and she never really got over his departure from her life, nor he from hers, as patience later revealed, despite his getting married to another woman and having two daughters of his own. He visits the farm on the off chance, not expecting her to still be there… she would be in her mid twenties by now … and you know the rest. Or do you? Do you know, for example, how, say, Jeanne d’Arc and Heathcliff fitted into the story? How stoicism does? And the passive reaction of his wife? And the more seriously and intensely passive reactions of one of his daughters? Sometimes summer is a whole lifetime, I guess. And sometimes it is a moment of never. And variations between. The due settlement of patience with a pent-up passion. Or passion as passiveness.
      “It had happened because it was part of something else, of what had been impossible and now was not.”
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    7. nullimmortalis
      January 13, 2020 at 7:15 pm Edit
      THE WOMEN
      “Fragments made a whole:”
      Fragments made a whole, the raison d’être of my gestalt real-time reviewing since 2008 (and, even before that, the “synchronised shards of random truth and fiction” first printed in ‘WEIRDMONGER’ by Prime Books in 2003.)
      It says in the blurb on the back cover about this particular story: “…we encounter a young girl who discovers the mother she believed dead is alive and well;” — well, ‘well’ is a dubious word anyway, and was this woman REALLY her mother? I somehow doubt it. A beautifully poignant story where the two close friends, two women, are stalking the girl at her school, one woman purporting to be the mother, the other jealous of the (m)other’s affection for the pretty girl, with all that thought entails… and intriguing, too, the girl’s difficult relationship with her father who had kept the secret of how his marriage broke down and the circumstances of her mother’s earlier ‘demise’…
      It seems strange that I have read this author’s last stories first. This has been as a result of a very old friend of mine kindly buying the book for me at Christmas.
      More reading and reviewing of William Trevor stories to come I hope, God willing, in due course here, slowly and sporadically: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/william-trevor/
      end
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