Tuesday, February 11, 2020

William Trevor Stories (2)















Collected Stories – William Trevor

D58B71C8-9646-4CFE-9BBA-B21A59713D48
My other reviews of William Trevor’s stories: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/william-trevor/
My previous reviews of older or classic books: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/reviews-of-older-books/
When I read this book, my thoughts will appear in the comment stream below…

15 thoughts on “Collected Stories – William Trevor”





  1. A MEETING IN MIDDLE AGE

    “Why did you say cow-parsley?”
    From ‘releasing a lease’ to an oblique twist at the end about a pink cheque for five pounds, this is possibly the greatest short story I have ever read. No exaggeration. Between Mrs da Tanka and Mr Mileson encountering each other, both cluttered with the baggage of their respective backstories, neither satisfied by their night together. Or am I attempting to clarify an issue that should stay clouded?
    Reply




  2. ACCESS TO THE CHILDREN
    A sadly poignant story – sadly humorous, too, in a strange way – of a man now going to seed after ‘murdering’ his marriage to Elizabeth by having an affair with Diana whom he met on a train. Diana has now left him. He now lives from Sunday to Sunday, on which day he has access to his two young daughters and tries to find things for them to do in London, but they end up watching The Golden Shot and Songs of Praise on his TV, as he gradually gets drunk. Meanwhile Elizabeth, with whom he shares a birthday date, has a new man, but he still hopes that good sense will prevail by renewing their marriage… a Gimlet in his eye? Beautifully done, with nice touches of the daughters’ conversations. Somehow uplifting by being an adept story to cherish simply for what it is with old day Sundays evoked, but, overall, real sad.
    Reply




  3. THE GENERAL’S DAY
    “The past was his hunting ground; from it came his pleasure and a good deal of everything else. Yet he was not proof against the moment he lived in.”
    I, too, once bored people with astrology, but never as a conversational befriending device, like 78 year old General Suffolk. I, too, feel guilty, when going to the cinema in the afternoon, but that is unlike General Suffolk. This is of its time. Women with cigarettes hung autonomously from their mouths. The General on the search for a woman on his day out, but ironically leaving a woman back in his own place doing for him, as they used to say. A hilarious but poignant portrait of this man, getting drunker and drunker. Men got drunk more easily then. See previous story. By the way, I loved the item of backstory, though, about the duel in the General’s younger days. And the blade – or a similar one – that he drew blood with, hung on someone else’s wall today.
    Reply




  4. MEMORIES OF YOUGHAL
    “; and then she thought it was decidedly odd, a detective going on about his past to an elderly woman on the terrace of an hotel.”
    Two friends, retired woman teachers, on holiday on continent, sitting side by side in deckchairs. When one is gone temporarily, the private detective on surveillance sits in the other deckchair, and says he wants casual conversation so as to appear casual… makes her squiffy with drinks he buys … but his memories of childhood, nostalgic and tragic, were they made up or real? And when the other woman returns, who made up or concocted whom, and who would gossip later about it all – or not, as the case may be? Details here of colours, things, memories, drinks, plants, and much more, seem to be off some wall of literature that I remember as a child would later preoccupy me as an old man, whether either blocking my view or entrancing me remained to be seen, as it is now seen, but I am still unsure.
    Reply




  5. THE TABLE
    “‘I am the nigger in the woodpile,’ said a Mrs Galbally,…”
    A VERY strange story, an arch-absurdism, of a Louis XVI console table sale and its negotiations between various parties and their motives as imagined by a Jewish furniture dealer, involving a ‘love nest’ and taking off one’s clothes prior to a ‘slick kiss.’ Obviously code for something far more important than itself. History was changed each time this work got a new reader to read it.
    “I am a Jewish dealer, madam. I have a Jewish nose; I am not handsome; I cannot smile.”
    [I would guess this was published in the 1960s.]
    Reply




  6. A SCHOOL STORY
    If one has asthma as a schoolboy, one should not smoke surreptitiously in the lavatories, I would say. He did have “the presence of worms in his body”, though, I note. An insidious story of boy’s telling stories to each other at night, one about the supposed ‘murder’ of his mother by his father so that he, his father, could marry his mother’s sister. A triangulation of boys leading to a set of accretive circumstances, the telling of stories about each other to the headmaster and another teacher called Pinshow. It all sort of coagulated in my mind like illicitly toasted toast with adulterated raspberry jam. Which of the dual relationships of the triangulation was the most illicit? None, probably. Like all human life, much hangs on chance or mistake or mischief or wild imagination.
    Better than burnt toast, Cakes and Ale are just a happy rare break from the rest of that insidious miasma of our lives from schooldays onward, I guess.
    This thus titled work by W. Somerset Maugham was mentioned in another William Trevor schoolboy school story (‘Traditions’) that I read and reviewed yesterday: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2020/01/13/later-stories-by-william-trevor/#comment-18033
    And I happen to be concurrently reviewing the Selected Stories of W. Somerset Maugham here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2020/01/18/short-stories-somerset-maugham/
    Reply








  8. THE PENTHOUSE APARTMENT
    “She remembered Mrs Neck saying: ‘I’d sooner a smear of Stork that what they’re turning out today,’…”
    With the accretive tipsy squiffiness of General Suffolk earlier, this relates to a posh top flat wherein Mr and Mrs Runca are due to have flowers et al photographed for a fashionable magazine, a flat in an apartment block, and telling, too, of the block’s curmudgeonly, untrustworthy caretaker, a spinster lady with a dog who lives in a lower fiat, the Runcas’ Italian maid, and an almost slapstick accumulation of mishaps and near-catastrophes, mishaps due to drinking — and a prophecy, here back in the sixties, of an equally accretive sort of Trumpish ‘fake news’ syndrome that many believe to be true….
    I truly sympathised with the spinster and her dog’s victimisation in these circumstances, and her own slightly squiffy failure to make herself understood amid a mountain of mistruths told ABOUT her or even concocted naïvely, for all the best reasons, BY her.
    Reply




  9. IN AT THE BIRTH
    “The best things are complex and mysterious. And must remain so.”
    I take that on board, when telling you that this is probably one of the most sinister stories I have ever read. Telling of a period when telephone numbers were commutable but not telephones themselves. And babysitters did not become those for whom they sat. And a job in secrecy was something to be boasted about. And a man catching a woman in marriage upon the brink of becoming a nun, also boastable. You will not forget this story of Miss Efoss babysitting for Mr and Mrs Dutt.
    Worthy of Aickman.
    Reply








  11. THE INTROSPECTIONS OF J.P. POWERS
    Ex RAF man JPP teaches ladies to drive, telling them about mirror signal manoeuvre, stream-of-traffics’ rights of way, while fancying the breasts of a typist back in the office, while bearing overweight breasts himself! Depression leads to misstreaming… even death being better than commission-selling goods to pregnant ladies?!
    Reply




  12. THE DAY WE GOT DRUNK ON CAKE
    This is a classic of coercion, suspicion, uncertain characters, frailty of purpose and easy partying…
    Seriously great. How is it I have not read it before?
    It out-Pinters Pinter. Who came first, Trevor or Pinter?
    Reply














Later Stories by William Trevor














































A Bit on the Side
After Rain
Cheating at Canasta
The Hill Bachelors
My other reviews of William Trevor: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/william-trevor/
My previous reviews of older or classic books: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/reviews-of-older-books/
When I read these books, my thoughts will appear in the comment stream below…

12 thoughts on “Later Stories by William Trevor”





  1. THE DRESSMAKER’S CHILD
    (from ‘Cheating at Canasta’)
    “…and he imagined he was in the car alone with her, that the man wasn’t there, that he hadn’t come to Ireland with her, that he didn’t exist.
    ‘Do you hear about St Teresa of Ávila? Do you hear about her in Ireland?’ Her lips opened and closed in the driving mirror, her teeth flashing, the tip of her tongue there for a moment.”
    A most moving story of 19 year old simple-minded Cahal who helps his Dad mend cars in the garage in Ireland, and there is a statue in a nearby village that was said to weep tears; he takes Spanish visitors (a man and that woman whose lips are in the driving mirror) to see that miracle legend that Cahal believes to be hokum, takes them in a tyre-leaky car for the money, and what happens? No retelling of the story here will express what happens because each time you read it something different will happen, like once he went back and picked something up and moved it and fulfilled a new destiny by the end. [As well as hankering for his own girl, Cahal also loved the singer called Madonna. And world football. There is a grey area between being simple-minded and deluded. The grey diminishing area between Cahal and the dressmaker?]
    Reply




  2. SITTING WITH THE DEAD
    (From ‘A Bit on the Side’)
    “‘We see a lot of widowing,’ Norah murmured.”
    Winnowing, too, I reckon, as in separating the living ghosts from the dead ones. Two women in oldish Ireland who take it upon themselves to ‘sit with the dead’ as their activity in life, arrive too late but sit with Emily instead who has watched her horse-bartering husband dying into his eventual death over the last few months, and the conversation gradually reveals her sad downtrodden marriage, a situation that the two sitters winnow on the way home in their car. Utterly poignant.
    Reply




  3. THREE PEOPLE
    (From The Hill Bachelors)
    “Lace Cap is the colour chosen. Sidney pours it into the roller dish and rolls it on to the ceiling, beginning at the centre, which a paint-shop man advised him once was the best way to go about it. The colour seems white but he knows it isn’t.”
    Vera 40 something; Sidney, once a stranger, now their odd job man, including doing broken bush-rose dismantlement, is 30 something; her father, like General Suffolk in another story, 78. There was a disabled sister, Mona. Once.
    Sidney gave Vera an alibi by saying he met her in the cinema at the time the intruder had entered the house…
    We work out how everything fits together without realising it is working US out. That is what fiction does. It is the reader that lands the fatal blow. And helps with whether tiling comes before painting in a bathroom. And whether Vera and Sidney will become an item when the father vanishes, too.
    “‘Out of control,’ Mr Schele comments, hearing that. ‘The whole globe out of control.’”
    Reply




  4. The Piano Tuner’s Wives
    (From After Rain)
    “She had not attended the first wedding, although she had been invited. She’d kept herself occupied that day, whitewashing the chicken shed, but even so she’d wept.”
    The story of a blind piano-tuner who, when young, rejects one woman and marries another as his first wife, and then when the latter dies much later, he marries the first woman. Touching and poignant, when we learn what one could possibly extrapolate might have happened in such circumstances before reading this work did in fact happen. But nobody, I say, would have predicted the separate stories of colours and details each woman might have concocted for him when helping the logistics of his travelling to the pianos that needed tuning…
    Gave a new slant on story-making as well as on story-telling itself.
    “When the romance began with the man who had once rejected her, her brother and his wife considered she was making a mistake, but did not say so, only laughingly asked if she intended taking the chickens with her.”
    Reply




  5. THE ROOM
    “She hadn’t known until Phair said, not long ago, that routine, for him, often felt like an antidote to dementia.”
    Strangely, I can link this with a much earlier story by Trevor – THE TABLE – that I read earlier today here, about a ‘love nest’ imagined as a whole projection of a scenario. In THE ROOM, the love nest is above a betting shop, and one projection of a woman’s casual affair in that nest imagines another projection, this time of a marriage, one involving a murder and the same woman acting an alibi.
    Imagining can work both ways for each projection, though.
    Nothing is Phair.
    Reply




  6. TRADITIONS
    “Adolescence was marked in them by jacket sleeves too short, unruly hair and coarsened voices, blemished skin beneath beginners’ stubble.”
    An atmospheric schoolboy story of yore. This boy had missed the coarsening prelude quoted above; and he was looked at with interest by the now middle-aged ‘dining-hall maid’ in this posh boys’ school. He looked at her, too, while suspecting her guilty of acts of wrong-doing over the years, including, today, the slaughter of various boys’ jackdaws, jackdaws as countenanced to be in a bespoke shed by the school handyman… and was it because she was let down by a previous boy at the school, or did she do it at all? Well, I somehow know for certain who killed the jackdaws, even if the story doesn’t tell us directly!
    Reply








  8. OF THE CLOTH
    “, a tarnished looking-glass huge above the white marble mantelpiece,”
    A gently gently of a Protestant rector in the emptying Ireland countryside noting the ‘confidence’ of the Catholic Mass when he attends the funeral service of his Catholic one-armed gardener to whom he had given a job for several years. The later visit by the priest to the rector in some beautiful seeming rapprochement is marked by the the rector turning a newspaper over so that the priest does not have to stare at its headline about some pedophile priest or other … only in the dark can you talk to each other clearly. Their own backstory in this small world linked in common by a car number, and the oblique mention of monks who would sail anywhere to set up a new commune in common? Oh, only obliquity, like darkness, can approach truth?
    ‘I remember you sitting on that wall.’
    ‘We used learn off the car numbers. Not that there were many, maybe two a day. ZB 726.’
    Reply




  9. A FRIENDSHIP
    “It was over, all this was followed by; they would forget it; he’d drive to the Mortlake tip with the golf-bag, there’d be no television for thirty days, no sweets, cake or biscuits.”
    From concrete cement being put in Philip’s expensive golf-bag by his own two small sons, to “hole-in-corner”, we learn of the attrition and emotional entropy of Philip and Francesca, he a court judge, and Francesca his wife, and Francesca’s long-standing friend Margy, and Margy’s love affairs, one of which affairs she helps land on Francesca, as a sort of sororal gift to make up for Francesca’s marital entropy with Philip. The result, the follow up by this semi-colon; the very satisfyingly and believably and informatively complex reasons for the friendship breaking up and not the marriage breaking up. Stoical. As is the waitress in La Trota who had too many tables to handle. Or I might have got that last bit wrong! Must be my age. Anyway it was a court judge’s verdict, after all.
    Reply




  10. Men of Ireland
    “Guiltless, he was guilty,…”
    Or whatever this story otherwise says about the travelling down-and-out called Prunty, and what it says about the priest whom Prunty seeks, back in his, Prunty’s, own Irish home town, after being in England. Off the boat he tries his chances with those he hitches with, does Prunty, to get a bit of cash, as if in dress rehearsal for the big heist, blackmailing or sexually impugning the priest for nothing but the thought that he, the priest, might have failed him, Prunty, failed Prunty when Prunty was an altar boy. Yet, we, the readers, if not the author, perhaps know better? Priest and Prunty. Only print can hide facts?
    Reply




  11. JUSTINA’S PRIEST
    “, he wondered if he had become prey to despair, the worst sin of all in the canon that was specially a priest’s.”
    Friend of Breda, who once wore a T-shirt with an ‘indecency’ on it, Justina, offered dinged tins of comestibles, is also the ‘backward’ sister, of Maeve, Maeve who is married into plumbing, and despairing her lot in life of looking after Justina. The socially inept priest, sad at the way modernity now ridicules priests, has something in common with Justina, including their togetherness in hearing her confession, and this makes me nod in thoughtfulness at the way he can bring a happiness in God to her, but can she do the same for him? Mr Gilfoyle, the plumber, and his mobile gallstone, notwithstanding.
    Reply















4 thoughts on “Additional Stories by William Trevor”





  1. COCKTAILS AT DONEY’S
    “; she always came in February.”
    February, today, I note, too. Not only in Florence, then. She always came, full stop? The word ‘nymphomaniac’ is bandied about, after all! The man in this story is almost sexually harassed by a classy woman, but a woman who was not afraid to seek the affairs she needed, pretending she had met him before, but we gradually learn about the man’s backstory, too, in addition to his writing tourist guidebooks of cities like Florence, where there is a dark side as well as a light, judging by the local newspapers. Which of these two strangers is the angel, which the virgin, I wonder. Looking at all the Annunciations in Uffizi can hardly help, I guess, in deciding. A treasure of a missing person story that will linger long in the Trevorine memory. I wonder if in fact they had met before…
    Reply












  4. THE SMOKE TREES OF SAN PIETRO
    “‘This is the new treatment,’ he said, taking from the blue baize cover on the table the minute hand of a grandfather clock and inserting its point beneath one of my eyelids.”
    This is where Trevor meets Bowen’s Inherited Clock. Proust, too. THE perfect story, surely, as the sickly narrator with a hinted-at finite childhood before dying, a sort of Death in Venice, except it’s regularly San Pietro, and the older man ostensibly and equally regularly fancies his mother, not him. Amid the lazy swimming and the boy’s odd excursions. The man goes regularly, though, it is said, to visit his ‘mad wife’ ensconced in a nearby town. And the boy writes to his father, subject to later enforced censorship for truth’s economy. The boy is still narrating at the end of this story, and so we retain hope in his respect, with him still trying to sketch the perfumeless smoke trees… yes, the perfect story if there ever is one. Sad, but accepting of us as readers. Keeping the hope going.
    Reply


    THE BALLROOM OF ROMANCE
    “Nobody knew the name of the man with long arms.”
    With the cement company said to be coming to this area of Ireland – the area with this wayside ballroom – he might not have to carry so many heavy stones? So many heavy stories? Bridie, thirty something, goes to the ballroom – pink outside, blue in – every week some miles on her tyre-precarious bike leaving her one-legged dad at home with his Wild West novel. Ireland is the wild west for me, from here in the England of Wolverhampton, not that I know Wolverhampton very well. The ballroom allows no alcohol and only decent songs performed by three regular men, one of whom, the drummer, Bridie has a yen for, I think, but does he for her? A lot of them have their responsibilities with oldsters back home … in this Church undercurrented area. Bridie was once with the nuns? Some bachelors from the hills, coming to the ballroom, are bit more feisty with their sneaky drinking and more physical flirting… and we gradually get to know some of the women, older and younger, plain and pretty, the plain ones waiting outside the Gents to catch their man coming out. Tonight Bridie has some sort of epiphany. Will she ever come back here to dance and eat crisps and lemonade? Test her tyres or shrugging off or accepting kisses…? Disappointed past, disappointed future. But happy enough without knowing why? But what about the man with long arms? And the Optrex and Bridie’s tears? This story, meanwhile, somehow managed for the first time to get under my skin, made me feel it is a shame I am a loner – and humanity, however frail, is worth getting to know more.

TO BE CONTINUED -- please also see: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/william-trevor/

Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)