Word: felicia
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...contempt of her friends and neighbors, she runs away to search for her lover, who has departed without leaving a precise forwarding address. This tale, of course, has had many tellings; it's hard to think of an Irish writer who hasn't tackled it. Yet in Felicia's Journey (Viking; 213 pages), William Trevor makes his heroine's plight and flight seem entirely original. Which is exactly the way it appears to Felicia, who has never had to deal with the sorts of problems that overwhelm her now. What is an unmarried pregnant girl to do? Where...
...hands of a lesser writer, such a premise might be played simply for suspense and shock. There is plenty of both in Felicia's Journey, but Trevor grounds his effects in utterly plausible details; potential terror seems more terrible when its source is the ordinary...
...story is told as both Felicia and Mr. Hilditch experience it, and these alternating points of view not only enhance suspense but also illuminate character. Felicia does not know that while searching for her lover she has become prey to someone else. As she thinks back to the romantic interlude that caused her current dilemma, she cannot--or will not--see how badly used she has been by the father of her unborn child...
Trevor is best known as a writer of short stories, and his gifts for compression and a resonant allusiveness do not abandon him over the longer haul of a novel. He makes every one of his words matter; Felicia's Journey is packed with extraordinary passages. Here is a look at the homeless, to whose ranks Felicia has been driven: ``Hidden away, the people of the streets drift into sleep induced by alcohol or agitated by despair, into dreams that carry them back to the lives that once were theirs.'' To take Felicia's journey is to encounter an exemplary...
...Books: Felicia's Journey tells an old story in a fresh...