Word: trevor
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...sadness in Trevor's lives of everything being unresolved, of botched relationships and of displaced circumstances is the reality of the human condition which remains after reading what is very often a highly entertaining and always straightforwardly narrated story...
...Stories of William Trevor will surely establish Trevor as one of the most masterful post-War practitioners of the genre. These 800 pages contain a formidable array of stories--stories which delve into the comic and tragic interiors of ordinary lives, revealing an extraordinary subtlety of observation and perception. No peripheral backwater of society no commonplace experience is too mundane to attract the sympathetic interest of this writer. Just as bleak, hollow cocoons of loneliness make up much of Philip Larkin's poetry, is unglamorous, unremarkable lives which are the raw materials of Trevor's prose. But far from being...
Beyond the Pale, the title story of a 1981 Trevor collection, immediately allays any tears that Trevor's subject matter might result in dry and repetitive models. A Georgian seaside lodge on the Irish coast provides the setting for an explosive tale of suburban English couples holidaying in June, playing bridge and going for cliff walks just as they have done for years. Swapping bed as often as bridge-partners, the bonds and tensions webbing these people together is wonderfully conveyed the prejudices and biases that the characters display in their attitudes both towards each other and towards Ireland...
...distinct contrast to this edgy placement of Englishmen on Irish soil (a juxtaposition which comes up repeatedly in Trevor, and specifically in his latest novel, Fools of Fortune); a trilogy of stories entitled Matilda's England is a sublime, melancholic pattern of a woman's reminiscences of a life, of the eras of a country house, of tennis parties and unfulfilled relationships. Here is the retreat into the past, the solace of remembering old pleasures, the ghostly hovering of the past over present dissatisfaction that colors so much of Trevor's work...
...WOULD BE UNFAIR to place any one of William Trevor's novels alongside his collected stories on the reviewer's rostrum; for there is a breadth of scope and achievement in this collection, a complex structure of "development," on compassing many near-perfect stories, that is bound to overshadow the specific range of a single novel. Fools of Fortune, while it is engrossing stuff like virtually everything Trevor writes, takes on too great a task in too little space. ranging over the years 1918 to 1983, including a story of doomed love between an Irishman and his English cousin...