« COPYRIGHTUS AD INFINITUM? | Main | LESLIE SCHWARTZ BOOK TOUR »

May 25, 2004

WILLIAM TREVOR REVIEW

The Telegraph reviews the latest collection of short stories by the marvelously understated William Trevor (The Story of Lucy Gault, Felicia's Journey).

A few stories stand out from the generality of modest regret. "Traditions" hints of the favours dispensed by a dining-hall maid to boys in the public school where she works. Trevor firmly resists any inference of servitude or exploitation in this, his lightest story, writing the piece more as a Lawrentian dalliance free from moral chastisement or consequence. "Solitude", by contrast, this volume's longest and best piece, examines the emotional chaos wrought upon a daughter who witnesses her mother's infidelities while hiding behind the sofa. Though the story is wistful, even sad, there remains an irrepressible authorial smirk at the ludicrous shenanigans that the daughter, like Henry James's Maisie, inadvertently witnesses.

Poignance, resisting bleakness; few do this better than Trevor. Nuances glimpsed in the mundane café or street seismically alter the geography of affairs, and Trevor captures their significance with quiet, penetrating wisdom.


Posted at 12:19 AM |

| | Pin It! | |

Comments

The comments to this entry are closed.

TEV DEFINED


  • The Elegant Variation is "Fowler’s (1926, 1965) term for the inept writer’s overstrained efforts at freshness or vividness of expression. Prose guilty of elegant variation calls attention to itself and doesn’t permit its ideas to seem naturally clear. It typically seeks fancy new words for familiar things, and it scrambles for synonyms in order to avoid at all costs repeating a word, even though repetition might be the natural, normal thing to do: The audience had a certain bovine placidity, instead of The audience was as placid as cows. Elegant variation is often the rock, and a stereotype, a cliché, or a tired metaphor the hard place between which inexperienced or foolish writers come to grief. The familiar middle ground in treating these homely topics is almost always the safest. In untrained or unrestrained hands, a thesaurus can be dangerous."

SECOND LOOK

  • The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald

    Bs

    Penelope Fitzgerald's second novel is the tale of Florence Green, a widow who seeks, in the late 1950s, to bring a bookstore to an isolated British town, encountering all manner of obstacles, including incompetent builders, vindictive gentry, small minded bankers, an irritable poltergeist, but, above all, a town that might not, in fact, want a bookshop. Fitzgerald's prose is spare but evocative – there's no wasted effort and her work reminds one of Hemingway's dictum that every word should fight for its right to be on the page. Florence is an engaging creation, stubbornly committed to her plan even as uncertainty regarding the wisdom of the enterprise gnaws at her. But The Bookshop concerns itself, finally, with the astonishing vindictiveness of which provincials are capable, and, as so much English fiction must, it grapples with the inevitabilities of class. It's a dense marvel at 123 pages, a book you won't want to – or be able to – rush through.
  • The Rider by Tim Krabbe

    Rider_4

    Tim Krabbé's superb 1978 memoir-cum-novel is the single best book we've read about cycling, a book that will come closer to bringing you inside a grueling road race than anything else out there. A kilometer-by-kilometer look at just what is required to endure some of the most grueling terrain in the world, Krabbé explains the tactics, the choices and – above all – the grinding, endless, excruciating pain that every cyclist faces and makes it heart-pounding rather than expository or tedious. No writer has better captured both the agony and the determination to ride through the agony. He's an elegant stylist (ably served by Sam Garrett's fine translation) and The Rider manages to be that rarest hybrid – an authentic, accurate book about cycling that's a pleasure to read. "Non-racers," he writes. "The emptiness of those lives shocks me."

Categories

Subscribe to this blog's feed