უილიამ ტრევორი პირველად ორი წლის წინ წავიკითხე და ამის მერე მოკლე მოთხრობების ჩემი საყვარელი მწერალია. ტრევორი არ წერს არაჩვეულებრივი ადამიანების არაჩვეულებრივ თავგადასავლებზე. მისი ისტორიები პატარა ქალაქებში (ძირითადად ირლანდიის) მცხოვრები ჩვეულებრივი ადამიანების ისეთი ისტორიებია, რომლებიც ჩვენც...
This week’s headline? dressing for him/consumed by imaginationWhy this book? great-aunt recommended author/and he's IrishWhich book format? cheap at Half-Price/double the funPrimary reading environment? bedtime at home/day in airportsAny preconceived notions? for old ones/bog o' detailsIdentify m...
I read this novel on holiday, immediately after Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley’s Game. I had thought of the Highsmith as my murder/mystery romp and the Trevor as my ‘literary’ read. However, they have more in common than I thought. Trevor is also a bit of a murder mystery romp, the first time I’ve e...
here's a short essay I wrote about this book for a series on writing (for beginners) for a local newspaper:Because of space some feel stories should be relentless, single minded in their plots, marching irrevocably to resolution. However this can lead to stories being too dependent on plotting, t...
The publication of a new book by William Trevor is a great literary event. Trevor's last collection, A Bit on the Side, was named a New York Times Notable Book and hailed as one of the Best Books of the Year by papers from coast to coast, including The Washington Post and San Francisco Chronicle....
Set in a provincial Irish town against the backdrop of the Second World War, Nights at the Alexandra is a masterpiece of short fiction. Tracing the reminiscences of a fifty-eight-year-old Irish cinema owner named Harry, the story recounts the years during Harry's adolescence when he forges an unl...
The climbing hydrangea droops, the leaves of the smoke shrubs have lost their sheen. Thaddeus’s spinach goes to seed, the potatoes he digs are small. The drought is worse than the drought of 1976; the worst, so people interested in such matters say, for two hundred years. In the fields the sheep ...
He didn’t care what was done nowadays; he didn’t care what the fashion was; he wouldn’t tolerate the talk there’d be. ‘Mulreavy,’ her uncle repeated. ‘D’you know who I mean by Mulreavy?’ She hardly did. An image came into her mind of a big face that had a squareness about it, and black hair, a...
It was a busy time of year, made more so by helping at the Corrigans’ harvest: it wasn’t as easy as it had been to get away. Her low spirits at Gortalassa had not revived, although they did a little when, behind the loose stone in the wall at the ruins, she found a note that gave directions of ho...
It was warm in the room when she awoke and for some seconds she was aware of pleasurable anticipation, before the revelations of the day before came flooding in on her. Higgledy-piggledy they came, without rhyme or reason. Unwillingly she marshalled them into order, beginning with the moment when...
Only one of them returned to the mill, a man called Doyle with a grey, slightly crooked face, who for some reason was unpopular with the others. Johnny Lacy told me my father had taken him back reluctantly, feeling obliged to since the mill was a man short. A suspicion of some sort hung about him...
In the upstairs restaurant the waiters hurried with their loaded plates, calling out to one another above the noisy chatter. Turbot, scaloppa alla Milanese, grilled chops, scrambled eggs with bacon or smoked salmon, peas or spinaci al burro, mash done in a particularly delicious way: all were spe...