rafternorth's review
2.0
“Violet married the piano tuner when he was a young man. Belle married him when he was old.”
Man. I really struggled to finish this book. It’s not that William Trevor is a bad writer, I just found most of the stories really boring. The only ones I genuinely enjoyed were ‘The Piano Tuner’s Wives’ and ‘Lost Ground’. I was aching to finish by the end. Really disappointed.
Rating : 2 Stars
Man. I really struggled to finish this book. It’s not that William Trevor is a bad writer, I just found most of the stories really boring. The only ones I genuinely enjoyed were ‘The Piano Tuner’s Wives’ and ‘Lost Ground’. I was aching to finish by the end. Really disappointed.
Rating : 2 Stars
mrssoule's review
2.0
The theme of this collection seems to be: people need to hurt those close to them in order to feel any kind of self-respect or control over their lives. And the injured parties just roll over and take it as their due. If the imagery was more striking I could handle the irritatingly mopey attitudes, but it's not quite there.
aria_izikdzurko's review
4.0
I love this writing, I just am not a huge fan of the short story format. I will have to give Trevor’s full length novels a try, because he truly has an amazing way of capturing moments very simply and poetically.
jessalynn_librarian's review
3.0
However well written they may be (and these were excellent), a short story is still a short story. And short stories often feel either depressing, unsatisfying, or both. These fell into the depressing camp, but were as satisfying as a depressing story can be. The characters were fascinating, and I loved his use of place, and a few of them had that haunting quality of the fine short story. But every single one was depressing. I don't need them to be all happy-go-lucky with a blissful ending, but I enjoy the occasional note of hope or happy ending. Sure, there were moments of happiness, little glimpses of beauty, some lovely characters - but then the ending would thump down on you. So, if you're looking for some high quality but downer short stories, this is the book for you!
deea_bks's review
4.0
Some say that Trevor's style is alike with Chekhov's or with Alice Munro's. I don't think so. I think his style is unique, it cannot be compared to theirs. Or maybe only the themes of the stories can be compared to Munro's: scenes of domestic life, moments from the lives of ordinary people, the fears and anxieties they confront with.
I thought all the stories in this book were rather good, but some of them were truly exquisite and loaded with depth. "The Piano Tuner's Wives", "A Day", "Marrying Damian" are definitely among the best short stories I've ever read and I am sure they, as well as the others, are going to haunt me for a while.
If there are people out there who enjoy reading short stories as much as reading novels (as I do), I think you'll find the stories in this book rewarding and some even mesmerizing.
I thought all the stories in this book were rather good, but some of them were truly exquisite and loaded with depth. "The Piano Tuner's Wives", "A Day", "Marrying Damian" are definitely among the best short stories I've ever read and I am sure they, as well as the others, are going to haunt me for a while.
If there are people out there who enjoy reading short stories as much as reading novels (as I do), I think you'll find the stories in this book rewarding and some even mesmerizing.
katrinelinden's review
emotional
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.0
chiyeunglau's review
5.0
William Trevor is a master of the short story and I can see how heavily he has influenced Yi Yun Li’s work. It is no surprise both write with great empathy for their characters; it is this empathy that makes each character so real and relatable. No matter their flaws and crimes, you can’t help but want to hold their hand and tell them that everything will be okay.
Trevor’s characters are still fresh in my mind long after reading, and their stories will stay with me for a long time.
P.S - if you’re a short story writer, this is a must read
Trevor’s characters are still fresh in my mind long after reading, and their stories will stay with me for a long time.
P.S - if you’re a short story writer, this is a must read
cameliarose's review
5.0
Slow-paced, simply plotted stories with intricate characters. Beautiful prose. Life is somewhat disappointing but still worth living. William Trevor is a master craftsman of short stories.
sadirienzo23's review
1.0
I absolutely hated this book. It reminded me of exactly why I hate literary fiction; it was self-indulgent, miserable, and every single page dragged on for what felt like 19 years. I would rate it zero stars if I could.
gh7's review
3.0
There's a moment in one of these stories when Bono is mentioned and it was as shockingly disorientating as if a Jane Austen character suddenly said the word fuck. Because although written in the 1990s most of the time I felt like I was reading an author who was writing at the mid-point of the 20th century. Often his stories are set in an isolated rural world which allows him to turn the clock back a couple of decades. An advantage of this perspective is social rules once upon a time were much more rigid; any transgression created more violence to the status quo than is the case now. And this is the theme of all of the stories in this collection - the violent upsetting of the apple cart.
In her story The Daughters of the Late Colonel Katherine Mansfield ingeniously makes us feel we are reading about two little girls at the beginning of their lives the start of the story. Only gradually do we realise they are elderly spinsters nearing the end of their lives. In his story After Rain Trevor inverts this process. The woman in the story is thirty but we soon begin to see her as an elderly spinster. It's kind of clever until you realise the perspective is essentially forced and bogus. In the 20s and the 30s a dumped thirty-year woman would probably become a spinster; since the 1960s that scenario is much less likely. We learn very little about this woman. The story is padded with lots of pretty passages about Italy. I found this a problem with lots of the stories - the padding. I'm not sure I agree that he knows much more about his characters than he puts into the stories - it's a stock and not always convincing claim of all writers that they know every facet of their characters' idiosyncrasies before putting pen to paper. I think there are three stories here in which he uses the delivery of the newspaper as a kind of pivot in the day's domestic arrangement. And a man reading a newspaper at the breakfast table is after all a worn out cliché. If he knows so much about his people surely he could have come up with a more enlightening and original detail. Often, I felt he was hiding his characters from me, as if the more he told me about them the less credible they'd become. Every story is motored by an idea - but often this idea didn't for me give birth to other ideas.
Two stories have as their pivot the entrance of criminals into the benign banality of domestic habit. The theme of domestic arrangement being disrupted by an intruder is constant in almost all the stories. This reminded me of Elizabeth Bowen's Death of the Heart except in Bowen's book the domestic arrangement is corrupt and the destructive intruder innocent, a much more intriguing premise than the rather clichéd dynamic of criminality disrupting innocence. He does actually use this dynamic in one of the stories about the Catholic/Protestant divides in Ireland but a promising beginning ends in not very convincing melodrama. At times you sense Trevor doesn't much care for the modern world and has a tendency to sentimentalise rural domesticity. Not a stance I have much time for. Tourists often buy houses in Italy with the same ambition and are generally a corrupting presence. Trevor's characters are often blandly benign. Too ripe for the violence of social change. You could make the argument that these stories are timeless; but you could equally make the argument that the world Trevor creates has been done to death in literature. It's astonishing to realise Don DeLillo wrote Underworld the same year these stories were composed. If I were given the two books without any biographical detail of the authors I would guess Trevor was writing at least fifty years before DeLillo.
Probably I'm giving the impression I gleaned little enjoyment from these stories which isn't true. But I had high expectations and they weren't met and I'm still of the opinion Trevor is a good second tier writer rather than any kind of rare marvel. I've got one more of his books. Fingers crossed.
In her story The Daughters of the Late Colonel Katherine Mansfield ingeniously makes us feel we are reading about two little girls at the beginning of their lives the start of the story. Only gradually do we realise they are elderly spinsters nearing the end of their lives. In his story After Rain Trevor inverts this process. The woman in the story is thirty but we soon begin to see her as an elderly spinster. It's kind of clever until you realise the perspective is essentially forced and bogus. In the 20s and the 30s a dumped thirty-year woman would probably become a spinster; since the 1960s that scenario is much less likely. We learn very little about this woman. The story is padded with lots of pretty passages about Italy. I found this a problem with lots of the stories - the padding. I'm not sure I agree that he knows much more about his characters than he puts into the stories - it's a stock and not always convincing claim of all writers that they know every facet of their characters' idiosyncrasies before putting pen to paper. I think there are three stories here in which he uses the delivery of the newspaper as a kind of pivot in the day's domestic arrangement. And a man reading a newspaper at the breakfast table is after all a worn out cliché. If he knows so much about his people surely he could have come up with a more enlightening and original detail. Often, I felt he was hiding his characters from me, as if the more he told me about them the less credible they'd become. Every story is motored by an idea - but often this idea didn't for me give birth to other ideas.
Two stories have as their pivot the entrance of criminals into the benign banality of domestic habit. The theme of domestic arrangement being disrupted by an intruder is constant in almost all the stories. This reminded me of Elizabeth Bowen's Death of the Heart except in Bowen's book the domestic arrangement is corrupt and the destructive intruder innocent, a much more intriguing premise than the rather clichéd dynamic of criminality disrupting innocence. He does actually use this dynamic in one of the stories about the Catholic/Protestant divides in Ireland but a promising beginning ends in not very convincing melodrama. At times you sense Trevor doesn't much care for the modern world and has a tendency to sentimentalise rural domesticity. Not a stance I have much time for. Tourists often buy houses in Italy with the same ambition and are generally a corrupting presence. Trevor's characters are often blandly benign. Too ripe for the violence of social change. You could make the argument that these stories are timeless; but you could equally make the argument that the world Trevor creates has been done to death in literature. It's astonishing to realise Don DeLillo wrote Underworld the same year these stories were composed. If I were given the two books without any biographical detail of the authors I would guess Trevor was writing at least fifty years before DeLillo.
Probably I'm giving the impression I gleaned little enjoyment from these stories which isn't true. But I had high expectations and they weren't met and I'm still of the opinion Trevor is a good second tier writer rather than any kind of rare marvel. I've got one more of his books. Fingers crossed.