A review by deea_bks
A Bit on the Side by William Trevor
5.0
How some authors can express so much in just a few words I will never cease wondering. How they have that ability to make the story on the page speak to you about your own, without it really having any similarities with it, will never cease making me stand in awe of those authors! I just love William Trevor’s style because his glimpses of people’s lives always manage to do this, “to speak to me”.
A man refusing an inheritance from an ex-lover because of being afraid of what the world would say reminisces about how the lover was the only person he felt he could connect with. Two people having a blind date realize that their expectations are ill-matched, but they deal with the date honorably while they face their past regrets quietly. A girl feels guilty for having gossiped about the cuckolded man who had tutored her. An accountant tells his lover his reasons for ending their love affair in spite of the fact that he loves her. A girl realizes that she had been in love with the future she imagined with her lover, not with the man himself. Trevor’s vignettes are sometimes really unexpected, but they still leave a print on you no matter how bizarre the stories seem.
A feeling of regret permeates the whole volume, but also one of quiet acceptance. And also, every single story has a conclusion that really touched me one way or another and even though some of them might have been weaker than others (like in any volume of short stories), I choose to rate this book with a five for the overall feeling that kept lingering over me after having finished the majority of them.
***
A man refusing an inheritance from an ex-lover because of being afraid of what the world would say reminisces about how the lover was the only person he felt he could connect with. Two people having a blind date realize that their expectations are ill-matched, but they deal with the date honorably while they face their past regrets quietly. A girl feels guilty for having gossiped about the cuckolded man who had tutored her. An accountant tells his lover his reasons for ending their love affair in spite of the fact that he loves her. A girl realizes that she had been in love with the future she imagined with her lover, not with the man himself. Trevor’s vignettes are sometimes really unexpected, but they still leave a print on you no matter how bizarre the stories seem.
A feeling of regret permeates the whole volume, but also one of quiet acceptance. And also, every single story has a conclusion that really touched me one way or another and even though some of them might have been weaker than others (like in any volume of short stories), I choose to rate this book with a five for the overall feeling that kept lingering over me after having finished the majority of them.
***
*“She wondered if in his life, too, there had been a mistake that threw a shadow, if that was why he was looking around for someone to fill a gap he had never become used to.”
*“It would not have seemed unusual to speak about his marriage, about love’s transformation within it, about his grief when it was no longer there, about the moments and occasions it had since become.”
*“The silence was different when the music stopped, as if the music had changed it.”