William Trevor May 24, 1928 to November 16, 2016

Sadness darkens The Reading Life World.  Please share with us your most cherished memories of reading his works.

Mr. Trevor, you will be truly missed but never forgotten.  Thank you for everything. 

Mel u

Ambrosia Boussweau 

"The Women" by William Trevor (2013 in The New Yorker, republished in The O Henry Stories 2014)

William Trevor (1928, County Cork, Ireland) is for sure one of the two, along with Alice Munro, greatest living short story writers.  I have read and posted on way to few stories by these writers, maybe because their stories need time to seep down into the depths of your consciousness.  

"The Women", first published in The New Yorker and included in The O Henry Prize Stories 2014 is an amazing story that shows the slow unraveling of an old family secret.  There are two central characters in the story, an affluent refined businessman and his daughter.  His wife left him for another man when his daughter was two and he raised her alone, with hired help.  Everything in the girl's life stays the same, she is comfortable and happy though lonely with no real companions but her father, a very good man, the household help and the tutor who home schools her.  Her father periodically takes her on nice weekends to Oxford or Csmbridge and on vacation to Paris, Venice, and Rome.  The father decides she needs regular contact with other girls so he sends her to a fine boarding school.  She hates it at first and wants to go home but in time she makes friends, settling in.  I don't want to spoil the main plot development for potential readers but it does involve a pair of very close rather odd fifty something year old women who start to come to the ice hockey games.  

The ending really makes you think about the collisions of worlds, the coincidences that can define personal histories.  The contrasting worlds of the life of the father and his daughter and the two strange women is really brilliant.

"The Women" is a simply wonderful story which I am so glad to have read.

Do you have a favorite Trevor story?

Mel u

"The Hill Bachelors" by William Trevor (1997)

Event Resources  Everyone Is Invited to Join Us for Irish Short Story Month Year Four

Ways to Participate-do a post on your blog and let me know about it-I will keep a master list and I will publicize your post and blog.

If you are an Irish author and would like to be featured, please contact me.   There are several options open.

If you would like to do a guest post on my blog on anything related to Irish short stories, contact me.

William Trevor (1928) is universally recognized as one of the greatest contemporary short story writers. I have not read nearly enough of his work.  I think my reason in part is that I find in his short stories such deeply constructed works that reading ten of them in a day would be like trying to absorb all of Middlemarch in one 24 hour stretch. 

After Irish Short Story Month Three ended in April last year I began to expand my readings into Irish poetry. I found within "The Great Hunger" by Patrick Kavanagh a  majestic expression of many of the themes of Irish literature.  One of the persistent personas in the Irish short story is that of the old bachelor, living on the family holdings, still not fully independent as he ages, waiting for his parents to pass.  Ireland was (I will leave the current state for others more informed to ponder) a sexually repressed culture in which these bachelors had so little opportunity for sex that their appetites withered. while still young.  In rural Ireland, a place where not long ago a woman who had sex outside of marriage could be placed in a mental hospital, there were not the brothels and street walkers of Dublin.  In "The Hill Bachelor" Trevor takes us into the life of a man, working the farm he inherited, he seeks a wife for a while but the local women don't want the life such a marriage brings.  We see thatmany people  want to escape from rural farm life, preferring city factory work.  In time the old bachelor just fades into the hills. 

Mel u

"The Potato Dealer" by William Trevor

"The Potato Dealer" by William Trevor  (2009, 15 pages)

Irish Short Story Month Year 3

March 1 to March 31

William Trevor

County Cork

Resources 

If you were to somehow be able to poll the serious short story readers of the world as to who the greatest living practitioner of the form was, I think Alice Munro would come in first with William Trevor (1928) as a strong second.     Both are worthy of a Nobel Prize.   In both cases I have read far to little of their work.

During Irish Short Story Week Year One I posted on his "Men of Ireland" and "Woman of the House".   In ISSW2 I posted on a great story centering on a priest, "Death in Jerusalem".    He has won lots of awards for his many novels and short stories.  William Trevor:  The Collected Stories is 1280 pages.  I have a copy of Selected Stories:  William Trevor which contains a bit more than a third of his stories.   (The date of this publication is 2009 and that is the date I attribute to the story.  I know it was published earlier but I do not have the date.  I have said this before but to anyone who will edit a collection of short stories in the future, please put the date and the original place of publication somewhere in the collection.)

"The Potato Dealer" deals with many of the basic themes of Irish literature, as expounded by Declan Kiberd in Inventing Ireland:  The Literature of the Modern Nation and the social forces at work in the country as detailed in Occasions for Sin:  Sex and Society in Modern Ireland by Diarmaid Ferriter.   Kiberd tells us that one the most important theme of modern Irish literature is that of the weak or missing father.   Their are three fathers in "The Potato Dealer".   A young unmarried pregnant woman and her mother have lived with the mother's unmarried brother ever since her husband died.  This is our first missing father, taken by an early death.   The girl fell in love with and was impregnated by a "summer curate".  A young man working in the parish for the summer only.  He left without ever knowing he was to be a father and perhaps this is doubly a weak father in that he was seen as a father to the people he ministered to.  The uncle and the girl's mother are deeply in scorn for what the girl has done.  Premarital sex was seen as great sin and an out of wedlock child would bring down disgrace on the extended family.   The uncle has a solution.   He feels a local potato dealer he knows will marry the girl for money.  He approaches the man and he right away knows he will do it but he bargains.   He is in need of a new truck for his business and that is the motivating factor.  Once the baby is born people will maybe say she was conceived before the marriage but marriage will wipe away the stain of that.   He moves on the farm and is told, he is a decent hardworking man, that he will if he keeps it up one day inherit the farm.   Everyone including the daughter Ellen who soon comes will think the potato dealer is the father.  They never share a room with his wife and he never so much as embraces her but he does  not have much interest in such things so he is OK with this.   All of the emotions are constrained in this story.  This is what Ferriter talks about a lot.  He also talks about the forces that kept many men from marrying young.   People keep their emotions in check for so long that in time they almost do not have them.  This does lead to tishe explosive potential for violence.   Marriages are treated as business deals.  He is a kind of father to the girl.  She for sure thinks he is her father and their is love between them.  He asks her about her school work when she comes home.  His wife cannot get over her love for the curate and she wants to reveal the family secret to her daughter.   So we have three weak or missing father:  The one that died, the one that skipped town and the potato dealer, who actually is not a bad father, or is as good a one as he can be.  

Trevor's portray of the emotions at play as the story winds down show his great skill as a story teller and the depth of his brilliant understand of people.   He takes us very deeply into the below the surface emotions of the characters, ones they may not even know they have.   You will wonder, or at least I did, if what the mother did was right or not.    

I think maybe one reason I  have not read more of William Trevor's stories is that they require time to digest, you cannot just rush through 1000 pages of them like you would a bag of potato chips.




Mel u

"Death In Jerusalem" by William Trevor

"Death in Jerusalem" by William Trevor (1978, 16 pages)

Irish Short Story Week Year Two

March 12 to May 1

April 1 to April 6

Resources and Ideas for Irish Short Story Week

My Prior Posts for ISSW Year Two

Please consider joining us for Irish Short Story Week Year Two (yes it is a long week!).   There are lots of ideas and links to stories in the resources page.   All you are asked to do is to post on Irish Short Story (or a work related to this area such as a biography of one of the writers or a historical work with some good background information) and let me know about it.   You are welcome to guest post on my blog if you like.   If you have any questions, concerns, complaints, just let me know.

As I began to post consider posting on Irish short stories centering on priests, I previously posted on Daniel Crockery's very well done story, "The Priest" I did a Google news search on "Priests in Ireland".  A picture of a priesthood in moral crisis quickly emerged with the many stories of  sexual abuse of children by priests and cover ups by church officials.  Of  course this is only the small minority of priests but it seems to have made it harder for the priests in Ireland to be moral leaders.

I think if you surveyed readers of the genre and asked them who the best living short story writer was you would get close to a split vote between Alice Munro and William Trevor.   Both are now in their eighties and both are very prolific writers.   Trevor's collected short stories comes to over 1200 pages.   His stories are normally shorter than Munro's.   Munro's are set in Canada, Trevor's in Ireland.   Both are very much cold weather writers.  

William Trevor (1928, County Cork, Ireland)  included "Death in Jerusalem"  as his contribution to his collection of short stories, The Oxford Book of Irish Short Stories.  I hope we can take that as his endorsing it as a good representation of his work.   I posted on two of his short stories during Irish Short Story Week Year One, "Men of Ireland" and "The Woman of the House".   For sure Irish Short Story Week would not be complete without at least one post on William Trevor.   

"I can't wait for Gothic Week"
Carmilla

"Death in Jerusalem" centers on a priest and his brother, both well into middle age and their mother.  One of the themes found in as lot of the short stories I and others have posted on this year is the clash of moral obligations and the anxiety the inability to be a fully moral person causes.   I will just briefly state the outlines of the plot here in order to illustrate what I mean.   For sure this story fits Frank O'Connors conception of a short story that deals centrally with loneliness.   The priest and his brother have been planning a joint trip to Jerusalem for a long time.   They are conflicted when it comes time to go because there very elderly mother is very sick.  They both really want to go and they know it may be now or never.  (I am going to tell more of the plot now than I normally do.) Just as they arrive in Jerusalem the priest gets notified that their  mother has passed away.   He ponders what should he do, should he tell his brother who he knows will insist they go home at once.  There is nothing, of course they can do for their mother, there are other family members perfectly able and willing to handle all the arrangements.   I will stop here but you can see their is no "right decision" he can make.   

Do you have a favorite Trevor story?

I have a small collection of his short stories, maybe 40, and will, I am hoping, post more on his stories during Irish Short Story Week Year Three in March 2013.

I will next post on a short story by Frank O'Connor.

Mel u

William Trevor-Two Stories-Irish Short Story Week

""Men of Ireland"  (5 pages, 2005) and "The Woman of the House" (4 pages, 2008)

The New Yorker

Day Six

William Trevor

Resources for the Week

William Trevor is without any doubt is by far and away the consensus pick for best living Irish short story writer.

Most long time readers of short stories consider either Trevor or Alice Munto (Canada) as the best world wide of contemporary short story writers.   Trevor (1928-Mitchelstown, County Cork, Ireland) is a very prolific writer.    In addition to numerous novel,  he has written 100s of short stories.    The Collected Short Stories of William Trevor is 1280 pages.  I first encountered  Trevor this week and will just comment briefly on the two stories (both published in The New Yorker) I read.  

"The Woman of the House"  opens with a crippled man bargaining with two men over the price of painting his house.   (I have seen a good bit of bargaining in the Irish short stories I have read this week.)    Martina lives with the man.   There relationship is a bit unclear.   Martina once had hopes for a good happy life now she just strives to get by.   She lets the butcher fumble her body in meat locker and does not have to pay for her chicken and pork.   She takes the money this saves her from the funds the man gives her and hides it.   As the story plays out we learn more of the history of the two painters, displaced persons from Poland now often called Gypsies.  We come to try to understand the woman.   The story is perfectly written and for sure kept me interested and wanting more.   Like many an Irish short story, it deals with people on the fringes of society, outsiders, misfits and outcasts.   I saw in this story and elsewhere this week that one can be an exile without moving away.

You can read this story HERE.   (You will also get to see some of the famous cartoons as you are reading!)

"Men of Ireland"  is also about an outcast and a misfit.   The central character left Ireland 23 years ago for England to try is luck there.   He never found any.   He decides (we do no learn why)  to take the ferry back to Ireland to go to his home town.    All of his clothes are second or third hand and he stole the shoes he is wearing from a drunk.   I went along with him as hitched a ride with a truck driver.   I got a look inside the mind of the man.  There is no real plot, no resolution in the very brief story but there is a full world constructed in " Men of Ireland".   Trevor ties the life of this very unimportant man in with the world in a brilliant way.


You can read "Men of Ireland" HERE

I could see myself starting on his 1280 page collection soon.

It is not to late to join in-all you are asked to do is post on one Irish Short Story this week and leave me a comment so I can include it in the master post I will do next week.

"Please stay around for the Party"-Rory

My greatest thanks  those who participated so far.

Mel u