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The Master

Customer Rating:

Just ordered this and awaiting it anxiously. I have just finished two later collections The Hill Bachelors and Cheating at Canasta (the title story in the latter is heartbreaking and just a perfect piece of writing). I also immediatley ran out and bought After Rain and A Bit on the Side. I had overlooked Trevor for years. I now fully acknowledge that in doing so; I deserve to be tried for crimes against humanity! Being from Ireland and living here, I also live with the constant knowledge that Trevor is a god and part of the literary furniture. Somehow, strangely, I just took him for granted and never read him. I had also wrongly assumed that Trevor belonged to that somewhat stuffy Irish "big house novel" literary tradition (if one can call it that). By chance, I picked up The Hill Bachelors and have found literary salvation! He is utterly brilliant and consistently so. 12 collections and counting. Nearly every collection consists of 12 stories, each about 20/22 pages long, divided in to 5 or 6 scenes. His structure is so simple and within it he performs miracles, over and over again. It is also wonderful how his stories alternate between a story set in Ireland and a story set in England, the country that he has lived in since his 30s. I adore short stories and all the great North American and Irish writers in the genre: Hemingway, Carver, Wolff, Munro, Joyce and McGahern. But I think Trevor is now my literary hero - plus he's a first rate gentleman (not always so with literary geniuses). Although now 80 let's hope for a new collection from the master in about 2010 and God help him, maybe more after that.

A Book for the Ages

Customer Rating:

If you enjoy consummate skill in the written word you will treasure this book. It is the most beautifully crafted collection of short stories I have ever encountered. The characters are powerful, endearing, heartbreaking, loving, loathsome, self centered, generous, and sometimes frightening - the scope of this work is breathtaking. It is unfortunate that a book perfect for "dipping into" is so large and heavy - a reissue in rice paper would halve both (The Oxford Book of English Verse 1250-1918 has 1166 pages and fits quite comfortably in a coat pocket!) William Trevor is a genius - if you buy his book you will not be disappointed. Dr Peter J Kirby.

Masterful and dazzling, with an astonishing variety

Customer Rating:

It took me a couple of months to make my way through these 85 stories and it was definitely worth the time I spent with them. Trevor's prose is always simple and clear, yet his range of characters and plots is astonishing because of their superbly captured detail and variety. Most of these stories deal with Irish and English characters, and many swirl around the realities or possibilities of extramarital affairs. "In Isfahan," one of Trevor's best stories, a married middle-aged man carries on an impromptu affair with a young woman he meets while in Iran; in "Lovers of Their Time," another top-notch story, a married man carries on a long-term affair with a shop girl by meeting her in a hotel's second-floor public bathroom. Trevor is also quite adept of presenting the romantic yearnings of women. In "The Ballroom of Romance," a country girl's dreams and consequences are highlighted in her trips to the local dance hall; in "Afternoon Dancing," a middle-aged married woman dallies with the idea of an affair with her dance partner after the death of her close friend. Like Chekhov, to whom Trevor is often compared, this writer also has an admirable sense of comedy. "Mulvhill's Memorial" finds an unlikely pornographic set-up within an office; "The Trinity" has a couple booking a vacation to Venice and ending up in Switzerland. Accidents spiral out of control in "The Penthouse Apartment," and in "A Complicated Nature," a man is forced to help his upstairs neighbor when her suitor unexpectedly dies. Another one of the best stories of this collection is "Broken Homes," where an elderly woman suffers the indignities of having her kitchen painted by a team of indifferent youths. Other first-rate stories include "The Smoke Trees of San Pietro," where a boy's sickness propels his mother into an affair, and "Death in Jerusalem" where a mother dies while on vacation.

real good

Customer Rating:

Had never heard of the guy - got it at a bookstore because it had 1200 pages (I needed a lot to read) and because it was written by an old guy (well, he's old now, at least - well- wrinkled but kind looking). So far I'm about a third of the way through it, but like everyone else has said, this book is great. Some writers get lazy and write the same story over and over. Not this guy - every character, every situation is unique. For people who like movies, read the one about Istafan and compare it to "Lost in Translation". The story about the swingers party is indescribably great also, just in the way he describes a man kissing a woman's hair or them barely dancing at all.

The Master's Collection

Customer Rating:

Someone else here refers to the problems of 'star' hyperbole. He's right. The five stars Trevor deserves must be especially large and dazzling. He goes wrong, just a little, once in a while. So did every truly great writer we know. Most of the time he opens a door on the world of two or three people, and shows us the universe in the process. He is a breathtaking artist. Witness 'Another Christmas' - in a dingy living room and armed with no one but an aging Irish couple, he brings home the Troubles in Ireland in epic, heartbreaking scope. And 'Torridge'...a girl said to me when this story first appeared in The New Yorker that it was like Beethoven's Fifth; you can't imagine it not having been around before. It's that good. Readers! You can do no better than to get to know what this man can do with a pen.