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Post by suze on Sept 15, 2014 10:53:24 GMT
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Post by suze on Sept 15, 2014 11:07:16 GMT
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Post by suze on Sept 15, 2014 11:16:56 GMT
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Post by suze on Oct 26, 2014 10:10:01 GMT
William Trevor - Cheating at Canasta
British Council:
Trevor’s two most recent collections of short stories, A Bit on the Side (2004) and Cheating at Canasta (2007), are close companions in tone and theme, penetrating the shame, fear and isolation of a succession of individuals, none of whom are happy, all of whom are lonely. These protagonists exist on the margins, in down-at-heel villages, remote farms, or flats above bookmakers.
It is worth noting how well Trevor employs an oblique prose style in these works: elliptical sentences such as ‘He didn't know if he'd tried to, he didn't know if there hadn't been time’, frequently require rereading, reinforcing the elusiveness of truth in such settings. Often, it is simply unclear whether the dark secrets borne by many of the characters are past experiences or prolonged fantasies. In ‘On the Streets’, from the former collection, a waiter stalks his wife with the story of a murder he may or may not have committed; in ‘Men of Ireland’, from the latter, a tramp returns to the village of his birth to blackmail the parish priest with memories of child abuse which have possibly been fabricated.
There are several broader social themes sketched in the Irish stories of these collections, including the waning influence of the Catholic church and the slow decline of rural Ireland after years of emigration, but Trevor’s governing concern remains with the individual and the insuperable odds faced in any attempt to find happiness or fulfilment. The tone is set by characters such as the stonemason in ‘Sacred Statues’ (A Bit on the Side), a talented craftsman who, unable to raise the funds to pursue his vocation, resigns himself to working on the roads. ‘Things happen differently,’ he concludes to his wife at last; ‘We’re never in charge.’ In this landscape of disappointment, instances of humour are few and far between, and the bleakness of Trevor’s world-view remains both uncompromising and compelling.
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Post by suze on Oct 26, 2014 10:13:27 GMT
E notes
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Related to the theme of lonely, fragmented lives is the prevalence of evil, a force surprisingly mundane. Ordinary people inflict great harm, sometimes intentionally, sometimes through a thoughtless selfishness that motivates them to set off a chain of events or revelations that wreak havoc in other lives. His works demonstrate that past evils continue to infect the present. Evil committed by groups or individuals affect the entire social fabric. Fanatics emerge who cannot forgive what has happened in the past and continually subvert attempts at reconciliation through new violence. Evil, guilt, and violence are inextricably related
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Post by suze on Oct 26, 2014 10:20:44 GMT
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Post by suze on Oct 26, 2014 10:21:46 GMT
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Post by suze on Oct 26, 2014 10:31:45 GMT
The short review:
Trevor has a skill for dropping readers immediately into the flow of a story at the outset, revealing the richness of his fictional world vividly and palpably. It is quite possible that a black humor is at work in Cheating at Canasta that I’m not properly attuned to. But whatever the book’s virtues, it felt simply bleak, not richly melancholic. And that is a not inconsiderable difference.
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