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Ireland: Selected Stories
These nineteen stories - selected by Trevor himself from The Collected Stories and After Rain - capture the nuances of rural and middle-class life in the Ireland he knows so well. Here are its people, their lives driven by love, faith, and duty, surviving in a culture that blends tradition with transformation.
Hardcover, 272 pages
Published
May 31st 1999
by Viking Penguin
(first published 1998)
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Such a painful collection of short stories. The subjects of the stories are what is painful, not the writing. William Trevor has a great talent of capturing life's little tragedies (sometimes not so little). I can't decide if he was a depressed person, or just very observant. I love these stories though, even though they deal with sad subject matters. I feel like they make me more sensitive to people around me. A couple of the stories (I won't say which) are a voice for my own personal tragedies...more
This weekend I was re-reading some of these stories and it reinforced my opinion that William Trevor is right up there with Sean O' Faolain and Frank O' Connor as an absolute master of the short story form. His stories tend a little more towards the bittersweet - one is less likely to encounter a story as overtly comical as O' Connor's "First Confession", or O' Faolain's "Dividends". To me, the finest story in the collection is "The Ballroom of Romance", but there really isn't a bad story in the...more
Some were very good, some were fairly boring/a bit melodramatic. Decent collection overall.
I've been a William Trevor fan for a few years now, and Ireland is doing nothing to challenge my status as such. Trevor's lyrical style is at once deft and blunt, but can at turns also be delicate and heartbreaking in a way that only the Irish can.
It's sad that this book seems to be widely unavailable/out of print, because it's brilliant. Beautiful snapshots of overlooked lives.
God these stories are depressing.
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William Trevor grew up in various provincial towns and attended a number of schools, graduating from Trinity College, in Dublin, with a degree in history. He first exercised his artistry as a sculptor, working as a teacher in Northern Ireland and then emigrated to England in search of work when the school went bankrupt. He could have returned to Ireland once he became a successful writer, he said,...more
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