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A daily record of what I'm thinking about what I'm reading

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Tuesday, February 27, 2018

Why William Trevor should have won a Nobel Prize

I felt a bit sad to see a William Trevor story (Mrs. Casthorpe) in the current NYer, mainly because it reminded me that Trevor died, w/ little notice, about a year ago and we won't be seeing more stories from one of the greatest writers of our time. You can't say that Trevor was unrecognized or unrewarded, though he was by no means as well known as many of this contemporaries and near equals and it's a shame that he never received a Nobel - I think they should have split the award between him and Alice (the Great) Munro, but so be it. To my knowledge this is his first posthumous story in the NYer, and maybe there are enough uncollected to make one last book. His previous NYer story was from a year to so before his death and to be honest it showed diminished powers. Similarly, Mrs. Casthorpe will not be ranked among his greatest works - the conclusion is a little forced and too dependent on coincidence or chance - but it does have some of the great Trevor qualities and characteristics: Sorrowful people, some (like the title character) w/ quite an edge, living lives of quiet desperation, disrupted by desires and aspirations, all of which are generally frustrated or unfulfilled, generally leaving the central character with a sense of their loneliness or social isolation - in other words, not exactly cheery stuff, but work in a direct line of descent from Chekhov. His earlier works tended to be set in rural Ireland; later works, such as this one, in contemporary England, often in the remote suburbs our out districts of London. This story involves a relatively young widow who hopes to carry on her sex life and emotional life with a younger man - though she greatly over-estimates her powers of attraction and goes into a spiral toward death. Trevor alternates among three different POVs for this story - a little rough going at first, but the strands of the story do tie together by the end. Not sure why this was left unpublished, perhaps WT felt  it was unpolished or incomplete, but despite my quibbles I finished reading it hoping that there are more Trevor stories waiting to see the light.

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