Imbricated! Ozick was the daughter of my pharmacist in the Bronx and I knew her. Trevor would NEVER have used such a word. I loved his study of the thieving piano student when I read it. None of his stories would have used such self-aggrandizing language, as a metaphor yet!
5
Once, when I was a much younger man, I had the occasion to introduce a well-known author to a crowd gathered to hear him. But I made the introduction all about myself (I, too, had a new novel). I was reminded of my long-ago error of vanity, of egotism, while reading Ozick on William Trevor. She writes,"Virtuosity’s sentence-making is thickened, intricate, imbricated, often dazzling. And eventually, because of the nihilist pressure of the unstoppable gush of language itself, cynical to the point of despair." Translated into English? "I, too, am a writer."
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I am glad someone else noted this and wish another critic had reviewed this wonderful work.
8
Trevor was Anglo-Irish and Protestant. Anglo-Irish are a distinct group in Ireland with their own unique history. Not sure why this is no longer mentioned when discussing Trevor.
2
What a beautiful tribute from one master to another.
1
Last fall, I took a Form and Technique course as part of a BA Creative Writing degree (I'm in my 60s and am almost retired from my day job). As we wrote our own pieces of fiction, we also read and discussed the short stories of established short story writers. Our instructor, in his 40s, was from the urban area of a major U.S. city, and most of the writers he selected for the course were American urban writers, which I didn't really care for since I'm more small town/rural in my upbringing, and I have spent a lot of time traveling and working overseas, including in Ireland (my current favorite short story writer is Nadine Gordimer, and I'm a big fan of James Joyce). Thus, I appreciated that severals of William Trevor's works were on the our reading list.
1
When I read Trevor's collection After Rain, I couldn't think about the craft of writing the same way again. He is almost transparent in his work, so you might be reading along quite happily and then through the accretion of small beauties you suddenly become aware that you're in the hands of a master storyteller; his sentences are chords in his own peculiar minor key that never resolve and never disappoint.
7
Lava did not "make molds" of the victims of Pompeii. Lava flows from Vesuvius did not reach the city in 79 AD. The well-known Pompeii casts were made of plaster by archaeologists as they excavated victims’ remains from a layer of ash, mud, and pumice stones that blanketed the city and wiped it off the map after the cone of Vesuvius collapsed.
9
Reading a review like this is reading literature itself — pure delight...!
12
One last dip into Trevor genius; all the more exciting being a surprise...and recently excerpted in New Yorker. A giant like Ozick crowing about the Master. Kudos to the Times for opening this window.
10
Cynthia....I will buy William Trevor's book, but I also anxiously await your collection.
2
I hope, I’m certain, you mean “eagerly”!
6
A beautiful column and tribute. Thank you. Trevor (like the magnificent Alice Munro) could take the ordinary and the banal and make life stunning, revelatory, painful, and profound. His stories are gems, and they shine on and reveal additional facets of understanding in the reader's mind.
12
Beautifully rendered, Ms. Ozick. William Trevor is unquestionably a master of the short story, like yourself. He takes us into his world so easily, so unnoticeably; and renders life as it is, in all its nuances, as well as all its numinous revelatons.
14
I have read a couple dozen of his stories over the last two years and I can recall each one, their distinct characters, situations, emotional dilemmas and outcomes. He seemed able to look around at nearly all the otherwise obscure people around him, real or imagined, and see original experience. At a time when we are being herded into our tribal identities, he saw the endless ways of grief, joy, release, suffocation, satisfaction, that individual humans experience. His stories are always revelations.
18
I think the key point, of being herded into our tribal identities, is very fine and just what Ozick is noting when she says that Trevor has no ideology in spite of what the fake wisdom of the academic-critical crowd will say. Bravo
I don't know if art and literature will save us in these dark times but, if so, William Trevor will be one of those who brought us back from greed, fear and hatred and to empathy and human understanding. One of the greats.
19
One of the masters of the miniature literary masterpiece. Some times, during some moments in some Trevories, you gasp, after holding your breath
14
Oh god William Trevor. He will go down in history if we have one as one of the greatest short story writers. I'm so glad to hear there's another book.
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