“Trevor is probably the greatest living writer of short stories in the English language,” stated The New Yorker upon publication of The Collected Stories (1992), his magnum opus of short fiction. “His sixties stories have a wondrous sense of sixtiesness, of youth-quake and space-out and sexual abandon; his seventies stories darken and brood, and the cloud that hangs over them is often the troubles in Northern Ireland, which cleave relationships hundreds of miles away as surely as a newly revealed adultery. His more recent stories take him to the past, often an Irish past, and Trevor increasingly seems to take the long view, watching the way family curses infect generations, the way national curses continue over centuries.” And Reynolds Price noted: “With this new immense collection, William Trevor has filed in serene selftrust the results of years of work of impeccable strength and a piercing profundity that’s very seldom surpassed in short fiction.”
“William Trevor is an extraordinarily mellifluous writer, seemingly incapable of composing an ungraceful sentence,” said The New York Times Book Review. Though best known for his novels and short stories he has also published A Writer's Ireland (1984), an informal history of Irish literary achievement, and Excursions in the Real World (1993), a volume of memoirs. His several plays, which have been staged in both London and Dublin, include The Old Boys (1971), Going Home (1972), Marriages (1973), and Scenes from an Album (1981). “I don’t know who now has most right to claim Mr. Trevor, England or Ireland,” said John Fowles. “It is clear to me that his excellence comes from a happy marriage of central values in both traditions. Art of this solidity and quality cannot be written from inside frontiers. It is, in the best sense of the word, international.”
“Trevor amazes me with the variety of his subjects,” remarked novelist and critic Doris Grumbach. “What a good writer, what a superb story-teller, and he has gone on for so long being so good.” The Sunday Telegraph (London) noted: “Trevor writes of the piercing tragedies and grand dramas of everyday life in a tone through which the echoes of Chekhov and Maupassant are clearly audible. Like theirs, Trevor’s view of the world is melancholy and unsparing. . . . But like them, too, his work is supported by a fundamental optimism, a belief in the indomitability of the human spirit and rare sustaining power of love.” V. S. Pritchett agreed: “As his master Chekhov did, William Trevor simply, patiently, truthfully allows life to present itself, without preaching; he is the master of the small movements of conscience that worry away at the human imagination and our passions.” The Boston Globe hailed him as “one of the finest writers now at work in our language,” and The Washington Post Book World concluded: “To be a master of the story and a master of the novel is a distinction achieved by precious few writers, but such a master is William Trevor.”
----
NIGHTS
AT THE
ALEXANDRA
----
ONE
I am a fifty-eight-year-old provincial. I have no children. I have never married.
“Harry, I have the happiest marriage in the world! Please, when you think of me, remember that.”
That is what I hear most often and with the greatest pleasure: Frau Messinger’s voice as precisely recalled as memory allows, each quizzical intonation reflected in a glance or gesture. I must have replied something, Heaven knows what: it never mattered because she rarely listened. The war had upset the Messingers’ lives, she being an Englishwoman and he German. It brought them to Ireland and to Cloverhill—a sanctuary they most certainly would not otherwise have known.
She explained to me that she would not have found life comfortable in Hitler’s Germany; and her own country could hardly be a haven for her husband. They had thought of Switzerland, but Herr Messinger believed that Switzerland would be
“William Trevor is an extraordinarily mellifluous writer, seemingly incapable of composing an ungraceful sentence,” said The New York Times Book Review. Though best known for his novels and short stories he has also published A Writer's Ireland (1984), an informal history of Irish literary achievement, and Excursions in the Real World (1993), a volume of memoirs. His several plays, which have been staged in both London and Dublin, include The Old Boys (1971), Going Home (1972), Marriages (1973), and Scenes from an Album (1981). “I don’t know who now has most right to claim Mr. Trevor, England or Ireland,” said John Fowles. “It is clear to me that his excellence comes from a happy marriage of central values in both traditions. Art of this solidity and quality cannot be written from inside frontiers. It is, in the best sense of the word, international.”
“Trevor amazes me with the variety of his subjects,” remarked novelist and critic Doris Grumbach. “What a good writer, what a superb story-teller, and he has gone on for so long being so good.” The Sunday Telegraph (London) noted: “Trevor writes of the piercing tragedies and grand dramas of everyday life in a tone through which the echoes of Chekhov and Maupassant are clearly audible. Like theirs, Trevor’s view of the world is melancholy and unsparing. . . . But like them, too, his work is supported by a fundamental optimism, a belief in the indomitability of the human spirit and rare sustaining power of love.” V. S. Pritchett agreed: “As his master Chekhov did, William Trevor simply, patiently, truthfully allows life to present itself, without preaching; he is the master of the small movements of conscience that worry away at the human imagination and our passions.” The Boston Globe hailed him as “one of the finest writers now at work in our language,” and The Washington Post Book World concluded: “To be a master of the story and a master of the novel is a distinction achieved by precious few writers, but such a master is William Trevor.”
----
NIGHTS
AT THE
ALEXANDRA
----
ONE
I am a fifty-eight-year-old provincial. I have no children. I have never married.
“Harry, I have the happiest marriage in the world! Please, when you think of me, remember that.”
That is what I hear most often and with the greatest pleasure: Frau Messinger’s voice as precisely recalled as memory allows, each quizzical intonation reflected in a glance or gesture. I must have replied something, Heaven knows what: it never mattered because she rarely listened. The war had upset the Messingers’ lives, she being an Englishwoman and he German. It brought them to Ireland and to Cloverhill—a sanctuary they most certainly would not otherwise have known.
She explained to me that she would not have found life comfortable in Hitler’s Germany; and her own country could hardly be a haven for her husband. They had thought of Switzerland, but Herr Messinger believed that Switzerland would be
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