Last Stories

Reviews

None but those with a complete mastery of fiction can walk this line. William Trevor was not "an Irish Chekhov" or even "the Irish Chekhov". He was and will remain the Irish William Trevor 10 stories bring a literary career that lasted more than half a century to a consummate conclusion William Trevor's prose runs as clear as water yet tastes like gin Extraordinary stories from ordinary lives One of the great contemporary chroniclers of the human condition, in all its pathos, comedy and strangeness. As a writer he looked at the world with an always surprised but never scandalised eye, and his writer's heart was with those awkward and obscurely damaged souls who cannot quite manage the business of everyday life - all of us, that is There are those rare, exceptional writers who are fortunate enough (like their readers) to burn bright and steady over many decades, expressing the same creative clarity at the end of their careers as they did at the beginning. William Trevor was one of those writers We honor him as the supreme master of his honest art In the first few paragraphs of a story he could set an entire scene without seeming to, working on details, small moments, odd thoughts. As in the work of Alice Munro, there often seemed to be very little happening in his fiction, but then he was capable of offering the reader a sense of an immense drama His stories are formally beautiful and, at the same time, interested in the smallness of human lives. He was, as a writer, watchful, unsentimental, alert to frailty and malice. A master craftsman Trevor is a master of both language and storytelling Expand reviews