Last Stories

Starred review from March 19, 2018
This spare collection of 10 stories by the late Trevor (The Story of Lucy Gault) might be too bleak if its darkness weren’t skillfully counterbalanced by sly hints of humor and understated compassion. The stories are sharp and concise, containing whole lives in the span of just a few pages. The book as a whole has an elegiac tone, with death figuring heavily in many of the stories. Often, it’s death observed at a distance, as in “The Crippled Man,” in which two foreign painters speculate about the disappearance of one of the owners of the house they are painting, or “The Unknown Girl,” in which the former employer of a young woman killed crossing the street wonders whether she holds partial responsibility. Many of Trevor’s stories contemplate two interacting characters who have little in common, like the prostitute who pursues a picture-restorer whose memory is failing in “Giotto’s Angels,” or the very different widow and widower in “Mrs Crasthorpe.” The author keeps a distance from his characters, driven to incomprehensible actions by motives even they don’t understand. Readers familiar with Trevor, who died in 2016, will find satisfying closure, and those new to his work will find reason to go back and explore his previous books.

William Trevor has justly been called our twentieth-century Chekhov, and this audiobook is a fitting and memorable finale to his oeuvre. He is a master of many things, especially understatement and drama so quiet that you often don't realize a bomb has gone off until well after the detonation. Simon Vance is the perfect interpreter of Trevor's technique. His performance is cool and subtle, alert to variations on themes, shrewd about mood and color. Theft is a recurring motif here. Also, love buried but not forgotten, love obsessive or wholly imagined, betrayals between spouses, and lies between parents and children. And at least one murder. If either Trevor or Vance overplayed even slightly, it could be melodrama. Instead this brilliant collection feels like life. B.G. � AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine