Last Stories

March 1, 2018
Ten short fictions from the late Irish master (1928-2016) explore love, betrayal, and the ways that people cope with life's blows.There's a distinct shortage of happiness in this book, not least because it's a reminder that Trevor (Selected Stories, 2010, etc.) is no longer writing. The stories themselves make up a grim group, dealing in theft, extortion, and infidelity. In the opener, "The Piano Teacher's Pupil," a boy's musical talent comes with a light-fingered larceny. The teacher exemplifies Trevor's uncanny skill in compression, defining the milestones of her life by one room and three sentences, noting how memory can ease pain: "If a beloved lover had belittled love it mattered less in that same soothing retrospect." Theft arises again when a prostitute steals the savings of a man suffering from a memory disorder ("Giotto's Angels"). "The Crippled Man" ends with a woman concealing her handicapped cousin's death to keep his pension coming. Trevor paints the cousins' lives in rich, sharp strokes while working in the marginal existence of two itinerant Carinthian house painters and the way a woman's tough economies might benefit from a carnal arrangement with a butcher. In "At the Caff' Daria," two women, once friends, meet years later after the death of the man who married one and then left her for the other. Another fickle male lover appears in "An Idyll in Winter," barely touched by the pain he cavalierly inflicts on his wife and a former pupil. "Mrs Crasthorpe" is a widowed woman whose name partly defines her as crass, but while she dies in alcoholic squalor, sympathy is stirred by her trials with a son who is a recidivist flasher.As always, Trevor navigates the rough seas of human relations with a new angle, fresh language, deep sympathy, and uncanny insight.

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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.

Starred review from April 1, 2018
The situations behind Trevor's (Selected Stories, 2010) beautifully composed stories revolve around themes of personal cruelty, romantic and marital heartbreak, lover betrayal, and even violent death, and he has long established himself as a writer of great charity for the ordinary person and sympathy for the hard knocks of unheralded lives. In this last and posthumous collection?Trevor died at age 88 in 2016?his tales have footing in his native Ireland and his adopted homeland of England, his usual settings. Trevor's characterizations step to the fore as the major aspect of his writerly genius. The Piano Teacher's Pupil introduces the collection as well as heralds the traits found in succeeding stories. A masterpiece of concision, it steps forward as a rewarding example of the sheer effectiveness of the short story form. Miss Elizabeth Nightingale is a piano teacher with a new student whom she immediately recognizes as a musical genius, but nearly simultaneous with this realization comes the awareness that her prized student has a penchant for thievery, leaving her to weigh the benefits of the beauty that the gifted brought. Trevor will long reign as a literary master.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)

Starred review from March 1, 2018

Two workmen realize that the worn-out relative/housekeeper of the crippled man who hired them is hiding his boss's death (the better to keep receiving his pension). A man learns that the rumpled woman found dead in an alley was once the polished, desperately striving widow who tried to win him. A cartographer returns to the Yorkshire farm where he once tutored a lovely girl, now a grown woman with whom he falls in love. Throughout these final stories from the masterly Trevor (The Story of Lucy Gault), limpid and clearly defined as dewdrops on a branch, we see characters dealing with the past and moving forward--or not. Not surprisingly, there's an autumnal air throughout: the housekeeper "had once known what she wanted, but she wasn't so sure about that anymore," while the cartographer realizes that you can't escape what's done ("the damaged do not politely go away"), and a woman betrayed by a friend recalls a time when "friendship was the better thing." Yet this is hard-won wisdom, not sorrow. VERDICT Highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, 11/6/17.]

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

March 1, 2018

Publishing on May 24, which would have been Trevor's 90th birthday, this collection of ten final stories from a multi-award-winning master of the form will draw big attention throughout the literary community. Six of the ten stories have not appeared in print, though they will be surfacing in The New Yorker, and the remaining four stories have never appeared between book covers.

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.