A Bit On The Side: Stories

Rating:
Summary: Achingly Sublime
Review: Finding an author who labors for subtlety, one who more than appreciates it but rather writes for and of the reason of subtlety, for it alone, is awfully, awfully rare. Most authors don't seem to fully understand the magic of quiet intelligence, which allows a reader to slip inside a story and synthesize the events and details. As I have learned in school, it is subtlety that allows a reader to disengage from his or her life and suspend disbelief. I have never read any of William Trevor's work before, but I understand now why he is considered a master storyteller. A BIT ON THE SIDE is a remarkable collection indeed.

I recommend Paddock's A SECRET WORD, a brilliant novel-in-stories, for the same reasons.

Rating:
Summary: Sensitive Slice of Modern British Life
Review: I find this collection to be equal to Trevor's two immediately previous short story collections "After Rain" and "The Hill Bachelors" both of which I have also read along with 3 of his novels. If you are unfamiliar with contemporary British writing, this author's short stories or novels might be a good introduction. It's helpful to have a compact Oxford English Dictionary since occasionally a phrase comes up which is more British than American. He deals in both English and Irish themes, both urban and rural, religious and secular. Many of his stories deal with contemporary themes such as the clash between more modern values, often including adultery or divorce , and more traditional religious values. "Justina's Priest" is about this conflict. Many might be considered nostalgic for the past. He also sometimes writes from a child's or an adolescent's viewpoint. He often seems to put conservative values in a positive light, though he also deals with urban themes, such as modern dating services, and also with crime. You would have to say that one appeal of stories like "Sitting With The Dead," "Sacred Statues", "Big Bucks" and "Traditions" is nostalgic since they examine aspects of traditional Irish culture or religion and look more to the past than the future. "Solitude" is another powerful story,really a horror story, about a crime committed by a child and its consequences for her & her family; and "On The Streets" is also about the crime of stalking. His stories about adultery, "A Bit On The Side" and "Graillus' Legacy" are nevertheless highly romantic, as lovers fondly recall memories of former or soon-to-be-broken relationships.


Rating:
Summary: A short-story collection that made me FEEL!
Review: I have read many great short-story collections, but this one is the best I have read in a very long time. A Bit on the Side showcases several of the darkest, bleakest, most thought provoking and haunting short stories out there. William Trevor has delved into human emotion in a way that most short-story writers aren't able to convey in a few pages. Some of the stories touched me, others disturbed me. And that is what I love about this collection. Trevor made me FEEL for the characters. A book is definitely a keeper when the language is so palpable it almost jumps out of the pages. My favorite stories are "Sitting with the Dead," "Justina's Priest," "Traditions," and "A Bit on the Side." I haven't read Trevor's previous efforts, but I will definitely give them a whirl. I cannot recommend A Bit on the Side: Stories enough.

Rating:
Summary: "Other glimpses and other betrayals."
Review: Irish writer, William Trevor (1928- )(FELICIA'S JOURNEY; THE STORY OF LUCY GAULT), has been called the Chekhov of our time, and if Chekhov were alive today, it is easy to imagine that he would be writing short stories much like the twelve pieces contained here. I always open a new William Trevor book with a sense of excitement. Trevor's writing is brilliant and requires the reader's full attention; it is characterized by subtle nuances that offer keen insights into the heart of human nature. His characters are ordinary people whose personal struggles are depicted with a significance that is both poignant and universal. Reading Trevor requires patience, but readers can expect to emerge from a Trevor story with a broader understanding of what it means to be human.

Trevor's eleventh volume of short stories grapples with the uncomfortable truths of disillusioned relationships. In the first story, "Sitting with the Dead," a new widow laments her loss of a hateful husband to two rural Irish nuns ("professional" sitters for the dying). In "Solitude," an heiress tells the story of her parents' unstable marriage to strangers; "On the Streets" follows a woman being stalked by her lonely ex-husband; in "Rose Wept," an 18-year-old schoolgirl weeps with regret over "other betrayals" after gossiping about the cuckolded man who tutors her; and in the title story, a middle-aged accountant explains his reasons for ending an affair with a woman so that she won't be regarded as his "bit on the side. In this emotionally haunting collection of twelve stories, we witness Trevor at his best. His characters discover through the nostalgia of lost love that, when it comes to relationships, "things happen differently" than expected; "we're never in charge" (p. 151).

G. Merritt

Rating:
Summary: Trevor-Trevor Land
Review: It's so pleasing to see Trevor's prolific talent back in action, and so soon after his celebrated last collection The Hill Bachelors. How many living short story writers now on either side of the Atlantic are Trevor's equal? Perhaps a few as good - Alan Sillitoe, Alice Munro, and Richard Bausch - but few better.

A claim most reviewers of short fiction are helpless to resist is that their favourite stories in the collection are the 'best: perhaos solely on the grounds that they prefer them. I don't know which are the 'best' stories in A Bit on the Side, but I know which are my favourites. They are 'Justina's Priest', 'An Evening Out' and the title story, which, along with certain other stories in this collection appeared first in the New Yorker.

As an aside, I am also heartened to see non-US authors (who publish in US magazines) like Trevor are now eligible for entry in the O. Henry awards; his recent win is most welcome. Not least because he set the standard in short-story writing decades before many of its contemporary practitioners were even born.

The loneliness, pain and stoicisim of the ordinary men, women and children who people Trevor's fiction are as thoroughly realised as ever. Trevor is as unjudgemental as Chekhov. An atheist friend of mine told me how much he was moved by the plight of Father Clohessy in 'Justina's Priest', who is made to realise: 'What priests and Bishops had been - their strength and their parish people's salvation - was mocked in television farces, deplored, presented as absurdity. That other priests in other towns, in cities, in country parishes, were isolated by their celibacy, by the mourning black of their dress, had been a consolation once, but that source of comfort had long ago dried up.'

Not that the collection is depressing. While these stories, like Ford's A Multitude of Sins, are typically variations on the theme of adultery, they also powerfully stand up for the redemptive, affiriming power of love in Ireland and Anglo-Ireland. It seems only fair to conclude with these words, taken from the title story of the collection:

'Nothing of love had been destroyed today: they took that with them as they drew apart and walked away from one another, unaware that the future was less bleak than now it seemed, that in it there would still be the delicacy of their reticence, and they themselves, as love had made them for a while.'


Rating:
Summary: The Curator of the Quiet Masterpiece
Review: William Trevor's brilliant stories reached their peak with the collections "After Rain" (1996) and "The Hill Bachelors" (2000), and he goes far in this newest collection to remind us why the short story often packs a defter punch than the novel. The title characters in "Justina's Priest" wage the most heartbreaking of battles in a timeless tale of the world moving forward.

However, I found Trevor's syntax to be unnecessarily cluttered as never before. Each story has sentences that are written in the most wrapped around manner, and are done so without their own reward. This is a minor complaint, but enough to keep this collection at four stars.