After Rain

Rating:
Summary: HUMAN NATURE INSIGHTFULLY PORTRAYED
Review:

Following on the heels of his beguiling Felicia's Journey, the incomparable Irish storyteller, William Trevor, brings us a collection of 12 poignant tales that illuminate the human condition.

Acknowledged by many to be the master of his oeuvre, Trevor commands our attention with dignity and subtlety. Amazingly adept at shifting perspectives from male to female in varying locations and scenes, the author's championship form is evident in After Rain.

His initial offering, "The Piano Tuner's Wives" is an incisive rendering of a middle-aged second wife's jealousy. Haunted by the happiness her husband once shared with another, she seeks to establish her place in surprising ways.

A lifelong bond between two women is broken in "A Friendship" when the clever plotting of one backfires. Timothy, the gay protagonist, in "Timothy's Birthday" seems to seek to punish his parents for their perfect marriage. He refuses to visit them for his birthday celebration as he has always done. Instead, he sends a friend with an excuse. The disreputable Eddie delivers his hurtful message, then steals from the older couple.

Trevor's spare prose shimmers in this story's summary paragraph: "They didn't mention their son as they made their rounds of the garden that was now too much for them and was derelict in places. They didn't mention the jealousy their love of each other had bred in him, that had flourished into deviousness and cruelty. The pain the day had brought would not easily pass, both were aware of that. And yet it had to be, since it was part of what there was."

Another story takes place in the fields of Ireland today. Here, Trevor displays his gift for knowing the female heart as a young woman challenges the culture and mores bred into her parents' bones.

Trevor's work is meat compared to the broth of some of today's fiction. He continues to astound as he explores the complexities of family relationships with sympathetic candor. After Rain is one more triumph.

- Gail Cooke

Rating:
Summary: A Well Kept Secret
Review: After Rain is the only Trevor book I've read, but my first impression is of an unpretentious, master craftsman. He shows how to dazzle while keeping to simple language. The subjects for his stories are both, refreshingly new, and, just around the corner from our own lives. With it's tight construction and expert storytelling, this book goes fast, but at the end of each story, you feel like you're in possession of the most subtle and refined tapestry. What's better is that it always feels like a surprise, since you saw the story unfold so efforlessly and elegantly that the resulting richness and power is unexpected. Each of the stories are awesome in their own right, so it is difficult to have favorites.

Rating:
Summary: After Rain by Wm. Trevor
Review: After the amazement of "THE COLLECTED STORIES" it's hard to believe he's still so steadily, story by story, amazing. But he is. He's one of the greats of our time, I believe.

Rating:
Summary: HUMAN NATURE INSIGHTFULLY PORTRAYED
Review: Following on the heels of his beguiling Felicia's Journey, the incomparable Irish storyteller, William Trevor, brings us a collection of 12 poignant tales that illuminate the human condition.

Acknowledged by many to be the master of his oeuvre, Trevor commands our attention with dignity and subtlety. Amazingly adept at shifting perspectives from male to female in varying locations and scenes, the author's championship form is evident in After Rain.

His initial offering, "The Piano Tuner's Wives" is an incisive rendering of a middle-aged second wife's jealousy. Haunted by the happiness her husband once shared with another, she seeks to establish her place in surprising ways.

A lifelong bond between two women is broken in "A Friendship" when the clever plotting of one backfires. Timothy, the gay protagonist, in "Timothy's Birthday" seems to seek to punish his parents for their perfect marriage. He refuses to visit them for his birthday celebration as he has always done. Instead, he sends a friend with an excuse. The disreputable Eddie delivers his hurtful message, then steals from the older couple.

Trevor's spare prose shimmers in this story's summary paragraph: "They didn't mention their son as they made their rounds of the garden that was now too much for them and was derelict in places. They didn't mention the jealousy their love of each other had bred in him, that had flourished into deviousness and cruelty. The pain the day had brought would not easily pass, both were aware of that. And yet it had to be, since it was part of what there was."

Another story takes place in the fields of Ireland today. Here, Trevor displays his gift for knowing the female heart as a young woman challenges the culture and mores bred into her parents' bones.

Trevor's work is meat compared to the broth of some of today's fiction. He continues to astound as he explores the complexities of family relationships with sympathetic candor. After Rain is one more triumph.

- Gail Cooke

Rating:
Summary: Best Short Stories
Review: I keep reading book after book by Irish-born author William Trevor -- short stories and novels alike -- expecting that, sooner or later, I will be disappointed. I've decided that I'm not going to hold my breath...

Trevor's fiction is in a class of its own -- for most of what I've read by him, 5 stars do not do it justice. His style is illuminating, compelling and precise -- descriptions are all-encompassing and concise at the same time. His powers of observation and his ability to relate what he observes, transposed onto the lives of his characters, are immense -- and with all of this in play, there is a prevailing sense of calm in his work, a gentleness of vision that draws the reader into these stories, giving the worlds they illustrate a vital reality that lives and breathes within these pages.

Each of these stories is like a painting -- there is as palpable a sense of light in these incredible works as in any of the great works by Rembrandt. They reveal more with each reading, just as repeated looks at Rembrandt's paintings acquire greater and greater detail with each viewing, as we study them.

None of this is to imply that Trevor's stories are clinical and dull, merely objects for study. These works are infinitely entertaining, so finely crafted that the reader is pulled into the worlds they depict without realizing it. It is as if the characters are living around us, that we are at the center of Trevor's imagination along with them. He is a master at conveying their perception of their world, the struggle as they attempt to deal with events that surround them and shape their characters and lives.

The photo of Trevor on the rear of the book shows a man who appears to be unassuming and gently self-assured at the same time, a man who is not out to show off, one who has been moved to graciously share his gift with us. When the sad day comes that this fine writer is no longer with us, I feel sure that we will look back upon his works as some of the finest the 20th (and now the 21st) century was privileged to see.

Many of this fine author's works are available through amazon.com -- I encourage you to explore them. It will be a very rewarding journey.

Rating:
Summary: The most nearly perfectly true fiction
Review: In 1995, I bought William Trevor's "The Collected Stories" based on strong reviews. He won me over (and over and over) with almost every story in the bountiful tome. Great stories tell me truths that having heard them seem always to have been at the tip of my soul's tongue but just not quite spoken to myself. Trevor speaks such truths with almost every story. "After Rain" has some of the best ever. Read it. If it delights you and stings you as it did me, then be sure to go on to "The Collected Stories." A word of personal warning: Trevor's novels are very, very different from his short stories. Do not make assumptions about his stories if you have only read his novels. The short story is clearly more suitable for sharing his sharp insights.

Rating:
Summary: Ten (variably) fine stories and two out-and-out masterpieces
Review: Like Grieg in the musical sphere, and Cheever in the literary one, William Trevor seems to be at his best in the smaller forms, where his sharply etched insights and compellingly profound characterization can glitter without the "imposition" of relaxation dictated by the novel. Reading his "Collected Stories" was among my favorite literary "events" of the past 20 years (since reading, of all things, Dreiser's "An American Tragedy" [talk about strange bedfellows!]), and if the present volume seems a bit less well-stocked with masterpieces than the earlier, larger collection, it also shows Trevor polishing his craft to an almost superhuman degree. Every word tells.

A couple of the stories in "After Rain" struck me as surprisingly weak: "The Piano Tuner's Wives," in which an elderly man's second wife contrives to distort his happy memories of his first, seemed architecturally imbalanced: the second wife was drawn with less fecundity than the first and as a result the cutting insights of the story's end seemed like the proverbial "too little, too late." The other relative disappointment for me was "A Day," in which a married woman meditates on her husband's infidelity. Maybe it was that the central character seemed annoyingly passive, but to my mind Trevor added little to a situation that has been visited many times before.

The bulk of the remainder of the stories was exceptionally fine, though, particularly "A Friendship," which limns the dissolving of a lifelong relationship between two women at one of their husband's instigation.

However, the real gems of the collection, in my opinion, were "Child's Play" and "Lost Ground," which may be among the finest short stories written. The first is spare and knife-edged, the second weighty and full of tragedy. In "Child's Play," two children of divorce play act, with uncanny accuracy, their parents' sordid affairs, but when something happens to threaten the children's own relationship, their sudden reversion to reality proves more poignant and devastating than any play they can put on. "Lost Ground," the longest and perhaps greatest story in the collection, tells the tale of a Protestant family, one of whose sons is visited by, and asked to carry the word of, a Catholic saint. By encapsulating the religious conflicts in Northern Ireland in the guise of a single family, Trevor manages to comment on the intolerance of humankind while presenting a family drama of piercing sorrow.

I read recently that some people find Trevor's works offputtingly depressing. Maybe so; there are no happy endings here and virtually no happy people. Perhaps his truths are just too painful for a few to face. But then, sometimes, life is that way too.

Rating:
Summary: An Extraordinary Collection of Short Stories
Review: There is little doubt that Trevor is a master of his craft and perhaps the greatest living short story writer in the world today. After Rain, a volume of twelve stories, explores such subjects as infidelity, homosexuality, religious conflicts, and violence. What makes these stories so powerful, however, is not the subjects they deal with, but the portrayal of the characters thoughts, emotions, and responses. Trevor is able to examine such human conditions as jealousy, rage, sadness, regret, and hope in a non-judgmental light that leaves the reader looking into oneself to gain further insight. His writing style is nothing short of remarkable. He is eloquent and simplistic, never revealing more than he should, making the unspoken a compelling component of his story. If you have not yet read Trevor, I urge you to wait no longer. His literary grace will surely leave a lasting impact on you as a reader and as a human being.

Rating:
Summary: A Rich Collection from a Master Craftsman
Review: With a few deft strokes, William Trevor establishes a mood, a sense of place, an atmosphere of expectations and apprehensions. You read a paragraph or two and you are there - on an Irish farm, in an Italian Pensione, in a seedy suburb. Behind the facade of provincial respectability you glimpse the private fears and secret passions of ordinary people - their casual cruelty and guilt, their destructive jealousies and misdirected ardor, their timid hopes and aspirations.

There is nothing idyllic about these stories. They tend to sneak up on you the way some Henry James stories do, unkenneling the nameless dread that lurks in people's hearts. Do not read them at bedtime; they make for unquiet sleep. There is usually some kind of recognition and reversal, but rarely a sense of resolution or redemption. The best you can hope for is clarity.