An Extraordinary Collection of Work
in 12 Short Stories
A BIT ON THE SIDE
By William Trevor
Knopf Canada
ISBN 0-676-97669-7
Reviewed by Sharon Greer
Labouring with themes of loneliness, grief and despair, William Trevor's latest embodiment of 12 short stories, A Bit on the Side, is an extraordinary collection of work. Continuing to explore in his usual melancholic style the strife of everyday life is where Trevor truly excels.
Always a joy to read, you can’t help but devour these narratives as quickly as possible. Trevor has an incredible instinct and faculty to write about ordinary people as the real heroes of daily living.
The unspeakable sadness of a woman’s desolation living with a man whose entire existence is focussed on racing horses that never win. Sitting with the Dead is a tragic tale of one woman’s wasted life devoted to a self-indulgent, ungrateful husband who barely notices she’s alive.
An Evening Out is an exquisite little gem examining the mind set of an exploitative, petty con man whose aim appears to be setting up fragile women. Always on the lookout to use someone to further his photography work, this angry charmer goes hunting for a woman who owns a car so that she can be used to haul his heavy equipment around.
If his victim doesn’t own a car, he turns his disappointment to advantage when he invites the unsuspecting individual to an expensive restaurant for dinner. After several bottles of wine and a sumptuous meal, he quietly slips away to the washroom, leaving his gullible scapegoat with an extravagant bill.
The sinister, disquieting tones of On the Streets are real as the story slowly unravels to reveal a woman’s frightening experience at the discovery of her ex-husband’s murderous undertakings.
A truly menacing foreboding pervades this salient account of macabre exploits as we begin to understand this vile man’s control over his terrified victim.
Trevor manages yet again to produce a body of work both colossal and phenomenal in its intensity. Without a doubt, he is one of the most eminent living writers of short stories.
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