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| |  | Literature & Fiction | Home » » » Cheating at Canasta: Stories | | | | | | | Description: | | The publication of a new book by William Trevor is a great literary event. Trevor’s last collection, A Bit on the Side, was named a New York Times Notable Book and hailed as one of the Best Books of the Year by papers from coast to coast, including The Washington Post and San Francisco Chronicle. And his earlier collection, After Rain, published in 1996, was named one of the eight best books of the year by The New York Times.
Trevor’s precise and unflinching insights into the hearts and lives of ordinary people are evidenced once again in this stunning new collection. From a chance encounter between two childhood friends to the memories of a newly widowed man to a family grappling with the sale of their ancestral land, Trevor examines with grace and skill the tenuous bonds of our relationships, the strengths that hold us together, and the truths that threaten to separate us. Subtle yet powerful, his stories linger with the reader long after the words have been put away.
| | | Product Details: | | | Author:
| William Trevor | | Hardcover:
| 240 pages | | Publisher:
| Viking Adult | | Publication Date:
| October 18, 2007 | | Package Length:
| 8.6 inches | | Package Width:
| 5.7 inches | | Package Height:
| 1.0 inches | | Package Weight:
| 0.8 pounds | | Average Customer Rating:
|  based on 16 reviews |
| | | | Customer Reviews: | |
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 UPBEAT IN A DOWNBEAT SORT OF WAYOct 25, 2009
William Trevor writes in a crisply undulating style - like the rolling Irish Hills. There is such clarity in the prose but on occasions an odd sentence renders itself entirely incomprehensible.
But this is more of a challenge than a problem.
The tales appear to be downbeat and morose, focusing on loss, the passing of time and loneliness. Essentially they explore the inevitable outplaying of the human condition. But underneath it all I detect hope.
For example in "Folie a Deux" (the idiocy of two) the cruel, stupid act of two young boys so remains in the psyche of one of them as to paralyse his personal development. The message, paradoxically, is a good one: that immoral acts have a consequence.
I found the stories strangely uplifting, reminding me that we are all frail and temporal beings - and so we should make the most of our life......while it lasts.
1 of 1 found the following review helpful:
Very well written but the lack of much hope or joy makes for non-uplifting reading,Sep 11, 2009
These stories are very well written and Trevor's reputation is deserved. My one reservation is the fact that the stories are somewhat down beat and one just longs for a story illuminated by joy and peace but alas there are none of that type in this collection. I will make some observations on each of the stories, really to try and distill down my own reactions to stories:
(I) The Dressmaker's Child: a very strange story about a bond beginning to form between a man who accidentally knocks down and kills a wild child (daughter of an off-beam mother) and the subsequent incipient relationship that begins to form betweem the man and the mother. Really not sure I understood this story.
(II)The Room: a disturbing story about a woman married to a man, who was accused but not convicted of murder and her suspicious of his part in the murder and her trying to come terms with this over many years. The story resonates and disturbs.
(III) Men of Ireland: A tramp returning from England to Ireland after 23 years and his attempt to capitalise on the scandals in Ireland by soliciting money from a retired priest through insinuating the priest had tried to press drink on him when he was a young altar boy. The priest gives in through a kind of shared shame. A disturbing story.
(IV) Cheating at Canasta: a man returning to venice in response to a wish made by his wife before dementia took hold of her. I was failry neutral about this story.
(V) Bravado: another distrubing story, this time about a lad trying to impress his girlfriend by beating another lad on the way home from a party with fatal consequents. One comes away with a sense of utter pointlessness
(VI)An Afternoon: I did not like this story at all: a young girl and a predatory young man on probation.
(VII) At Olivehill: A catholic ascendancy familiy having fallen on hard times decides to sell their farm to be converted into a golf course. This was moving - a sense of change and a sense of loss.
(VIII) A Perfect relationship: the ending of a relationship between a young woman and an older man. A kind of moving story, particularly the ending where there is no real resolution of what is causing the relationship to end.
(IX) The Children: A recently widowed man taking up with a divorced lady and their decision to marry and the impact on their repsective children - a moving story.
(X) Old flame: An elderly couple and the husband's continuing to keep in contact with a woman for whom he had once intended to leave his wife. This is a puzzling story of how a couple and can live with such duplicity and how the wife is being crushed by the husband's old attachment.
(XI) Faith: This was one of my favourites about a Church of Ireland clergy man and his dominant sister. He appears to lose his faith whilst serving his country parish while she is undimished in her dying - indeed she is given a beautifully written happy death:
"She turned away, shuddering off a convulsion as best she could, but another came and she was restless. Confused, she tired to sit up and he eased her back to the pillows. For a moment then her eyes were clear, her contorted features loosed and were calm. Batholomoew knew that pain was taken from her and that she shed, in her first moment of her eternity, he too-long gnawing discontent; that peace, elusive for a lifeime, had come at last".
Any yet the minster remains at a loss?
(XII) Folie a deux: a story about not accepting forgiveness and redemption - the killing of a dog by 2 young lads results in the apparent disintegration of one of them through the sheer horror of what he had done.
Even though it would be fair to say that the stories were indeed down beat and lacking in hope, Trevor's economic style carries one along and one is infused with a kind of regret for lost lives.
0 of 1 found the following review helpful:
 Who was the villain?Jun 07, 2009
It is sometimes said that William Trevor writes better about Ireland than about England. Of course that's relative, because everything he writes is close to perfection. I think, however, that in this collection we see a tendency for Irish characters to be more securely anchored in their exact and believable social class and background. Mallory, in the title story, is evidently a sophisticated upper-class Englishman, but much about him is left vague. We are not told how much his carefully described dinner cost. We know in "The Dressmaker's Child" that Cahal charged 50 Euros to drive to Poulearg.
I kept coming back to the story "Sons of Ireland." When I first read it (in the New Yorker) I put it down thinking that Father Meade was guilty. Reading it for the second time I thought I'd made a mistake and that he was being blackmailed by a liar and had given way because he was over-scrupulous. After a few more readings I decided that his interior monologue contained lies to himself, and latched on to the crucial phrase "the petty offence that had occurred." It was still ambiguous. The "petty offence" might have been Donal Prunty's behavior, but it was characteristic of the typical pedophile's self-justification. In the end the question remained, after all the details of Prunty's despicable behavior, whether he had a moral advantage over the good old priest. It's a typical William Trevor question.
1 of 1 found the following review helpful:
Morality fables for a morally-ambivalent ageMar 08, 2009
Not one to waste words, William Trevor's sentences are so concise that they're not the most easy to read as so much information is packed in. His pithy prose demands full concentration from the reader; glean it over with a cursory eye and important nuances are lost. But when you do pay attention, huge rewards await you.
This collection of 12 tales draws together a myriad of characters:
a 73 year-old almost abandoned wife grapples with the omnipresence of her husband's lover, the not-so clandestine relationship kept oppressively alive by the lover's best friend in the most eerie vicarious fashion in 'Old Flame';
a man meets an old friend who was irreparably damaged by their complicit cruel act of childhood folly, and is loathe to face what his relatively unscathed self implies about his own humanity in 'Folie a Deux';
a pair of middle-aged siblings grapple with their bullying yet symbiotic relationship that is built largely on 'Faith', misplaced or otherwise;
a lonely teenage girl meets her online acquaintance,with near disastrous results, but she seems none the wiser from this episode.
Many other characters dot the rest of the stories, and their presence linger on way after Trevor writes the last word about them.
2 of 3 found the following review helpful:
The Laureate of MelancholyOct 06, 2008
Reviewing William Trevor's THE STORY OF LUCY GAULT on this site some years ago, I wrote: "There are very few authors whom one trusts to lead one into dark places, with the assurance that there will be some beauty to be found there in the end. Trevor is emphatically one of them." In that book, in his novel FELICIA'S JOURNEY, and in almost all of his short stories, Trevor writes about the lost, the lonely, characters who are very young or growing old, people who have been deceived, rejected, or bereaved. But he also has the gift of benediction. The title of his previous collection, AFTER RAIN, is well-taken; his ability to bring the sun out after the storm is miraculous -- to produce not always a happy ending, but at least acceptance and understanding, a quiet gift of grace.
The stories in CHEATING AT CANASTA are just as good, but they are rather more sad. Trevor still has the power to set up a nuanced situation in a very few pages: the impending sale of an old estate in Ireland, an accidental encounter in Paris recalling boyhood traumas. He can still create characters who pull at your heartstrings: a fifteen-year-old girl meeting an older man from a chatroom, a widower finding love again after the death of his wife. And in story after story, he can still end gently with hard-won wisdom: a separated couple coming together again only to realize they were better apart, an old clergyman in doubt of his faith finding peace at the deathbed of his domineering sister. But while all the endings seem absolutely right, none of them is entirely happy. Trevor's rainfall still stops, but now mostly gives way to a tranquil dusk. I appreciate that... but do miss the occasional rainbow. [4.5 stars]
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