Tag: short stories

Author, Book review, Fiction, Ireland, literary fiction, Penguin, Publisher, Setting, short stories, William Trevor

‘Bodily Secrets’ by William Trevor

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A Year With William Trevor | #WilliamTrevor2023

Fiction – paperback; Penguin Classics; 144 pages; 2007.

Bodily Secrets, by William Trevor, was published in 2007 as part of a 20-book series called “Penguin Great Loves”^^ which I bought as a beautifully designed boxed set many years ago.

This slim volume features five short stories — previously published in The Collected Stories of William Trevor in 1992 — all revolving around various forms of love, including unreciprocated love, adulterous love, sexual love and convenient love.

Black comedy

The opening story, The Day We Got Drunk on Cake, is a black comedy in which four people — Mike, his colleague Swann, and two of Swann’s friends, Jo and Margo — go on a boozy lunch in London’s Soho that extends long into the night.

During this farce-like escapade, Mike is constantly looking for a phone to ring Lucy (in the days before mobile phones), a woman he is in love with but who doesn’t reciprocate his feelings. In all the multiple conversations he has with her over the course of the day, Lucy is unfailingly polite, but he begins to wear her patience:

“Hello, Lucy. How are you?”
“I’m fine, Mike.”
“Good.”
“Mike, you telephoned me at four fifteen. Do you know what time it is now?”
“What time is it now?”
“Four thirty-five.” (p9)

These nuisance calls are interleaved with conversations in which Margo beseeches Mike to help her with a personal problem. Her husband Nigel brings home elderly women, “explaining he has been attending some meeting with them and has brought them back for coffee”. But Margo doesn’t know what the meetings are about and is worried Nigel will start bringing home “tramps, grocers, one-legged soldiers”.

To find out what’s really going on, Mike pretends to call Nigel — under the guise of being an official from the Ministry of Pensions — but instead, he rings Lucy for advice. It’s ludicrously funny in places, especially when he reports back to Margo, telling her one lie after another.

The story ends with Mike musing on his need to get over Lucy — “the love of my life” — and to let time work its magic.

Unreciprocated love also features In Love with Ariadne, but this story is bittersweet rather than farcical. Barney, a medical student residing in a Dún Laoghaire boarding house, falls in love with the landlady’s daughter — but nothing comes of the relationship.

Forbidden love

Trevor turns his focus to illicit love between a married man and a much younger woman in Lovers of Their Time. The affair between Norman, a travel agent, and Marie, who is a shop assistant in a pharmacy, begins tentatively on New Year’s Day in 1963.

For the first 12 months, it’s a largely chaste relationship because they have nowhere private to go until Norman discovers a hotel where they can consummate their relationship.

Marriage and the prospect of children beckons, but ever-practical Norman is aware that getting a divorce from his wife Hilda will likely drive him into poverty: is his illicit love for Marie worth it?

This is a beautiful, largely melancholic story, but Trevor upends traditional stereotypes by making Hilda, the cheated-upon wife, as painfully uncouth. She’s lusty and “demanding in the bedroom” and makes Norman feel inadequate and unhappy, while Marie, whom he initially suspects may have a “tartish disposition”, turns out to be “prim and proper” and a genuinely lovely person who thinks highly of him.

Their love affair, gentle, romantic and sweet, offers the prospect of happiness for both of them.

“Oh darling,” she whispered one October evening at Paddington, huddling herself against him. […]
“I know,” he said, feeling as inadequate as he always did at the station.
“I lie awake and think of you,” she whispered.
“You’ve made me live,” he whispered back.
“And you me. Oh, God, and you me.”

Marriage of convenience

In the titular story, Bodily Secrets, a wealthy widow, 59-year-old Norah O’Neill, contemplates remarrying to have a “companion for her advancing years”. Her choice is limited, but the town’s affirmed bachelor Agnew, who is 51, seems the best fit — although her adult children and most of the townfolk think otherwise.

Agnew is a dapper dresser, a good dancer and has been a loyal employee: for 17 years he managed the family’s toy factory until Mrs O’Neill’s son, the angry and opinionated Cathal, shut it down. The only blot on his character (apart from his Protestant religion) is his frequent weekenders to Dublin, where it is thought he sleeps around with women or goes drinking.

Mrs O’Neill, a handsome woman, despises her ageing body and is not seeking a sexual partner. Her marriage to Agnew is ideal. Not only do they have separate bedrooms, but she also gets the emotional support she craves, along with a man who can manage the apple orchard she wants to establish on the site of the closed factory. While Agnew gets the financial security he needs, along with a cover for his homosexuality (the “bodily secret” of the title).

A similar “marriage of convenience” occurs in Honeymoon in Tramore in which a farm labourer, Davy Toome, marries Kitty, the farmer’s daughter, when she falls pregnant to someone else. It’s 1948 and pregnancy out of wedlock is viewed as a sin, so a hurried marriage is arranged. The real father, who is revealed at the end of the story, comes as something of a blow to Davy who had been told it was someone else entirely.

As ever, Trevor’s stories are compelling and expertly crafted and full of memorable characters and incidents. Each one looks at how love — in all its many various forms — profoundly shapes, challenges and transforms the men in these vastly different stories, all set in different periods and locations.

These poignant tales also showcase the complexities and vulnerabilities of human relationships, which is why reading them is such a wonderfully intimate and rewarding experience.

And that’s a wrap! This is the final book in my 12-month project A Year With William Trevor, which I co-hosted with  Cathy from 746 Books. Please click here to see all the books we read between us and to see a brief round-up of William Trevor reviews published on other blogs. If you have reviewed a William Trevor book this year and it hasn’t been included, please do leave a comment (either under this post or the main William Trevor page) and I will update accordingly.

Update: This month Cathy has reviewed Trevor’s posthumously published short story collection ‘Last Stories‘. I have previously reviewed this collection here.

^^ Other books in this series which I have reviewed here are:

A Year With William Trevor, Author, Book review, Fiction, Ireland, Italy, London, Penguin, Publisher, Reading Projects, Setting, short stories, William Trevor

‘After Rain’ by William Trevor

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A Year With William Trevor | #WilliamTrevor2023


Fiction – Kindle edition; Penguin; 224 pages; 1997.

After Rain, by William Trevor, is a collection of 12 short stories which were first published in Antaeus, Harper’s, The Oldie, The New Yorker and The Spectator.

Upside down lives

The stories are all framed around ordinary people whose lives are turned upside down by milestone events such as love affairs gone wrong, divorce, pregnancy and bereavement. The settings move from Ireland, London and Italy (and back again) and are largely focused on fraught relationships between parents and children, or husbands and wives, or within extended families.

Each story is perfectly crafted, but don’t expect any grand finalés or sudden denouements: the endings are sometimes abrupt, giving them an unfinished feel, but I suspect that’s a deliberate ploy by Trevor to allow these characters to live on in your own imagination.

I know I am still thinking about Joanna and her 60-year-old parents from the story “Marrying Damian”.

In this story, Damian is an attention-seeker and a drifter who claims to be a poet but has never had anything published. He experiences one personal disaster after another and always asks his friends if he can “borrow a little money” which he never pays back.

When his third marriage ends, he returns to Ireland “out of the blue” to visit his friends, Claire and her husband, the unnamed narrator of this story. They are happy to see him, of course — their friendship is a long one — but they’re not prepared for their 20-something daughter Joanna, who once declared as a five-year-old “I’m going to marry Damian”, to become romantically involved with him:

Then, quite suddenly, everything was different. Perhaps in the same moment — at dinner two days later — Claire and I were aware that our daughter was being charmed all over again by the man she had once picked out as the man she would like to marry. To this day, I can hear their two voices in my dining-room, and Damian laughing while Claire and I were numbed into silence. To this day I can still see the bright flush in Joanna’s cheeks.

Abrupt changes

There are many moments of similar volte-face in these stories. In “Gilbert’s Mother”,  for instance, a woman suddenly clocks that her adult son (who still lives at home) might have murdered a local 19-year-old girl.

It was always the News, on the radio or the television, that prompted her dread. When a fire was said to have been started deliberately, or a child enticed, or broken glass discovered in baby-food jars in a supermarket, the dread began at once – the hasty calculations, the relief if time and geography ruled out involvement. More than once, before she became used to it, she had gone to lie trembling on her bed, struggling to control the frenzy that threatened.

In “A Day” a married woman discovers that her husband is having an affair and must choose whether to tell him she knows or continue on as normal. In “The Potato Dealer” a man is made an offer of money and land in exchange for marrying a young pregnant farm girl, even though he is not the father. In the titular story, a heartbroken woman holidays alone in Italy after the end of a love affair, but when she sees a painting of the Annunciation she has an epiphany.

All of these are tightly written and evocative. Trevor is an expert at capturing small moments in detail while simultaneously exploring the darkness in human hearts hardened against life and love.

Perhaps the story which left the biggest impression on me is the incredibly dark “Lost Ground”. At 35 pages, it’s the longest in the collection (and the one that follows the normal conventions of the short story because it has a shock ending).

It explores the lengths one particular family will go to when their teenage son Milton behaves in a way they don’t like. Milton claims to have seen the supernatural vision of a Catholic saint in the family’s orchard and now he wants to preach this news far and wide. But his family are Protestant and thinks he’s gone crazy, so they lock him up in his bedroom, where he remains until he manages to escape — with deadly consequences.

More to explore

I’m just skimming over the surface of these deeply human stories, rather than providing a comprehensive review of each tale.

But I came away from After Rain thinking it is probably the most accomplished collection of his stories I have read (so far), probably because they encapsulate all the major themes of his body of work — the complexities of human relationships, the intricacies of family life and the communities in which we live, and the quiet but profound moments of human connection and disconnection.

He is just so good at revealing loneliness, isolation and heartache in his characters regardless of their age, gender or social class.

If you have not read his short stories before, this would be a good place to start.

Cathy has also reviewed this book.

I read this book as part of A Year With William Trevor, which I am co-hosting with  Cathy from 746 Books. You are invited to join in using the hashtag #WilliamTrevor2023. 
Please click here to learn more, including our monthly reading schedule.

♥ This month Cathy reviewed his memoir, ‘Excursions in the Real World‘.

♥ Next month Both Cathy and I plan to read ‘Two Lives’, which is two of his novellas — ‘Reading Turgenev’ and ‘My House in Umbria’ — brought together in one volume.

20 books of summer, 20 books of summer (2023), Author, Book review, Claire Keegan, Faber and Faber, Fiction, Ireland, literary fiction, Publisher, Setting, short stories

‘Walk the Blue Fields’ by Claire Keegan

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Fiction – Kindle edition; Faber & Faber; 169 pages; 2013.

Walk the Blue Fields is Claire Keegan’s second collection of short stories following on from Antarctica, which was published in 1999 and which I read, reviewed — and loved — in 2011.

This collection has seven stories, all set in rural Ireland, which lends them a classic, timeless quality. There is little mention of modernity encroaching on anyone’s lives, so it’s hard to tell if they are set in this century, last century or even earlier. References to priests and farming abound, but there’s the sense that Keegan is aware of these Irish tropes and stereotypes and simply wants to lean into them.

All the stories are written in that beautiful clear-eyed prose for which Keegan is known. She even goes so far as to acknowledge the debt she owes to the late great (and my personal favourite) Irish writer John McGahern, who has inspired her style, by dedicating one of the stories, “Surrender (after McGahern)”, to him.

In fact, she fictionalises an incident from McGahern’s past in which his cruel and mean-spirited father is said to have sat on a park bench and greedily consumed 24 oranges on the night before he got married because he didn’t want to share them. Keegan takes that image and spins it into a tale about a Garda sergeant who pays an exorbitant price for a fresh loaf of bread even though he knows it may be the only food that the baker can offer her own son on Christmas Day.

The Forester’s Daughter

But the centrepiece of the collection is “The Forester’s Daughter”, which was reissued as a single-volume 80-page paperback in 2019.

It tells the story of an unfulfilling marriage between a forester (Victor Deegan) who is up to his eyeballs in debt and a woman (Martha Dunne) he met at a dance who married him — after a year-long courtship — on the basis she didn’t think she’d get a better offer.

“Would you think of marrying me?”
While the question was in mid-air, Martha hesitated. Deegan was standing with his back to the amusement arcade. With all the lights behind him, she could hardly make him out; all she could see were slot machines and shelves of coins that every now and then pushed a little excess into a shoot to let somebody win. […]
Martha’s instinct told her to refuse but she was thirty years of age and if she said no this question might never be asked of her again. She wasn’t sure of Deegan but none of the others had ever mentioned marriage, so Martha, with her own logic, concluded that Victor Deegan must love her, and accepted. In all the years that followed, Deegan never thought but he did love her, never thought but he showed his love.

It charts the impact of their poor choices during their marriage and the horrible melancholy passing of time with little to show for it except Deegan’s increasing isolation as he works and works to pay off his debt.

The singular act which threats to unravel everything is the gift of a stray dog that Victor finds roaming the fields. He gives it to his daughter as a birthday present (under the pretence of having bought it for her), but Martha is angry because she knows there will be trouble should the owner come looking for it. And Martha, of course, is right — with devastating consequences for all involved.

An unlikely partnership

In “Night of the Quicken Trees”, Keegan turns her eye to folklore and superstition. Another story about a strange partnership between a man and a woman, it charts a “marriage of convenience” between two lonely people, Margaret, a healer, and Stack, an eccentric widower who sleeps with his pet goat Josephine.

As neighbours, their relationship is kept at arms-length until they recognise a mutual need for companionship and, eventually, they move in together and have a child, even though Margaret, not yet forty, thought “it was past the time when she could bear a child”.

I can’t say I fell in love with this collection as much as her previous one. Not all the stories have remained with me, even though just a week has passed since I read them, and a couple end too abruptly, almost as if Keegan was told to put her pen down or else. But the trio of stories I have singled out are astonishing in their quiet, almost maudlin beauty.

Walk the Blue Fields was first published in 2007. It was awarded the Edge Hill Prize for Short Stories in 2008.

This is my 2nd book for #20BooksOfSummer 2023. I bought it on Kindle in 2017 and it’s been languishing in my digital TBR ever since. I have reviewed most of Keegan’s small output here.

Australia, Author, Book review, David Cohen, Fiction, literary fiction, Publisher, Setting, short stories, Transit Lounge

‘The Terrible Event’ by David Cohen

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Fiction – paperback; Transit Lounge; 224 pages; 2023. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

It’s not often I get sent unsolicited books (those heady days of a never-ending succession of book parcels arriving at my home are long over) but when I do it’s even rarer to open the envelope, discover something enticing inside, begin reading it (to see what it’s like) and then devour the whole book in a day! That’s exactly what happened when David Cohen’s The Terrible Event fell out of the envelope and into my reading life a couple of weeks ago.

This short story collection is wryly funny, surreal and quirky, and reading it, I was often reminded of Magnus Mills, one of my favourite writers who pens fable-like tales poking fun at the absurdity of routines and the systems that dominate our lives.

Unsurprisingly, David Cohen, who is a new-to-me author based in Queensland, won the Russell Prize for Humour Writing in 2019 for his short story collection The Hunter and Other Stories of Men. (He has also written two novels — Fear of Tennis and Disappearing off the Face of the Earth — which look to be comic as well.)

The Terrible Event is best described as a comic collection, but the humour comes with a healthy dose of pathos and a smidgen of surrealism.

I wouldn’t describe the humour as laugh-out-loud funny. It’s much more subtle — and stranger — than that. There are things that happen in the stories, for instance, that seem ridiculously absurd but are actually so close to the truth they feel believable. This lends them an unsettling, occasionally disturbing, dimension. And it’s this factor which makes all eight stories so memorable.

Remembering a tragedy

In the opening story, “The Terrible Event: A Memorial”, for instance, a conference organiser gets mired in bureaucracy and “cancel culture” as they try to prepare all the promotional materials for a conference about a Terrible Event for which no one can agree a name.

As they go around in circles, it becomes clear that the Terrible Event, which is the major theme of the conference, cannot be named because a member of the public has complained about it.

This person, who had hitherto been unaware of The Memorial’s existence, felt that the original name, which articulated in no uncertain terms the precise nature and location of the event that The Memorial was there to immortalise, was, in their words, ‘confronting and emotionally charged’. […] The Director immediately circulated an online survey in order to gauge ‘wider public perceptions’ of the original name. […] On the basis of the results, the Director decreed that we should start thinking about less potentially inflammatory names. […] Most respondents felt that the very word ‘memorial’ was a bit negative and suggested instead ‘Place of Memories’, ‘Place Where We Commemorate’ and the somewhat circular ‘Place Where We Remember the Thing That This Place Is Here to Commemorate’.

The story ends with a delicious sense of irony: on the day the memorial event to commemorate the original tragedy is cancelled, a new tragedy occurs. It’s a sombre reminder that we can argue all we like about words and language but censorship doesn’t necessarily make things any better.

The invisible colleague

In “The Holes”, a customer service representative accepts a new rather dull and not very demanding part-time job while the company is in a so-called “transitional phase” that never actually ends. The employee is told to make the most of the slow conditions because “you’ll be as busy as fuck” when the company moves into its new office, which is being built nearby. But the employee notices that the machinery on the construction site never moves and the building work looks to be at an indefinite stalemate.

Meanwhile, he becomes obsessed with a colleague who has worked from home for so long no one can remember what she looks like. She doesn’t seem to have an online presence and his boss never gets around to sharing her contact details, so he begins his own investigation… with intriguing results.

One of the more disturbing stories, “Bugs”, is about a newly divorced man who rediscovers a favourite childhood toy — a talking Bugs Bunny doll that utters a set number of phrases when you pull a string in his back — and becomes obsessed with it.

Every night before going to bed, Mark went through a sort of ritual when he sat on a second folding chair positioned directly in front of the first one and pulled the pull-string five times, enjoying the way Bugs’s head rattled with the unwinding of the string, and the satisfying whirr as it slowly retracted into the back of Bugs’s neck — for a few minutes, the 46-year-old man was a five-year-old boy once again — while the rabbit delivered whatever catchphrase his internal mechanics happened to toss out.

When the catchphrases begin to disappear one by one as if the toy is losing its “memory”, Mark becomes increasingly upset and begins to behave more and more peculiarly in tandem with his decaying toy.

Roadside trauma

But the real highlight of the collection is the final story,  “The Enigma Of Keith: Another Memorial”, which charts what happens when a lecturer in transport engineering sets out to discover if the presence of roadside memorials has an impact on motorist behaviour — will they slow down, for instance, if they see a white cross by the side of the road?

After approval from an ethics committee and the Department of Transport and Main Roads, he sets up a fake memorial in a southeast Queensland location to test his theory. He gets slightly carried away with making the memorial look legitimate, creating a fake persona for the “deceased” — Keith ‘Thommo’ Thompson (1994-2019) — and putting his own photograph on it to indicate ‘Thommo’ was real.

On the last day of the study, he notices a woman standing in front of the memorial, paying her respects by laying flowers on it. Intrigued, he strikes up a conversation with her and is too cowardly to admit the cross is fake.

‘I noticed you were taking a photo of…’ I pointed again to Keith’s memorial.
‘Yea, I’m sending it to this.’ Debbie took out her phone again and opened up the home page of a Facebook group entitled Roadside Memorials Down Under. […] She scrolled through a series of images: homemade monuments of bereavement — mostly crosses adorned with flowers, handwritten notes, candles. Beneath the images were tributes and comments from family, friends, people who’d experienced similar tragedies, random posters. They shared memories of those they’d lost to speed, alcohol, drugs, inattention, fatigue — or a combination of these.

He decides he can’t now suddenly dismantle it, and from then on plays into the idea that Thommo was a real person, and not a figment of his imagination, with unsettling results. People begin leaving comments under the Facebook picture, and then “mourners” begin visiting the cross to leave tributes. This, in turn, creates a traffic hazard, and now our traffic engineer has a real problem on his hands…

Human obsessions

If there’s a unifying theme to the stories in The Terrible Event it might be that humans get obsessed with the strangest things. And while those obsessions can be weirdly funny and downright quirky, if they are carried to their logical extreme the repercussions can sometimes be deadly.

And while many of the characters in these stories just don’t know where to draw the line, the hilarity that results is part of what makes this book such a fun read. I really enjoyed The Terrible Event and am keen to read more by this talented comic writer.

UPDATE 16 June: Lisa has also reviewed this one.

2023 Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year, Aingeala Flannery, Book review, Fiction, Ireland, literary fiction, Literary prizes, Penguin, Publisher, Setting, short stories

‘The Amusements’ by Aingeala Flannery

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Fiction – Kindle edition; Penguin; 223 pages; 2022.

Aingeala Flannery’s The Amusements is a collection of loosely connected short stories set in Tramore, a traditional seaside town in County Waterford, on the southeast coast of Ireland, famed for its fairground and long beach.

There’s a distinct William Trevor “vibe” about the tales of small-town lives depicted here, so I felt validated to discover, via the author’s Acknowledgements, that she was inspired by Trevor’s work, explaining that his story Honeymoon in Tramore “set me off on a flight of fancy”.

The way Flannery explores the interconnectedness of people living in the same small community, where everyone knows everyone else, where people bear grudges and are suspicious of “blow-ins”, comes right out of Trevor’s “school of writing”. Even her characters — life-like, flawed and shaped by their local community — could have stepped out of his pages.

But that’s not to say her work is derivative; it’s not. The Amusements is a highly original, closely observed portrait of a town and its residents, both permanent and fleeting, and the ways in which their lives intersect over the course of 30 or so years.

Interconnected stories

There are 16 stories in total and most are framed around the Swaine family headed by bitter matriarch Nancy who never has a nice word to say about anyone.

My sister says our mother is ‘spitting venom’. I can’t tell any more if Tish is trying to warn me, or to guilt me. Seems to me Nancy always spat venom, was always out with somebody: Auntie Stasia, the next-door neighbour, my brother Michael and his ‘appalling’ wife. It’s not easy to stay in with a person whose default position is disapproval.

We first meet Nancy in “Star of the Sea” when she’s a widowed mother who breaks up her teenage daughter Stella’s close friendship with budding photographer Helen Grant. She appears again in “Making Friends” when she has a serious falling out with her new neighbour Vonnie Jacob. Later, in “Home” Nancy is residing in an aged-care facility and her now-adult daughter Stella —who has moved to London via New York —  returns to Tramore on a flying visit to see her. In “The Reason I’m Calling” she is dying, aged 68, and by “Woodbine” she has passed away.

Her children, Tish and Stella, star in separate stories: Tish is married to a “good husband” and has a young daughter, Evie, but seems harassed and discontent with her lot; Stella, who moved away to become an artist, lives an unconventional life and hates returning home to Tramore because it just reminds her of all the reasons she fled in the first place.

Brilliant characters

Other subsidiary characters from the town — such as the butcher Thaddeus Burke, the public health nurse Jenny Supple and the bed-and-breakfast landlady Muriel Power — are also featured. Many of these characters move from one tale to another, and events which happen in one story are concluded, or referenced, in the next. But there are also a few that end abruptly and don’t seem to add much to the overarching narrative, and I would question their inclusion.

Tramore is also a character in its own right, a place that comes alive in summer as a bustling tourist hot spot, but dies down in winter when the amusement arcades close and the fairground rides shut down.

But regardless of the season, idle gossip, reputational crises and personal struggles abound. Anyone who has lived in a small town or close-knit community will recognise the people in these pages.

The Amusements is a terrifically entertaining read, brimming with life in all its messy, chaotic complexity. It has been shortlisted for this year’s Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year.

This is my third book from the 2023 Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year shortlist. I am trying to read them all (there are five) before the winner is named at the end of May.

A Year With William Trevor, Author, Book review, England, Fiction, Ireland, literary fiction, Penguin, Publisher, Setting, short stories, Venice, William Trevor

‘Cheating at Canasta’ by William Trevor

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A Year With William Trevor | #WilliamTrevor2023


Fiction – Kindle edition; Penguin; 252 pages; 2008.

To kick off ‘A Year With William Trevor‘ — which I am co-hosting with  Cathy from 746 Books — I randomly selected Cheating at Canasta, a collection of short stories that were first published in the Guardian, the New Yorker, the Sewanee Review and Tatler. 

It proved a perfect introduction to this year-long reading project, because the tales here, so masterfully written, showcase Trevor’s recurring themes: the complexity of family dynamics and relationships between men and women; the darker side of human nature; missed opportunities; and the ways in which the past has a habit of catching up with the future. Fear and shame dominate.

There are 12 stories in this volume, all roughly the same length, some set in Ireland, the country of Trevor’s birth, and some in England, the country where he spent most of his long life. But the title story, “Cheating at Canasta”, is set in Venice, specifically, Harry’s Bar, where a man, who is losing his wife to dementia, returns to the place they both adored and finds his time there disrupted by a younger couple quarrelling on a nearby table.

Young people caught up in events

When the hardcover edition of the book was published in 2007 it garnered mixed reviews, including a rather churlish one by Adam Mars-Jones in the Guardian (which I’m deliberately not linking to) which claimed Trevor couldn’t write about young people very well. I beg to differ.

In “Bravado”, a teenage girl witnesses a deadly assault on a boy she doesn’t know by her boyfriend who does it to impress her, earning himself an 11-year prison sentence in the process. Before her boyfriend is arrested, Aisling knows she should speak up but she’s understandably conflicted, caught between the excitement of her first romantic love and the responsibilities of the adult world she’s yet to fully join. What really holds her back, though, is the fact that she doesn’t want her father to know she went behind his back and kept seeing the boy he had warned her to stay away from.

It’s all resolved in the end, and Aisling does the right thing, but it leaves a long-lasting mark on her:

In a bleak cemetery, Aisling begged forgiveness of the dead for the falsity she had embraced when what there was had been too ugly to accept. Silent, she had watched an act committed to impress her, to deserve her love, as other acts had been. And watching, there was pleasure. If only for a moment, but still there had been.

Petty jealousy and imagined hurts

In ‘The Children’, an 11-year-old girl (and only child), Connie, handles the death of her adored mother with aplomb — “You’ve been a strength, Connie,” her father tells her after the funeral — and quickly adjusts to life without her.

But when her father falls in love with a local woman a few years later and installs her and her two children, one of whom is Connie’s best friend, into the house, Connie’s behaviour changes. She spends more and more time alone, hiding on the roof, which she’s forbidden to climb, to read her late mother’s books.

And in one instant she turns on her soon-to-be step-sister with the cruel words: “This isn’t your house.”  Connie’s sense of betrayal, of a deeply held hurt, petty jealousy and an inability to accept changed circumstances is palpable.

Teenager in danger

And in ‘An Afternoon’, teenage Jasmin meets up with an older man she’s only ever met online. Her naivety is alarming as she spends an afternoon in his company, laps up his attention — “You’re pretty,” he said. “You’re pretty, Jasmin” — accepts the alcohol he offers her and agrees to go back to his house.

Again there was the ripple of excitement. She could feel it all over her body, a fluttering of pins and needles it almost felt like but she knew it wasn’t that. She loved being with him; she’d known she would.

She’s rescued at the last minute — Trevor doesn’t always let bad things happen to his characters — and the sense of relief, for this reader at least, is enormous but hard-earned.

The first is the best

The stand-out story of the collection, however, is the first one, “The Dressmaker’s Child”, which you can read online at the New Yorker, and which I had originally planned to read at the end of the year according to the schedule Cathy and I put together for A Year With William Trevor. (I didn’t know it was in this collection, so I’ll have to substitute that with something else and will let you know in due course.) 

In this story, Cahal, an Irish car mechanic, drives two Spanish tourists to see the “Weeping Virgin of Pouldearg”, a religious icon discredited by locals, and thinks nothing of charging them €50 for the privilege. On the way back to town, he runs over a child, the daughter of the local dressmaker, but does not stop to help. The Spaniards in the back seat are too busy kissing each other to notice the bump in the road.

What enfolds afterwards is a mixture of pure shame and fear and dread as Cathal wrestles with his conscience, even though the body is found not on the road, as expected, but at “the bottom of a fissure, half covered with shale, in the exhausted quarry half a mile from where she’d lived”. 

This strange development is quintessential William Trevor, a writer who likes to take seemingly ordinary characters and thrust them into unusual circumstances to see how things play out. Most of the stories in Cheating at Canasta contain moments of oddity that change the direction of the narrative. Each tale is an adventure. It’s like getting into a car and not knowing quite where you will end up…

I read this book as part of A Year With William Trevor, which I am co-hosting with  Cathy from 746 Books. You are invited to join in using the hashtag #WilliamTrevor2023. To find out more, including our monthly reading schedule, please click here.

This month Cathy has reviewed ‘The Old Boys’. I reviewed this same book in 2019. You can read my review here.

Author, Book review, Cathy Sweeney, Fiction, Ireland, Publisher, Setting, short stories, Weidenfeld & Nicolson

‘Modern Times’ by Cathy Sweeney #ReadingIrelandMonth22

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Fiction – hardcover; Weidenfeld & Nicholson; 148 pages; 2020.

This is why I love browsing in the library so much; I would not have discovered Cathy Sweeney’s Modern Times otherwise.

First published in the Republic of Ireland by Stinging Fly Press and now reissued by W&N, it is a collection of short stories with an absurdist and often risqué slant.

The suggestive cover art — designed by Steve Marking / Orion — is perfectly appropriate, for the very first story, “Love Story”, opens like this:

There was once a woman who loved her husband’s cøck^ so much that she began taking it to work in her lunchbox.

How’s that for an opening line?

Tales about taboo subjects

There are other stories that revolve around sex and love affairs and lust. Most are only a few pages long, but they are shocking, confronting and wickedly funny by turn.

In “The Birthday Present”, for instance, a woman buys her husband a sex doll called Tina for his 57th birthday and keeps it locked in the guest room for his personal entertainment. But when he dies unexpectedly, she has to keep “Tina” hidden from her adult children.

In “The Handyman” a divorcee wonders what it would be like to have sex with the handyman she invites into her semi-detached house to fix up a few things before putting it on the market, while in “A Theory of Forms” a teacher reminisces about the illicit sex she used to have with a teenage boy who had learning difficulties.

In “The Woman with too Many Mouths”, a man plans to end his affair with a woman who has two mouths — “She was, as I said, not my type” — while in “The Chair”, a married couple take it in turns to administer electric shocks as a substitute for sex:

When it is my turn to sit in the chair, I am almost relieved. In the days leading up to it I become irritable, angry, even on occasion experiencing violent ideations. Often, during this period, I think of leaving my husband, of breaking everything. But when the time comes to sit in the chair I do so without protestation. A sensation of release and expanse overtakes me, as though I am swimming effortlessly in a vast blue ocean, obeying laws of nature that are larger than me, larger than the universe.

A little bit bonkers

Not all the stories are framed around these taboo subjects. Some are truly bizarre and best described as OFF THE WALL, bonkers or just plain WIERD.

There’s a story about a palace that becomes sick evident by a “dark discolouration” spreading through the bricks at the top of its tower. Another story revolves around a manuscript that is found wrapped in newspaper and hidden behind a boiler in a house recently “vacated” by an old man. In another, a son returns from boarding school and is instructed to supervise his mother at a family celebration for fear she will get up to “her old antics, letting the whole family down”.

Out of the 21 stories in the collection, my favourite is “The Woman Whose Child Was A Very Old Man” in which an unmarried mother escaping a “dull provincial backwater” moves to a city bedsit and takes a job at a local shop. She can’t afford childcare, so while she is at work she puts her baby in the freezer and as soon as she gets home she thaws him out.

Well, human nature is human nature, and anything can become normal. Soon putting the baby in the freezer was part of the rhythm of life. There were no various side effects. The baby went into arrested development while frozen, but then caught up easily when thawed out. When the woman had a day off the baby sometimes outgrew a romper suit in an afternoon or learned to crawl in an hour.

Eventually, this pattern of freezing and growing gets out of whack, and the child grows — and ages — too quickly. And then the woman gets distracted by her new career as a writer and forgets her child in the freezer, only to return years later to find he’s become a very old man. Yes, I told you the stories were bonkers.

Wholly original

The blurb on my edition suggests that Sweeney’s stories are reminiscent of Lydia Davis, Daisy Johnson and Angela Carter, but having only read Carter’s The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault I don’t know how accurate that comparison is. They do bring to mind the genius that is Magnus Mills, perhaps because of the simple, fable-like prose in which they are written. Regardless, they are wholly original — and totally memorable.

Modern Times is a refreshing palate cleanser offering a quirky, inventive take on the short story. It is great fun to read! I hope Sweeney writes a novel next so she can give extended reign to that vivid imagination!

^ I’ve inserted a special character so my content isn’t deemed “unsafe” by search engines.

I read this book as part of Cathy’s #ReadingIrelandMonth2022. You can find out more about this annual blog event at Cathy’s blog 746 Books.

Australia, Author, Book review, Fiction, Focus on WA writers, Penguin, Publisher, Reading Projects, Robert Drewe, Setting, short stories

‘The Bodysurfers’ by Robert Drewe

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Fiction – paperback; Penguin; 176 pages; 2009.

Robert Drewe was born in Melbourne in 1943, grew up in Western Australia and became an award-winning journalist on the east coast before he turned his hand to fiction. The Bodysurfers, first published in 1983, is a collection of loosely connected short stories and I loved it.

There are 12 in total, each around 10 pages long, and they are mainly set in the coastal suburbs of Perth and Sydney, though there’s also a story set on the Californian coast. The beach is a central theme (surprise, surprise) and there are lush, vivid descriptions of the sandhills, the surf and the dangers that lurk within.

Intrigued as I am by the ocean, I am not an enthusiastic surf swimmer. […] Surf and tides turn malign too suddenly, waves dump you, sandbanks crumble in the current, undertows can catch you unawares. […] It isn’t the waves or the undertow that worry me when I do, however — it’s sharks. I imagine they’re everywhere. In every kelp patch, in the lip of every breaker, I sense a shark. Every shadow and submerged rock becomes one; the thin plume of spay on the edge of my vision is scant warning of its final lunge.

And while the stories are varied in style and point-of-view (some are third-person, others are first-person, and one — Sweetlip — is written in the style of a confidential report), the ways in which men navigate changed circumstances is a central focus. In these tales, men lose jobs, lose wives, lose their sense of purpose or pride.

In one story a prisoner adjusts to life outside by ogling bare-breasted women at the beach, in another a man has an affair with a woman whom he suspects is cheating on him.

In Shark Logic a man stages his own disappearance following financial irregularities at the school at which he was the headmaster and begins living a low-key invisible life by the sea;  in The Last Explorer an elderly man lying in his hospital bed recalls his past achievements — specifically crossing the continent from east to west in a 10-year-old Model T-Ford in the 1920s — and cringes when the nursing staff ask if he’s “done a wee this morning”.

The Lang family chronicles

And threaded throughout these various tales are recurring characters from three generations of the same family. We meet the Langs in the opening story, The Manageress and the Mirage, when three children — Annie, David and Max — are taken to a beachside hotel for their first Christmas dinner after their mother’s death. Their father, Rex, is keen to maintain certain festive traditions, but what he doesn’t tell them is that he is having an affair with the hotel manageress, a dark-haired woman in her 30s, who pays them too much attention and actually joins them for dinner.

She announced to me, ‘You do look like your father, Max’. She remarked on Annie’s pretty hair and on the importance of David looking after his new watch. Sportively, she donned a blue paper crown and looked at us over the rim of her champagne glass. As the plum pudding was being served she left the table and returned with gifts for us wrapped in gold paper — fountain pens for David and me, a doll for Annie. Surprised, we looked at Dad for confirmation. He showed little surprise at the gifts, however, only polite gratitude, entoning several times, ‘Very, very kind of you’.

In later stories, we meet Max and David as adults, navigating their own marital problems and affairs, and in another — named Eighty Per Cent Humidity — it’s David’s son Paul who plays a starring role:

On Paul Lang’s worst day since being extruded from the employment market he makes several bad discoveries. In ascending order of disruption and confusion rather than chronologically they are flat battery in his old Toyota, the lump on his penis and the lesbian love poem in his girlfriend’s handbag.

This loose collection of stories offers an insightful glimpse into the lives, attitudes and obsessions of white middle-class heterosexual Australian men from the mid-20th century to the early 1980s. They’re occasionally witty, sometimes terrifying and often focused on jealousy, love, lust or death.

The Bodysurfers has been adapted for film, television, radio and the theatre. I have seen none of them.

I read this book as part of my #FocusOnWesternAustralianWriters. You can find out more about my ongoing reading project here and see what books I’ve reviewed from this part of the world on my Focus on Western Australian page.

Author, Bloomsbury, Book review, Fiction, Magnus Mills, Publisher, Setting, short stories, UK

‘Screwtop Thompson’ by Magnus Mills

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Fiction – hardcover; Bloomsbury; 128 pages; 2010.

There are no Magnus Mills’ novels left for me to read, so I thought I would give his short story collection Screwtop Thompson a go, having picked it up at a second-hand book sale earlier in the year for the princely sum of $3.

Mills is one of my favourite writers. He’s got a style all of his own. Part fable, part absurdist. Always original and hugely humorous.

He is an expert at looking at our overly complicated society (or British culture), honing in on a particular issue and then reducing it down to something super simple, as if to say, have you ever thought about things like this? (And the answer is always, “no”.)

In his novels, he has covered everything from bus timetables to record collecting, British exploration to time-keeping, and always with an eye to the ridiculous.

This short story collection is more of the same but has a domestic, rather than societal, focus.

For instance, in the opening story, Only When the Sun Shines Brightly, an enormous sheet of plastic — “industrial wrapping, possibly twenty yards in area” — gets caught high up on a viaduct wall and causes noise and disturbance as it flaps in the wind. A business owner who works below the viaduct tries various methods of reaching the plastic to pull it down, all to no avail. People complain about the eyesore and the noise, but nothing is ever done about it. Then, when it is miraculously removed, the narrator of the story complains it’s now too quiet to sleep!

In another, At Your Service, a short man called Mr Wee (LOL) asks his friend to help cut a few branches off a tree that is obscuring the view from his second-floor flat. Getting access to the tree — “a great overgrown thorny thing” — proves farcical, but when at last the bowsaw is used, Mr Wee is not happy: so much light now floods into his flat he has to keep the blinds down!.

Another story, Once in a Blue Moon, is a bit more off-kilter.

My mother’s house was under siege. One chill Friday evening in November I arrived to find the entire neighbourhood in a state of high alert. The police had blocked the street at both ends. A helicopter was circling overhead, and there were snipers hidden in the garden.

The narrator manages to convince his mother to let him into the house — after she’s shot out the upper-storey bedroom window — by asking her what she’s planning to do at Christmas. Her guard down, she invites him in, makes him a cuppa and answers his question — all the while keeping the gun levelled at him. It’s a quirky story, but not out of keeping with the kinds of absurd situations Mills normally puts in his novels.

My favourite story, Hark the Herald, will resonate with anyone who’s stayed in a British B&B and endured the passive-aggressive nature of the hosts, in this case, Mr Sedgefield and his partner, who put on a polite act, all the while treating their guest with thinly veiled contempt. It’s Christmas, and the narrator is looking forward to socialising with other guests, but despite being promised he will meet them on numerous occasions, he always seems to miss them, begging the question, do they even exist or are they a figment of Mr Sedgefield’s imagination?

Anyway, you get the idea…

There are 11 stories in this quirky little collection, most of which are only 10 or so pages long, so the volume is a quick read. Some of them feel a bit thin, almost as if they are sketches rather than fully formed ideas, and occasionally the endings are too abrupt.

On the whole, I’d say Screwtop Thompson was for true Mills’ aficionados, rather than for those who have never read his work before.

20 books of summer, 20 books of summer (2019), Author, Book review, Fiction, Ireland, Publisher, Reading Projects, Setting, short stories, TBR40, Viking, William Trevor

‘Last Stories’ by William Trevor

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Fiction – hardcover; Viking; 224 pages; 2018.

Willam Trevor’s Last Stories are literally that: the last short stories he penned before his death in 2016. They were published posthumously as a handsomely bound collection by Viking last year, and have now been reissued as a paperback by Penguin.

As you may know, Trevor is one of my favourite authors and earlier this year I went through a bit of a phase reading his first three novels: The Old Boys (1964), The Boarding House (1965) and The Love Department (1966). But this is my first foray into his short fiction.

Ten tales

There are ten rather exquisite tales in this collection. Most focus on love — particularly love less ordinary — and are written with a deft eye for detail and a storyteller’s regard for the bittersweet and the unexpected.

There’s a watchfulness at work here, because Trevor is focused on the small happenings in people’s lives, but that is not to say these stories, nor the lives depicted within them, are small. Indeed, it’s often the accumulation of small happenings that leads to bigger things — domestic dramas, marriage break-ups, even death.

As ever when it comes to short story collections, I find it difficult to review them because I’m never quite sure what to focus on and what to leave out. Rather than give you a detailed account of every story, let me single out the one I found most memorable.

The paperback edition

The second story, The Crippled Man, represents William Trevor at his very best.

In roughly 24 pages he lays out a tale that feels quite run-of-the-mill, of a woman living in an isolated farmhouse with her crippled cousin, whom she cooks and cleans for. But by the time you reach the conclusion, you realise that this is no ordinary tale: it’s slightly creepy and malevolent and has a delightful little twist at the end. I immediately wanted to re-read it again to see what I had missed the first time around.

The story goes something like this. The woman, Martina, is having a long-term love affair with the local butcher. One day, when she’s out visiting him, her cousin hires two men — brothers — to paint the house. He thinks the men are Polish, but they’re actually Roma and have never done a job like this before. The immediate assumption the reader makes is that they are up to no good and that they will rip off the crippled man. This is what Martina thinks too. She is angry at her cousin for making this decision without her input.

The men, however, do a rather good job painting the house, but mid-way through the job, they are puzzled by a bizarre change in Martina’s behaviour. She stops bringing them their tea at the agreed times of 11am and 3.30pm and often just leaves a tray on the doorstep for them to find. One day the younger brother spots her through the window “crouched over a dressing table, her head on her arms as if she slept, or wept”.

Later they realise that they have not heard the voice of the crippled man — who has only paid them half the agreed price —  for quite some time and they’re fearful something has happened to him. They are also fearful that they will not be paid the rest of the money owed them when the job is complete.

The clincher at the end — which I won’t reveal here — is akin to a penny dropping in the well, but Trevor writes in such a deeply understated way it comes as quite a shock that such a calmly told tale could deliver such a deliciously dark blow.

If you’ve not read Trevor before and want to get a feel for his style, I’d recommend reading The Piano Teacher’s Pupil, which is in this collection but has also been published in The New Yorker (which is where I read it first). It showcases to perfection the way in which he tends to focus on people’s unexpectedly dark character quirks and highlights how we often fail to confront those who have wronged us because we can’t quite believe their bad behaviour.

This is my 9th book for #20BooksOfSummer; and my 28th for #TBR40. I treated myself to the hardcover edition for my birthday last year, but that copy is still in London. A few weeks ago I bought it on Kindle — it was the 99p daily deal — so I could read it here in my new home in Fremantle.