The Hill Bachelors - Softcover

Trevor, William

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0141002174 ISBN 13: 9780141002170

Publisher: Penguin, 2001

Synopsis

William Trevor's Last Stories is forthcoming from Viking.

His first collection since the bestselling After Rain, William Trevor's The Hill Bachelors is a heartbreaking book about men and women and their missed opportunities: four people live in a suburban house, frozen in a conspiracy of silence that prevents love's consummation; a nine-year-old dreams that a part in a movie will heal her fragmented family life; a brother and sister forge a new life amid the chaos of Ireland after the Rebellion; and in the title story, a young man chooses between his longtime love and a life of solitude on the family farm. These beautifully rendered tales reveal Trevor's compassion for the human condition and confirm once again his position as one of the premier writers of the short story.

About this title

Review:

William Trevor has established a trademark for beautifully crafted human sketches which depict powerful situations and sentiments with an extraordinary economy of detail and expression. The Hill Bachelors offers 12 such sketches, revealing a master at the very height of his powers. The merest tips of emotional icebergs break the placid surface of his prose. Yet, through gesture, half-formed thought or barely-articulated wish, he indicates the memories, traumas and desires that lie beneath, ennobling the ordinary with an often tragic grandeur. His theme is often "what might have been".

The unrequited love of "A Friend in the Trade", the rejection of heroism in "The Mourning" or the renunciation of personal fulfilment, for familial or even national interests in "The Hill Bachelors" combine to establish pathos as the key tone of the collection. In the title story, 29-year-old Paulie returns to work the land of his fathers on a desolate hillside to the west of Ireland, full-knowing that this means he will never marry: "Enduring, unchanging, the hills had waited for him, claiming one of their own." Many of the stories are set in Ireland, and these have a richness of imagery and lyrical intensity that at times brings them close to prose poems. "Low Sunday, 1950," recalls Yeats' "terrible beauty" in its imagery of a landscape haunted by history; while "The Virgin's Gift" combines descriptive simplicity with religious allegory in a moving tale of a man's return to his parents after 40 years of self-imposed exile. --Robert Mighall

Review:

"One of the very best writers of our era." --The Washington Post Book World

"Ireland's answer to Chekhov has produced another story collection of splendid melancholy." --The Boston Globe

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0141002174
• ISBN 13: 9780141002170
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 224