The Hill Bachelors - Hardcover

Trevor, William

4.04

583 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0670892564 ISBN 13: 9780670892563

Publisher: Viking, 2000

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William Trevor's new collection of stories is his first since the highly acclaimed AFTER RAIN. It contains a dozen new stories, mostly set in Ireland, that show Trevor at the height of his powers. With understatement and precision he writes about the lonely and the sad, about those that barely have control over their lives and those who have something to hide. In 'Three People' a father waits for the proposal for his daughter that will never come; in 'Against the Odds', a con-woman has businessthat takes her all across the Six Counties; and in the poignant title-story, a youngest son returns home for his father's funeral and stays to run the farm.

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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

"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"

"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

"

"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

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