Vague Inchoate Shadowlands

 

When Anna gave me the Last Stories of William Trevor for Christmas based on the glowing reviews at the back of the book, I had never heard of him. At least I thought I hadn't as the name didn't ring a bell. I thanked her and thought I would get around to reading it some time or other. Because of the sheer number of  unread books I had -- BookXcess purchases, Kino purchases, Christmas and birthday presents (what I really want right now is another bookshelf but I can't get one because Ikea is temporarily closed due to the pandemic and the numbers in Malaysia keep climbing and climbing).

But I read Yiyun Li's Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life which was sad and sweet (OK I know if she saw the word 'sweet' attributed to any of her writing, she would gnash her teeth in rage, sentimentality being something that she rages against) and William Trevor was all over the memoir. In fact, she credits him and one of his books with her desire to give up her job in as an immunologist (nice, safe, steady) and embark on a career in the highly unsafe, treacherous world of writing.

What usually happen when I read something like is that I would go look for books by the author mentioned from Kino. Maybe BookXcess. But here I had a ready made Christmas present, just the thing.

So I decided it would be my next book, right after.

When I picked it up and read the first story, it left me feeling sad and unsatisfied. It was about a music teacher who gets a pupil who is a genius, a once-in-a-career happening. The teacher is middle-aged and comfortable and her life is sedate and predictable. So, she is inordinately excited about this pupil. His mother has said that he has gone through music teachers without quite telling this music teacher why.

But the teacher finds out for herself after the first lesson when she discovers something missing in her table of knick knacks. And after every lesson, there is something else missing -- the genius just happens to be a kleptomaniac, and not just a klepto but a self-satisfied one, proud of himself, knowing she knows what he is doing but will not say anything. Because the teacher figures out that the other piano teachers were dismissed because they probably discovered this propensity and did say something. At some point he stops taking music lessons and goes off to school or something. And he comes back years later, older, coarser, and gives her a performance, proud of himself.

There is much that is not explained in the story and I found it confusing and hard to follow. And then, I found most of the stories in this, his last collection, difficult. Many times I had to read and re-read to see what I had missed. Most of the people in it are sad, lost and there is an actual Eleanor Rigby character in one of the stories except that instead of being old, she was young. Young and hopeless. There was something about how she had run away from home as a young girl, probably a middle class home, because of some misunderstanding with her parents (although this is told in the vaguest way possible so you don't really get any clarity) and started working as a cleaner. She lived in two rooms rented out by a foreign couple, always pays her rent on time, gives no trouble, never brings anyone home and doesn't say a word to them when she comes back in the evenings. And then one day she steps in front of a van and is killed. The story is really about a middle-aged lady who is visited by a priest who wants to know more about the girl so he can conduct her funeral. Although she did not live around his parish, she used to go there often, not for the service, but just to sit in the church, undisturbed. But the middle-aged lady, for whom the girl worked as a cleaner for a time (and she was a very good cleaner, no trouble) can tell him nothing. She wonders if the girl had something on with her cherished son because once she saw her son cross the kitchen while the girl was scrubbing the floor and after he had crossed, she saw the girl smile faintly -- this girl who never smiles.

Anyway it is left like that. She died because her life was not worth living. There is a lot of death and dying and suicide in this book. Sometimes even murder. 

I struggled through the second story about a crippled man living with a homeless "relative" who has decided to kill him and is incensed when he hires two Polish (actually they are not Polish) workers to paint the outside of the house. The pseudo-Poles start the work then have to stop because it rains and also, they get another job that pays more. They come back after nine days and the house is silent and the cripple, who was noisy when they were there before, is strangely silent. They paint around the house and look into the windows trying to see him. But they can't.

And then they surmise that the woman who lives with him (they now realise she is not his wife) has killed him but is keeping it quiet because she still wants to receive his pension. It is all so sad and sordid.

Some of the stories are lighter but not by much. There is a friend who stole another friend's husband and that husband dies and what happens after. There is a schoolgirl who discovers that she was adopted from an orphan's home (her real mother comes to call) but decides that the woman is delusional and she won't believe it.

I found the book terribly depressing. And I realise that Trevor really doesn't like to use commas in places where I would consider a comma natural.

Anyway, I was looking at the list of other books he had written and realised that yes, I had read a book of his - Miss Gomez and the Brethren. I bought it because of the name (my mother was a Miss Gomez) and hated it. I hated the main character, how horrible she had been as an orphan child, flushing antique handkerchiefs down the toilet and then embracing this strange religion which required her to send a portion of her salary to this mission in Africa, writing letters to the "brethren". And they stopped writing back. She goes to Africa in search of them only to find that they are a bunch of conmen. But she doesn't care. She persists in her delusion because that's how she wants it. 

There was no real closure but here, the characters were at least well-defined and they had edges. Maybe it is because he wrote these "last stories" at the end of his life, but each one seemed to spring from a tiredness, a hopelessness, the Shadowland between life and death.