Short but bittersweet tales
Our pick of the best new short story collections
by William Trevor Viking, £14.99 HOW sad to think that this is the final collection of stories by Irish writer William Trevor who died in 2016. I always looked forward to his latest novel or short story collection for he had a very particular voice. In a few words he could evoke the sad and the dispossessed, getting beneath the skin of his characters with a humane but always sharply observant eye.
These last 10 stories are no exception. Some follow the events in people’s lives over several years, capturing snapshots of misunderstandings, loss and solitude.
In many of the stories very little happens and like life they are often open-ended with no neat resolutions or tidy twists. In The Women a father confesses to his teenage daughter that her mother did not die, she left him.
The daughter believes that her father is keeping a further secret which he will now reveal. But he returns to talking about travel arrangements and recollections of a holiday they just shared. How the girl feels is left hanging.
The Piano Teacher’s Pupil is the tale of a genius among a lonely teacher’s talentless charges. So gifted is he that she can teach him nothing but she knows, without a word being said, that he values her approval. Then he suddenly stops coming. He has stolen small valuables from her home and when he reappears, “coarser, taller, rougher in ungainly adolescence”, she believes he has come to return her property. Instead he just plays for her, making her understand that she tacitly attempted to take ownership of his talents. The thefts were a fair swap. In Giotto’s Angels a man is found on a park bench, having lost his memory. He is hospitalised then released to continue the restoration of paintings which he realises was once his profession. His abilities remain undimmed but he wanders the streets, asking people for directions to a place he never finds. There are stories about misconceptions, such as At The Caffè Daria in which an abandoned wife discovers that her replacement, a friend whom she