.
1991
My previous reviews of William Trevor: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/william-trevor/
My previous reviews of older or classic books: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/reviews-of-older-books/
When I read this book, my thoughts will appear in the comment stream below…
My review of Turgenev’s BEZHIN LEA: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2021/05/16/the-8th-fontana-book-of-great-ghost-stories-edited-by-robert-aickman/#comment-21824
READING TURGENEV
“…there were five assistants behind the counters, and an overhead railway network that linked the shop to the accounting office, carrying money and returning change in hollow wooden spheres.”
Though that system had gone out before 1955, when we learn of Elmer Quarry and his drapery shop and its window dummies and his sisters and about the the Irish community where it happened to be, and he taking Mary Louise Dallon to the cinema, leading toward marriage….the Dallons and Quarrys compared. We ever-evasive Trevor readers are, however, first briefly fed by this book with a different day far into the future when an (institutionalised?) Mary Louise’s own feeding is disturbed but not stopped by an announcement she has a visitor waiting….
This is a prime William Trevor texture that is chewy but satisfying, a narration with its own disturbed hints and hangovers of hidden taunt as well as un-supernatural haunt…
I have read so far up to:
“…a family growing old together was never a good thing, never a stable thing.”