Product Description

'No matter what,' Julia had said, aware then of what was coming, 'let's always play cards.' And they did; for even with her memory gone, a little more of it each day — her children taken, her house, her flowerbeds, belongings, clothes — their games in the communal drawing room were a reality her affliction allowed. A husband sits in Harry's Bar in Venice, thinking of his wife — lost to him now — whose plea has brought him back to one of their favourite haunts. On another table, a young couple quarrel. 'Cheating at Canasta' is the title story of William Trevor's new collection, his first since the highly acclaimed A Bit on the Side (2004), and its themes of missed opportunities, the inevitability of change and the powerful but fragmentary quality of our memories are entirely characteristic of his unparalleled oeuvre.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #32700 in Books
• Published on: 2008-05-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 240 pages

Review
The Times 7 July 2007

What remains to be said about William Trevor – except the oft-repeated truth that he is not just a master but the master of the narrative form … True to such maturity and control, the stories are suffused with radiant and effortless majesty; a comprehensive ease of speaking about spaces in the human heart and mind that remains out of reach for most writers.'

Anita Brookner, the Spectator 21 July 2007

These stories are formally perfect … As with Chekov – and the comparison is almost inevitable – they leave space for the reader to ruminate and in that way achieve their aim, which is to underline the solitary nature, almost the impermeability, of individual experience.

Cressida Connolly, The Literary Review July 2007

All the stories in this book are good, but two of them are outstanding … The final tale, in particular, is a work of perfect control and balance … This is the twelfth story in Trevor's twelfth collection: an almost magical number for what could be his most mesmerising and haunting story. William Trevor is the greatest living exponent of the form.

The Sunday Times 22 July 2007

Like Rembrandt, Trevor looks long but charitably upon his creations … [his] understanding of human nature is acute … wise, calmly written stories.

Allan Massie, Scotsman 14 July 2007

The short story as Trevor writes it, as Chekhov and Hemingway wrote it, is a novel in miniature, with everything omitted except the significant moment. Trevor is a writer who finds words for the silences between people.

Daily Mail 13 July 2007

Slyly humorous, thoughtful, rich in pathos, wonderfully harmonic in spirit and mood, and above all, hugely enjoyable, these tales confirm what we already knew: that Trevor is an absolute master of the genre.

TLS 20 July 2007

Some of the stories here can stand with his best… even more than most collections it should be taken slowly, measured out at a story or two at a day. Read in that way, some of these little epiphanies can still slice off the top of your head.

About the Author
William Trevor was born in Mitchelstown, County Cork, and spent his childhood in provincial Ireland. He studied at Trinity College, Dublin. He has written many novels and won many prizes, including the Hawthornden Prize, the Yorkshire Post Book of the Year Award, and the Whitbread Book of the Year Award. His most recent novel, The Story of Lucy Gault (2002), was shortlisted for both the Man Booker Prize and the Whitbread Fiction Prize. He is a celebrated short-story writer, and his two most recent collections are The Hill Bachelors (2000), which won the Macmillan Silver Pen Award and the Irish Times Literature Prize, and A Bit on the Side (2004). Both are available in Penguin, as is his Collected Stories.

Customer Reviews

A Master class in story-telling
I have read most of William Trevor's collections of short stories and this collection certainly doesn't disappoint. William Trevor can say in a couple of sentences what it takes other authors a couple of chapters to put across. His use of English is economical and beautiful.

My favourite story in this collection is the title story "Cheating at Canasta" which is the story of a husband coping with his wife's descent into Alzheimer's disease. It is gently and touchingly told. As with all Trevor's short stories it makes you think.

I am not going to review every story. I will just say that I tried to ration myself to one story a day in order to make the book last. I failed miserably!

Unfinished Business in Trevor's Cheating at Canasta.
I remember reading Katherine Mansfield's story The Garden Party during
a sixth form lesson and finding its indirect, impressionistic style haunting and yet real. Mansfield's young protagonist Laura discovers death's
centrality to her existence one summer afternoon and the story's slow,
elegiac tone reveals her maturing acceptance of life's final
inexpressibility. `Isn't life -'Laura attempts to say near the end; her
inability to add a question mark, an acknowledgement of her sudden
humility.

William Trevor is a writer celebrated for his short stories and novels
which explore the problematic and uneasy relationship between the past
and present. Things are only ever finished, never finished with in
Trevor's chronicles of change and revisitation, and it is this subtle but
enduring truth that illuminates all the stories in this haunting collection.
People are enmeshed with each other in ways that escape direct
translation and such dependencies may silence yet define them.

In The Children a grieving daughter subtly sabotages her father's
attempt at a new marriage through reading her dead mother's books each
day. `Time would gather up the ends, and see to it that his daughter's
honouring of a memory was love that mattered also and even mattered
more.' Some departures must be respected for their unutterable finality
and hierarchies of affection must be observed.

Trevor's apparent exploration of adultery in The Room unnervingly
reveals that a wife's affair is an attempt to communicate her unresolved
fears that her husband murdered a woman nine years before. Instinctive
loyalty precipitated her alibi for him yet such loyalty is finite and
corrosive. People just leave in Trevor's world. Their words and worlds,
run out on them. `The best that love could do was not enough, and he
would know that also.' When love turns to irony, then Trevor's
protagonists seem more isolated and lonely than ever.

This latest collection of short stories also includes one of the most
casually cruel tales I have ever read, a story concerned with the
contamination of a childhood friendship, through silence and complicity.
In Folie a Deux, two estranged childhood friends accidentally meet again
in a backstreet Parisian cafe and barely acknowledge each other. Trevor
bleakly unveils the childhood incident which seemed arbitrary, pitiless and
beyond evaluation. The two boys, Wilby and Anthony had once put an old
friendly dog named Jericho on a Lilo one summer day and had watched
him float out to sea. `Far way already, the yellow of the Lilo became a blur
on the water, was lost, was there again and lost again, and the barking
began and became a wail.' We are spectators here upon a literal `lost'
horizon of innocence. Trevor's protagonists say nothing and neither does
he. He simply shows us what the boys did because they could. Wilby grows
up and becomes a stamp collector, his cruelty a mere `aberration'. By
contrast, Anthony has left all his allegiances behind, and is believed to be
dead. `I haven't died,' he says. Yet of course, he has.

Every story in the collection explores the ways in which we depart from
each other and from ourselves. Yet Trevor's stories are also humane and
testify to the enduring power of intimacy even after death. Promises are
made and respected and Trevor's title story Cheating at Canasta follows a
grieving widower to Venice where in a favourite cafe he remembers his
wife's love of cards even when her mind was progressively lost to
Alzheimer's. His reflections are interrupted by a married couple arguing
at the next table and his conversation with them as they depart offers
them all a healing change that Trevor's narrative intuitively acknowledges
but does not denigrate or reduce to mere certainty and `knowingness'.'
`Shame isn't bad, her voice from somewhere else insists. Nor the humility
that is its gift.' Trevor's gift is to listen to such revisitations and discover
their power.

Cheating at Canasta
I expected to enjoy this book but I had the feeling there was nothing original about it. Usually finish books but I gave up on this--it was depressing without being clever.