The Hill Bachelors
In more than two dozen books, William Trevor has recounted heartbreaking  narratives with an extraordinary economy of detail and expression. The stories  collected inThe Hill Bachelorsare cut from this same understated  cloth, and reveal a master at the very height of his powers. As usual, only the  merest tip of the emotional iceberg breaks the surface of his prose. Yet Trevor  invariably points us toward submerged memories, traumas, and desires, ennobling  the ordinary with an often tragic grandeur.Renunciation--be it personal, political, familial, or erotic--is usually at the  core of these tales. In the title story, for example, 29-year-old Paulie returns  to work the land of his fathers on a desolate hillside in the west of Ireland,  fully aware that he will henceforth be unable to marry: "Enduring, unchanging,  the hills had waited for him, claiming one of their own." "A Friend in the  Trade" revolves around unrequited love, while the hero of "The Mourning"  ultimately rejects the so-called heroism of sectarian violence. Most ofThe  Hill Bachelorsis set in Ireland, and boast a richness of imagery and  lyrical intensity that verges on prose poetry. "Low Sunday, 1950" in particular  evokes the terrible beauty of Yeats's history-haunted landscapes. And in "The  Virgin's Gift," a prodigal son makes his long-awaited return, eliciting the  closest that William Trevor ever comes to a Joycean epiphany: "No choirs sang,  there was no sudden splendor, only limbs racked by toil in a smoky hovel, a hand  that blindly searched the air. Yet angels surely held the cobwebs of this mercy,  the gift of a son given again."--Robert Mighall--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.