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Cheating at Canasta | 
 enlarge | Author: William Trevor
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Category: Book
List Price: £7.99
Buy New: £3.00
You Save: £4.99 (62%)
New (29) Used (3) from £3.00
Rating:  1 reviews
Sales Rank: 64187
Media: Paperback
Pages: 240
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.4
Dimensions (in): 7.6 x 5 x 0.6
ISBN: 0141032456
EAN: 9780141032450
ASIN: 0141032456
Publication Date: May 1, 2008
Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: BRAND NEW - ***Delivery usually * 2 - 3 * working days - From Aphrohead of SOUTHPORT, Lancs, UK *** . Priority Airmail used Worldwide on International orders. Thanks from all at Aphrohead.
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| Customer Reviews:
Unfinished Business in Trevor's Cheating at Canasta. September 1, 2008
J. S. Lewison (Bolton, Lancs United Kingdom)
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.
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