From Publishers Weekly
The rather conventional device of a teenage boy whose life is changed and shaped by an encounter with a mysterious older woman is in Trevor's seasoned hands turned into a memorable tale. Calling it a "short novel" to qualify for Harper's new series of that name, however, is a bit pretentious; a short story (as it ran in the New Yorker) has been divided into short chapters further fleshed out by Hogarth's illustrations. The narrator is 58-year-old Harry, still living in the provincial Irish town where the seminal event of his life occurred. Seeking refuge from WW II (and, it turns out, from the progress of a fatal illness) Herr and Frau Messengerhe 62, she 27take up residence at the estate called Cloverhill. At 15, already an outsider to his family because of his superior intelligence and sensitivity, Harry is immediately captivated by Frau Messenger. During frequent visits to Cloverhill and through her letters when he is at boarding school he comes further under her spell. The fact that she is dying is conveyed through Herr Messenger's gift and memorialto her and to the town: a cinema called the Alexandra (her name), which will save Harry from working in his father's lumberyard and bring romance and glamor to the drab lives of the townspeople. Trevor's prose bears its customary lucidity and grace, though once in a bit he slips into grandiloquence.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--Ce texte provient d'une édition qui n'est plus publiée ou qui est non diponible.
Product Description
Hailed as "probably the greatest living writer of short stories in the English language" by
The New Yorker and "an extraordinarily mellifluous writer, seemingly incapable of composing an ungraceful sentence" by
The New York Times Book Review, William Trevor is one of our most elegaic chroniclers of loss.
Set in a provincial Irish town against the backdrop of the Second World War,
Nights at the Alexandra is a masterpiece of short fiction. Tracing the reminiscences of a fifty-eight-year-old Irish cinema owner named Harry, the story recounts the years during Harry's adolescence when he forges an unlikely friendship with an ÈmigrÈ couple recently arrived in his small town. Gently imperious yet strikingly beautiful, Frau Messinger, a young British woman married to a much older German, introduces a measure of color into Harry's otherwise black-and-white existence.
Disappointed by his dull family and his stifling boarding school, Harry soaks up Frau Messinger's stories of her youth and indulges her numerous flights of fancy. When Mr. Messinger announces his plans to build the town's first cinema and asks Harry to work its ticket window, Harry for the first time begins to imagine a life of possibility rather than privation. But the young man's newfound sense of himself comes not without its price, as William Trevor masterfully limns the border between innocence and experience, creating a subtle portrait of an adolescent moment that has the power to shape an entire lifetime.
--Ce texte provient d'une édition qui n'est plus publiée ou qui est non diponible.
