07:00 – I’m getting near the end of Ox-Tales: Fire (Profile Books) now so it’s close to appropriate (but not quite) that the story I read over breakfast this morning was Last by Ali Smith. This short by Smith certainly comes under the odd category, but it also slips into the pure genius one too. The story centres around a disabled woman who has got herself stuck on an empty train which has been ‘parked up’ in the sidings. No one has seen her except for the narrator, and as she makes her way towards the woman trapped on the train, she shares her penchant for the origins of words – which actually makes the story all the more endearing. As the narrator herself says – ‘words are stories in themselves’.
17:00 – Delighted to have received my 1280-page tome of The Collected Stories by William Trevor (Penguin – ISBN: 978-0140232455) earlier today, I thought I’d celebrate by reading the first short in the collection entitled A Meeting in Middle Age (note: My choice of reading place was the bath – not a good idea with a 1280 PP volume – ouch my wrists).
Many proclaim Trevor to be the unassailable master of the contemporary short story, but I’ve got to admit to not really seeing that in this first story. His characterisation is good, really good, which shows a real Chekhovian side to the writer, but the story, which focuses on two greatly incompatible strangers staging a hoax illicit affair, wasn’t all that inspirational to me. Am I missing out on an important point? Were my initial expectations set too high? Or am I just too new into this relationship with Trevor to ‘feel the love’? Whatever the reason (although I’m guessing the latter), things will only become clearer as I keep reading him.
19:00 – Still puzzled as to why I didn’t instantly and unconditionally fall in love with William Trevor, I was eager to see how one of his rivals measured up against him. You may remember last week I bought Lorrie Moore’s The Collected Stories (Faber), and featured it (along with Lydia Peelle’s Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing – Harper Perennial) in a Daily Bookshot. I said in that post that author Alison Lurie proclaims Moore to be ‘the nearest thing we have to Chekhov’, a claim which was refuted in the comments by Tom Cunliffe (creator of the excellent ‘A Common Reader’ lit blog), who preferred to give that living epitaph to William Trevor (hence the motivation for my purchase of the ‘Trevor Tome’).
Well I thought, as a start at least, that I’d sample one of Moore’s stories just to see how it measured up against Trevor. The first in the collection is one of four newer ones from Moore, a short entitled Foes (You can read it for free, courtesy of The Guardian) . The story, which firstly centres on the relationship between an ageing couple before focusing more on the interaction between two incompatible dinner guests (one of which is one half of the ‘ageing couple’) at a fundraiser, floated my boat a little bit more than Trevor’s story, but it certainly didn’t set it off to sea with engines on full. Again, like Trevor, Moore’s characterisation is superb, as is her dialogue, but the story, perhaps due to inflated expectations, wasn’t as good as I expected it to be. Early days of course, but I can already see a bit of a literary battle building up in my mind between the two short story aficionados. Is there going to be a Trevor VS. Moore contest coming up on RobAroundBooks? I’m thinking there may well be, and I could even have them fighting it out for the Chekhovian Cup…emmmmm 
Before all that though it’s back to my latest novel Triple Cross by Mark T. Sullivan (St. Martin’s Press). See you tomorrow.
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