07:00 – Determined to keep up my back-to-back reading of the short stories of William Trevor and Lorrie Moore for my Trevor vs. Moore reading challenge, I read a story again today from each, over breakfast. I began with Trevor and a story called A School Story.
The story is about a group of boys in a boarding school and the odd relationship that three of them have (the narrator, Williams and Markham). Markham is perhaps the strangest of the three, usually quiet but always willing to tell the story of how his mother died, and how he was going to exact his revenge for her death. Without spoiling the story that’s about all I can say, but if you read it then look closely at Williams – a despicable yet supremely cunning character. The story as a whole is OK, not brilliant but of a satisfactory level to keep my reverence for Trevor at a high level. Not the best I’ve read so far from Trevor by any stretch, so a score that reflects this – 3 out of 5.
The Moore short, What is Seized, I had a bit of a problem with. Again, as with a couple of other Moore shorts I’ve read, I couldn’t connect with it to any great degree. The story is about a mother’s descent into madness; a madness which seems fueled by the father’s coldness. There’s no doubt it’s an incredibly well-written story and hugely clever. But therein perhaps lies the problem for me – it’s too clever.
Moore is using many story-telling devices to tell this story and it all becomes a bit fragmented for me; too overly poetic. Maybe it’s just me. Maybe the morning time, when my neurons are still in the process of firing up, isn’t the best time for reading a story such as this. Regardless I have to score the story, and because of the inclusion of some quite beautiful snippets of prose i.e. “on the other side of the house was a slow, tiny stream, which trickled and glided gingerly over rocks, like something afraid of hurting itself”, I’ll score it an average 3 out of 5.
22:00 – I’ve been diving in to my latest novel read, Once & Then by Morris Gleitzman (Penguin Books), during the course of the day and a third of the way through it I’ve got to say I’m rather enjoying it. It’s a novel that’s rather simplistic in its presentation (as one would expect from a title that is fundamentally aimed at children), but it has made for rather compelling reading so far. The main character, the Jewish boy Felix, has an amazingly endearing quality to him, making the story all the more readable.
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