Article: Belonging nowhere, seeing everywhere: William Trevor and the art of distance.

 
   As a writer one doesn't belong anywhere. 
   Fiction writers, I think, are even more 
   outside the pale. Because society and 
   people are our meat, one doesn't really 
   belong in the midst of society. The great 
   challenge in writing is always to find 
   the universal in the local, the parochial. 
   And to do that, one needs distance. 
 
   --William Trevor 
 
  No one has had a closer vision, or a hand 
  at once more ironic and more tender, for the 
  individual figure. He sees it with all its 
  minutest signs and tricks--all its heredity 
  of idiosyncrasies, all its particulars 
  of weakness and strength, of ugliness and 
  beauty, of oddity and charm; and yet it ...

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