Article: The quiet of sadness New stories by Irish master William Trevor

AFTER RAIN By William Trevor. Viking. 213 pp. $22.95. Gail Caldwell is chief book critic of the Globe.

Even knowing the covenant of sorrows that lies ahead, one settles into the rhythm of William Trevor's stories as though lured onto a slow-moving train. Maybe it's the perfect simplicity and yet danger of those opening sentences: "Violet married the piano tuner when he was a young man." Or: "Gerard and Rebecca became brother and sister after a turmoil of distress." As such circumstances reveal themselves -- as we encounter the piano tuner, glimpse the trouble that Gerard and Rebecca shared -- it is the very inevitability of the stories that seems to weight them with such reality. The Irish ...

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