Fools of Fortune (Penguin Classics)

I'm writing this review because there are not enough raves about this book on the Amazon site yet. There should be hundreds. I ordered and read this book because of Francine Prose's recommendation of it in her recent book about reading like a writer. Fools of Fortune is a rich blend of qualities rarely found together. The style is simple, but the book is seriously literary. It is poetic. It is tense. It is a love story. It is a tale of revenge. The plot hinges on cruelty. The core of its message is humane. We become intimately familiar with its characters in a relatively short number of pages, but we grow to know them on a scale of unhurried decades and generations. I ordered it because I hoped that I would discover the work of a genius whom I had somehow overlooked in my previous education and reading. I did.

The phase "fool's fortune" is used by Shakespeare in two plays - King Lear and Romeo and Juliet. In both instances it is not appropriate. It means that bad things can happen to good people........and in William Trevor's book that is exactly what happens. Trevor invokes an initial scene of peace, happiness and tranquility which is destroyed........the banishment from Eden for the pleasant and content characters in this short, but dense novel. Trevor is best known for his short stories, but his novels...many set in Ireland during the "troubles" describe a complex situation beyond the control of the people he writes about. His writing is excellent, rich and compelling. I would recommend this book very highly.

Writing a review for Fools of Fortune is challenging because Mr. Trevor is such a skilled writer. However, I have to say something because the book affected me greatly; the story has invaded my soul in a most subtle manner. I plan to re-read it now that I have a handle on the plot and can relish Trevor's imagery, sentence construction, and descriptions of characters, places and happenings.

A violent crime befalls the Quinton family but because the Irish tend to eschew horrors, and maintain a benign facade even in real life, Mr. Trevor gives you enough information without slamming you in the face with the details. Then he gives you the aftershock of the tragedy through some of the more fragile characters in what we casually refer to as post-traumatic stress disorder.

It's so refreshing to read something well written when there is so much drivel on the market. I'm familiar with most of his books but somehow this one slipped by me years ago when I was immersing myself in his works. Thank goodness I stumbled upon it in a used book store via Amazon.

It's hard to add to what the other reviewers have already said. A breathtaking achievement, with not a single false note in the entire book (although there were a couple of typos--the editors' fault, not Trevor's). I plan to read everything this man has ever written.

This is a lesson on how construct a novel, how to lead the reader through it, and touch the reader with its story and its people. A superb work of art and craftmanship.

William Trevor's "Fools of Fortune" is perfection incarnate with elegance, spare yet richly satisfying. A miniature history of the struggles in Ireland rendered on a personal scale.

William Trevor (1928-2016) was one the greatest literary treasures the English-speaking world ever produced. He won or was nominated for just about everything an Irish/English writer can be, and he deserved more. I will probably not live long enough to see his like again.
Revered primarily as a prolific short story writer (I read once that the New Yorker magazine had a standing contract with him to buy anything he wrote, sight unseen) he also wrote fifteen or twenty novels, depending on how you count them, and depending too if you count novellas as short novels or long short stories.
One novel, which I first read many years ago, and now again, but not for the last time, is Fools of Fortune. The title may come from Romeo’s despairing cry after he revenges his friend Mercutio’s death by killing Tybalt, the King of Cats: “O I am Fortune’s fool!” And that should tell you much about what to expect from this unforgettable novel.
For reasons that mystify me—I was reading other things and involved in other projects—I recently found myself going back over and over to the bookshelf where it sat, until finally I picked it up and read once again the first, very short chapter and was, once again, hooked.
Many fine and gifted teachers of creative writing will tell you that it is always important to have a first line that will hook the reader:
“It was to have been a quiet evening at home;”
“Last night I dreamed I returned to Mandalay;”
“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice;”
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times;”
“He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish.”
You get the picture. But a certain class of reader, the kind seriously interested in great writing, will usually take the time to at least wade through the first several pages, or more, if the writing is good enough. William Trevor’s first introductory short chapter appears initially to be very low-key and subdued, almost mundane, but the magic of how he puts his sentences together will make you read through to the end, perhaps five- or six-hundred words, total, and then you will come away with a wonderful, haunting desire to know what and why and who. And that quality of haunting will stay with you through the whole novel. You won’t find out the what and why and who quickly, but as the story gradually unfolds in alternating points of view, with glimpses, hints, oblique suggestions, you’ll find yourself hooked, horrified, and above all haunted. You will find yourself unable to forget the characters you have come to know.
Like all great novels, it works on many levels: it is a love story; a dark glimpse into a dark period in Ireland’s long and bloody struggle for independence; a story of murder and revenge and the appalling, lasting results of both of those; a mystery; even perhaps a parable. (Euripides: “The Gods visit the sins of the fathers upon the children.” Horace: “For the sins of your fathers you, though guiltless, must suffer.” Shakespeare: “The sins of the fathers are to be laid upon the children.” And, of course, there is something in Exodus.) But above all it is incomparably evocative, with even the most briefly limned characters resonating unforgettably, drawing the reader into a doomed and tragic past with a final, brief adumbration of what might have been: “Fingers touch. One hand grasps another, awkwardly in elderliness.”
Oh yes, above all a love story.

A good Trevor novel: quiet tone, skillfully narrated, how almost pastoral lives came experience and encounter the most horrendous downturns. LIke all his short stories beautifully, beautifully told.

PIcture it: A young woman -- pregnant and unwed, thrown out by her self-righteous parents -- trudges through snow to find the father of her child. Alas, she reaches his home and finds it burned to the ground. His relations cannot say where the man is, only that he is gone to avenge an atrocity against his family. The child is born and has magical powers; after many years apart, the parents are reunited. Sounds like cornball melodrama? It is! Worse, the first half of the novel is another boring young-lad-at-English-prep-school piece, as if we haven't had enough of those to last ten lifetimes.

Yes, there are many good turns of phrase. Not enough, though, to warrant this Thomas Hardy retread.

Fantastic read. Trevor doesn't reveal everything to the reader, but instead leaves hints for the reader to figure it out on her own. I would recommend reading this twice, because I found it much more enjoyable my second time around when I wasn't confused out of my mind.