Nights at the Alexandra

Typical Trevor. An unmarried man in a small Irish village is 58, reflecting back on his youth. Like other Trevor characters, (I think of Lucy in Trevor’s The Story of Lucy Gault), an outsider would think his life dull, friendless and wasted. But, like Lucy, he seems satisfied and content with his life even though he appears to be sexless and friendless. And, like Lucy, the man is Protestant who grew up in Catholic Ireland. (As was Trevor, growing up in County Cork, Ireland, a country where only 4% of the population is Protestant – surely that had an impact on his life and his writing). <br><br><img src="https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/hostedimages/1506999350i/24072592._SX540_.jpg" width="363" height="242" alt="description" class="gr-hostedUserImg" loading="lazy"><br><br>The Alexandra of the title is a movie theater. It was named after a young woman, an outsider in the village, who befriended the boy when he was 15. The couple are a May-December pair; the wife 27; the husband 62. (Trevor tells us all their ages for a reason.) <br><br>The mystery to me, that is never explained in the book, is why did this young woman, in fact the couple - since her husband encouraged the boy’s visits and the friendship - take on this 15 year-old boy as their best/only friend in the village? The boy is at their estate constantly. She confides in him her life story; she writes him long letters when he is away at school. She’s beautiful. Obviously the boy falls in love with her. But their relationship is chaste, a touch of the hand or a peck on the cheek at Christmas – that’s it.<br><br>Both members of the couple are outsiders: he’s German and has fled his home country, disgusted and embarrassed by Hitler. She’s English. But they can’t flee to England because, as a German national, he would be put in a detention camp. <br> <br>Eventually the boy inherits the movie theater that the husband built in the village. He spends the rest of his life running it. His family tells him “the movie theater ruined him.” And maybe it did. He can only dwell in the past. It says something when the narrator tells us that “his most cherished possession” is a cheesy tie tack the woman gave him more than 40 year ago. <br><br><img src="https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/hostedimages/1506999554i/24072625._SX540_.jpg" width="363" height="242" alt="description" class="gr-hostedUserImg" loading="lazy"><br><br>This book is a novella – 95 pages in a small format. A good read – maudlin, like many others of Trevor -- but still a good read. <br><br>photo of Irish village from tuskergirls.files.wordpress.com<br>photo of William Trevor from avondhupress.ie<br>

<i>Deste modo, acabámos por vir sozinhos até ao nosso santuário, Harry, condenados a viver com a culpa de o ter feito. Quem foge nunca foge sozinho, a culpa e o remorso acompanham-no onde quer que vá.</i><br /><br />“Noites no Alexandra” remeteu-me para os livros de dois dos meus autores preferidos, “Uma Mulher Perdida”, de Willa Cather e “O Destino de um Homem”, de W. Somerset Maugham, pois também aqui há um jovem que frequenta a casa de um casal considerado forasteiro e se encanta pela mulher, a qual não é vista com bons olhos pela comunidade local. Por mero acaso, Harry presta ajuda a Frau Messinger, uma jovem inglesa que durante toda a infância foi a parente que vivia na casa dos outros de favor e que, agora, se refugiou numa pequena localidade da Irlanda juntamente com o marido alemão, muito mais velho do que ela. A partir daí, ele torna-se visita habitual em Cloverhill e assiste à construção do Alexandra, o cinema que Herr Messinger construiu para homenagear a mulher que ama.<br /><br /><i>Dei-me muitas vezes ao prazer de carregar no botão que desvendava o écran, levando as cortinas verdes e amarelas a abrirem-se lentamente com as borboletas estampadas a desaparecerem por entre as suas dobras à medida que elas se afastavam mais e quando a luz do dia invadia a sala, entrando pelas portas de saída, os tons ambarinos das paredes ganhavam novas e diversas tonalidades.</i><br /><br />William Trevor é um escritor com quem tenho uma relação inusitada. Sem nunca ter dado 5 estrelas a nenhuma das suas obras, admiro as suas histórias discretas, e as personagens que compõe ficam-me sempre na memória.<br /><br /><br /><i>O destino fez de mim o fantasma de um interlúdio. De vez em quando, digo isso mesmo na cidade, repito isso mesmo às pessoas que me interpelam. Só para explicar, só para tentar explicar.</i>

Harry was fifteen when the events of this book happened, but at this telling: <i>I am a fifty-eight-year-old provincial. I have no children. I have never married.</i><br /><br />When I finished this slim story, I immediately went back to that starting line. Stories that move you will make you do that. But then I realized that what followed just next might be the real start: <i>'Harry, I have the happiest marriage in the world! Please, when you think of me, remember that.'</i> That is the voice of Frau Messinger, <i>as precisely recalled as memory allows.</i> But, <i>The war had upset the Messingers' lives, she being an Englishwoman and he a German.</i><br /><br />And one of them is dying. <i>Is such love reserved for the dying?</i><br /><br />Trevor has this way, that we are rooted in the fifteen-year-old narration. I felt myself coming of age again. It is only near book's end that I awakened with a start, when I heard the haunted voice of the grown man: <i>Fate has made me the ghost of an interlude.</i><br /><br />----- ----- ----- ----- -----<br /><br />The <i>Alexandra</i> of the title is Frau Messinger, but it is also the name of the movie theater Herr Messinger builds for her. Trevor says this about it:<br /><br /><i>Urney bars tasted better in its rosy gloom; embraces were romantic there. . . . My brothers did not snigger in the Alexandra; my father, had he ever gone there, would have at last been silenced.</i><br /> <br />Will we ever be able to go to the cinema again, and feel the lowered lights of expectations, of coming attractions?

As well as being a very fine novelist, William Trevor is surely among the half dozen or so finest living exponents of the English-language short story, and when he is really firing on all cylinders – In stories like 'After Rain', 'The Day We Got Drunk on Cake', 'The Ballroom of Romance' or 'In Isfahan', to name just a few from dozens – he might very well be the best there is.<br />'Nights at the Alexandra', though a novella rather than a short story, can stand comfortably alongside these stories. <br />The story, about the various faces and facets of love, is simple, beautiful and profoundly moving: the coming-of-age of Harry, a middle-class protestant narrator, and the unlikely friendship forged with Frau Messinger, a lovely if somewhat fey young English woman who is married to a much older German man. Together they have moved to Ireland to escape the war, losing contact with beloved family members in the process. A love story of sorts develops, though it of the gentle, innocent variety, and plays out over several months, as Harry drifts back and forth from boarding school.<br />What elevates this little book to something special is the wonderfully pitched narrative voice, the slow unfurling of facts, the crafting (and especially the careful contrasting) of the characters, and as much as anything the clarity and utter truthfulness of Trevor's prose. The sentences keep a steady beat, and everything is so balanced that you can't fail to be taken by the force of the ending, even though you feel it coming several pages in advance. At his best, and for all the apparent simplicity of his style, he is simply spellbinding.

The perfect book. Simply perfect.

"I am a fifty-eight year old provincial. I have no children. I have never married."<br /><br />So this slender 99 page novel starts. What good would it do to comment on Trevor's control, the quality of his prose, the sureness of his storytelling?<br /><br />I read this book last summer for the first time and due to some storytelling questions of my own decided to re-read it this afternoon. I'm glad I did. It stays so focused in moments while still using this backward looking atmospheric approach that combines the richness of an adolescent's experience with a longing that just barely walks this line, for me, of being too sentimental. It's a really big, emotional piece of work, amid all its restraint.<br /><br />Clearly, I prefer novels like this--short, sharpened. I learned a lot from this one, and truly enjoyed it more the second time. Thank you, Mr. Trevor.

Nights at the Alexandra is a long short story, or a short novella, and this thin volume also includes two short stories: The Hill Batchelors, and The Ballroom of Romance. All of them are about filial duty fulfilled or otherwise, and are full of Trevor's usual (and wonderful) longing and nostalgia. He rarely puts a foot wrong.

A slim novel that packs a punch. The writing was beautiful, and the setting of a small Irish town against the backdrop of WWII was gorgeous and evocative, and the way Trevor makes you care about his characters in less than 100 pages is impressive. I'm usually more of a plot-driven reader so this isn't the type of book I usually like, but I loved Harry's voice and the way he describes his relationship with the Messingers and the construction (and reason behind the construction) of the Alexandra. This is a great book to read in an afternoon when you're between books and looking for something quick but substantial.

A series of three stories. The first Nights at the Alexandria is about an English woman and German living in Ireland during the Second World War. A young boy is befriended by the woman Frau Messinger and he visits them at their estate and house at Cloverhill. He does not want to live the life his parents does and end up running his fathers timber yard. <br /><br />The woman i think adopts him in a remote way as her surrogate child and then gets unwell. Her husband as a gift builds the Alexandria a cinema for her in which the boy ultimately inherits. The story is about love, loneliness, death and acceptance of what life can bring you. <br /><br />The Ballrooms of Romance is once again a story of loneliness and acceptance. Bridie is a woman who has been going to a dancehall for years. Her only escape from looking after her invalid father in the remote Irish countryside. <br /><br />On this final visit she remembers the past and men she wanted to marry and how she is now too old to keep coming back. She accepts an offer of a layabout she sees her future with him and it looks a bleak one. <br /><br />The Hill Bachelors follows the theme of loneliness. Paul one of several child comes back for his fathers funeral. He stays on to look after his elderly mother on the remote farm. He tries to find a wife but none want to live on the remote farm. In the end he accepts his future with a stoic heart. <br />

Nights at the Alexandra is beautiful, hazy, and sad but without regrets. The Ballroom of Romance is a short, thoughtful story on love and fate on the dance floor. The Hill Bachelors is atmospheric and echoing. Everything is perfect and quietly heartbreaking.