The William Trevor Reader: “The Property of Colette Nervi”

It has struck me before that, decades before the idea assumed its current form, William about ableism. Most of Trevor’s characters, to use the term broadly, are in a certain sense disabled. They suffer disabilities of spirit, of mind and psychology, of socialization, of history both personal and political—the Troubles represents a crippling national trauma of body and soul that afflicts many otherwise hardy characters. Trevor’s fiction is in one simple sense a fiction of difficulty, the difficulty and; Mr. Jeffs, in ; Harold, in ; and Dolores, in this week’s story, “The Property of Colette Nervi.”