“Cet été-là” est sans aucun doute l’un des plus beaux romans de William Trevor, considéré comme un écrivain majeur de langue anglaise. L’auteur nous livre ici une histoire inoubliable et une héroïne magnifique.
It’s summer and nothing much is happening in Rathmoye. So it doesn’t go unnoticed when a dark-haired stranger appears on his bicycle and begins photographing the mourners at Mrs Connulty’s funeral. Florian Kilderry couldn’t know that the Connultys were said to own half the town; and, in any case, he had come to Rathmoye only to see the scorched remains of the cinema. But Mrs Connulty’s daughter, liberated at last by the death of her imperious mother, resolves to keep an eye on Florian Kilderry, and it’s she who comes to witness the events that follow.
A few miles out in the country a farmer called Dillahan lives with the knowledge that he was accidentally responsible for the deaths of his wife and baby. He has married again: Ellie is the young convent girl who came to work for him when he was widowed. But she falls in love with Florian and though he plans to leave Ireland, a dangerously reckless attachment develops between them . In a characteristically masterly way Trevor evokes the passions and frustrations felt by Ellie and Florian, and by the people of a small Irish town during one long summer.
William Trevor, KBE (born 24 May 1928) is an Irish author and playwright. A protestant and yet one of the elder statesmen of the Irish literary world, he is widely regarded as one of the greatest contemporary writers of short stories in the English language.Trevor has resided in England since the 1950s. Over the course of his long career he has written several novels and hundreds of short stories, for which he is best known. He has won the Whitbread Prize three times and has been nominated five times for the Booker Prize, most recently for his novel Love and Summer (2009), which was also shortlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award in 2011. Tim Adams, a staff writer for The Observer, described him as “widely believed to be the most astute observer of the human condition currently writing in fiction”.