Essays, observations, memoir and a bit of travel writing by William Trevor. He describes his early years in Ireland, his family moving often for his banker father’s job; and being raised protestant in a catholic country. One of the teachers engaged by his parents “had been found in a farmhouse…where she’d been vaguely waiting for something to happen.” Boarding school days follow.

He moves on to Dublin for Trinity College and then work in advertising. “The air was pungent with the smell of poverty.” “I have myself remained a visitor in Dublin for a lifetime.” “The hard facts of Dublin are that no city has better barmen, that no city is a quick on the uptake or as swift with a loaded riposte.”

In London, his tragic memories of poet Assia Wevill and her impression on the lives of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath show the leap he has taken from rural Ireland. He details the life of a British seaside town in February.

Trevor travels farther. He writes of the shaking hands of a colonic surgeon on the Orient Express. He didn’t seem fond of New York City. “No one smiles because there’s nothing to smile at.” He visits Venice, a city developed “through the harnessing of greed,” also off-season, but still with plenty of tourists and music floating in the air.

In Trevor’s observations, and perhaps some dramatization, of people and places, you can see the seeds of his fiction, his waiting for an idea to catch and grow into something more. ( )

Trevor -- as always the most marvelous writer. I especially enjoyed his reflections on growing up in Ireland as a member of the (not so prosperous) Ascendancy. His memories of boarding school and Trinity are poignant and funny. He offers frank opinions, not the usual paeans of praise, on the personalities of some of the notables of Irish literature: Yeats, O'Casey and Beckett. Fascinating on a now obscure writer Gerhardie, well-respected for a time but later burned out. Wonderful description of his walk through the mountains near Tipperary and Clonmel. Didn't care as much for his musings on New York in the early 70's or on Venice. ( )

The autobiographical essays - mostly about the author's upbringing in rural Ireland in the 1930s and 40s - are much better than the travel essays, which while well-written rarely rise above the level of competency. ( )

William Trevor’s Excursions in the Real World is a book of myriad essays, more or less in chronological order, though they are memoirs only and not a full-fledged autobiography. In all these re-creations Trevor depicts an exceptional power of forgiveness. Henry O'Reilly, the farmer who once taught him to snare a rabbit, was known as the laziest man in Ireland, but seemed to him the nicest. Marchant Smith was a ruinous bully, but at least he employed the otherwise unemployable. A co-woker named Sarzy soon became impossible, but she was an innocent, and innocence is a quality Trevor highly prizes. It’s a delightful book, which seemed so relaxed as to be almost casual.