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Trevanian News

The Historical Novel Society announces its Editors' Choice
One novel from Crown, The Crazyladies of Pearl Street by Trevanian, is among the eleven on the November 2005 list. Visit the HNS website to see the picks

Brokeback Mountain
The editor notes that Trevanian,a pioneer as always, included the Western myth-breaking gay cowboy couple in 1999 in his novel Incident at 20-Mile.

Read Trevanian on Radio's Golden Age (pdf file), published in Radio Ink September issue

Announcing The first part of the Internet edition of Trevanian's Street of the Four Winds will be available for download from 18th July 2005 here

Read Trevanian's
Letter to a librarian about The Crazyladies of Pearl Street
now in the shops

Crown publishers is also re-issuing the first five of Trevanian's earlier novels in their
Summer of Trevanian

Read some question and answer sessions from Trevanian's desk here

Trevanian Home



October 2010. Lots of news to tell. Hang on and we will be updating this site very soon

In the meanwhile you can join Trevanian's Facebook page and help make the Trevanian community click here


The paperback version of The Crazyladies of Pearl Street has been on the streets in the US since 6th June 2006, while the UK rights are under negotiation for publication in the spring 2007.


On the Death of Trevanian.

Some Orbituaries: New York Times Los Angeles Times Metro News, San Jose, California Hollywood Reporter

Eulogy to Rodney Whitaker
Thursday December 21 2005

'...I don't mean to speak of Rod with all-round authority. Only his immediate family can do that. We are all multi-facetted, none more than he was, turning different aspects of ourselves to different people, so I can only speak of him as he appeared to us, to Bill and me, for we have talked of him together much lately, since we last sat in his company in France, this August this year. Though he was famously elusive, and though I fancy I may have spied him out, yet behind that fancy is the thought that what I spied is just what he would want me - us - to spy. I don't think that he would disagree with my findings, but he would certainly have enjoyed bandying them about!

Ask anyone who met Rod what they retain of his presence and they're likely to answer something different, but all true. From the few times they met him, our children loved his verbal playfulness. I admired his amazing general knowledge graciously shared, though he had a disconcerting way of searching your face to see if you thought he just might be inventing stuff. Bill enjoyed his entertaining, instructive and nimble conversation. These particular qualities, I think, go back to his liking of the Play as a medium for ideas. Before he turned to writing popular novels and short stories, he was a playwright, a dialogue creator, as well as a director and an actor. He said himself that all these learned and innate skills fed his later career as a novelist, that he use to rehearse scenes in an actorly way and then write them out. That kind of dramatic imagination had been at work since boyhood, as he tells in his last most autobiographical book (The Crazyladies of Pearl Street).

Though Rod had lived away from his native land a large part of his life and certainly found much of modern America inimical to him, he had, in my view, an unmistakeable affinity with what is best in the American man of letters. His wit and humour, with a touch of subtle exaggeration in anecdote were, I believe, in the fine tradition of the American humourists Mark Twain, Oliver Wendell Holmes, E.B. White and others. His lightly worn erudition was characteristic of American scholars from Emerson to Edmund Wilson to Gore Vidal. His practice of that nearly lost art of structured conversation, like a well-written dialogue in which he turned out to deliver the best lines, wholly spontaneous, was a combination of those. At best, Rod's discourse, like his writing, was naturally witty and graceful, with a certain old-world courtliness of manner and voice not often encountered and belonging, I think to an earlier American era when erudition and elegance of style were not so suspect...

...He was ever the consummate wordsmith and retained ..his abiding interest in the process of writing. As Trevanian, his chief pseudonym, he was free to play many roles, using many voices...actorly again - but his last book, completed ... against great odds, he came closest to his most personal voice. There he is between the pages, even more so in the discursive footnotes (as long as Sir Walter Scott's!) where we have the authentic Rod having a great rant from time to time, with all the humour and elegance of phrase, affection for family, and for the American, small-town era he came from. I shall always think of him and smile.

I'd like to finish with a short elegiac poem by Wendell Berry, a Kentucky poet born three years later than Rod.

He goes free of the earth.
The sun of his last day sets
Clear in the sweetness of his liberty.

The earth recovers from his dying,
The hallow of his life remaining
In all his death leaves.

Radiances know him. Grown lighter
Than breath, he is set free
In our remembering. Grown brighter

Than vision, he goes dark
Into the life of the hill
That holds his peace.

He is hidden among all that is,
And cannot be lost.

Elizabeth Daly
copyright 2005 Elizabeth Daly
re-printed by kind permission of the author.


The Long Street

Above the road float the lighted
squares of the window. They show
A calm face to night and the
shape in the yellow lamp glow.

We will go in at
the white gate and crunch the gravel
and climb the stair to the wizard's
lair, and there will ravel and unravel.

At the chairside we unload him
cargo that holds smells of rain,
tangs of cattle and horses and
a tug of wind along a damp lane.

We clash the rusty claymores of
wits with cool steel;
we cross grains, we hit and
are hit, we trade smacks and smile

over the bale we unbind,
Rapunzel-like. We taste the flood
of a wry sight and a crowded mind
and of life that beats on in the blood

and a heart that breathes
how on aerial feet
he has leaped the hedges, has
hurdled the brook and run the long street.

C. Somerville, 2005
from his funeral address by kind permission of the author

More soon...The Making of a Liberal Conscience


The Crazyladies of Pearl Street

[This book is in some ways a key to our country; America was made by people like this.-Washington Post]

If you have just bought Crazyladies you will need the Cybernotes Companion for downloading, printing off and keeping with your copy of the book. Read more about this unique offering from Trevanian click here

You do not need the Cybernotes to read and enjoy The Crazyladies of Pearl Street. The book is a complete whole. The Cybernotes, however, provide other angles on the life of the times. Here's what a recent visitor (Mary) from New York said.

'...when I re-read the book with the cybernotes in my hand, it was like having a second good book to read, so interesting did I find it. The history, the amplifications, the arguments, and the spicy non-PCism of the writer's comments blended with his essential compassion and his sense of fair play for the underdog.'

Click here to download Trevanian's cybernotes companion to his novel the Crazy Ladies of Pearl Street

To download right now the cybernotes to Trevanian's latest novel The Crazyladies of Pearl Street click the icon above. (It is recommended to save this file(830k) directly to disk by right clicking on your mouse rather than using the Acrobat viewer to open the file while on-line.)

Alternative download as zip file (623k)

You also may be one of those interested readers that Trevanian calls 'the Others'. Here's what he said of you, "The Trevanian Buff is a strange and wonderful creature: an outsider, a natural elitist, not so much a cynic as an idealist mugged by reality, not just one of those who march to a different drummer, but the solo drummer in a parade of one... Please accept these tokens of gratitude for having followed me though so many genre and eras."

Trevanian, alone of authors of the modern era, has become a world-wide success, sold millions of books without ever making a public appearance or a signing or a live interview. Today's news is that he is reaching his many readers - those 'others' - through this web site.

Much of Trevanian.com is devoted to giving the reader of Crazyladies the chance to deepen his or her experience of the years described in it. But there is a great deal more here. Trevanian has given us a glimpse of the contents of his desk, and allowed some of the texts found there also to be made available to the Trevanian Buff.

The site is an on-going process of discovery and change, and over the months that follow things will be added, taken away, improved upon and generally worked into a coherent picture of a great author and his works.

   

The evolution of a web site



To the webmaster, Trevanian.com

Just yesterday (untypically it seems, at a somewhat advanced age) I finished my first Trevanian novel, Shibumi. I see that Trevanian is a cynical idealist, a Cervantes-like, and as yet beginning, possible hero ("beginning" is not negatively intended, and does not refer, of course, to his ability or history as a writer). I see a person who is brilliant enough, knowledgeable enough, and obviously well-regarded enough to offer a continuum of instruction on his website as to how we all might take action (non-violently, that is) to save the present world from the terrible Samsaric "reality" of power on which his Mother Company is based. (That might be quite risky, though, maybe?) But he also seems to have ego enough to understand where the leaders and the followers are vulnerable and/or transformable...Can Mr.Trevanian meet such an amazing and incredible challenge? We need someone to, don't we? Hopefully, A.C.L.

       
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