Palate cleansing

After finishing Sam Quinones' amazing Dreamland -- really I can't recommend it highly enough -- I needed something down to earth, so I picked up William Trevor's stories and read "Le Visiteur."

Lovely. Trevor captures an instance of wish-fulfillment of seeing someone across the room, feeling deep attraction, and then actually having it come to fruition. Yes, that. Actual sex, in an instance of what Walter Benjamin called -- in his meditation on the flaneur -- "love at last sight." We all know it well, but not as well as our narrator.

There is of course more going on in the story, as there always is with Trevor. An entire little world packed into 8-10 pages. Or, rather, glimpses thereof.