Paris Stories

Pick any Mavis Gallant's story and you are about to have a magic world of sentences, words and literature open right in front of your eyes. Her stories - most of the first published in The New York - are sublime. So sublime that masters devoted to the short form, such as Alice Munro, praise her as one of the best living writers. Her stories, alongside Munro's, William Trevor's and Jhumpa Lahiri's, to name a few, are truly Chekhovian, in a sense of encapsulate so much in so few pages - plus the beautiful writing. "Paris Stories", one of the few collections of her work, available is a good start. Mind you they are called Paris not because all of them take place in the French capital, but because they were written in Paris - where the author still lives as her adopted city. Her characters are, most of them, most of the time, expatriated searching for their place in the world, or for a way of connecting. "He began to think about Germany. Paris was fine for a holiday, but it had been picked clean. Yes, Germany. His money was running low. He thought about Germany". Her stories are about love - but not only, or usually, about men-women love. They are about something more complex than longing to fall for someone or get married. They are about the art of surviving a love story, despite a love story or because of a love story. Gallant has the gift for details that bring people together and those that separate us. Her characters are always on the verge of something and when something happens their lives may not even change, because changes are not something to be taken for granted. As the writer says in the book's afterword, stories are not novels, and they shouldn't be read in sequence or all at once. "Read one. Shut the book. Read something else. Come back later. Stories can wait". Yes, indeed, they can wait, but can the reader of good prose wait for long until start the next story? Suggestion: don't wait too much.

For better or worse, Mavis Gallant was one of a stable of writers who, for several decades under the editorship of William Shawn, wrote what came to be known as the "typical New Yorker story." Indeed, in a recent interview, the poet Michael Casey recalled a Benjamin Cheever character mocking "a New Yorker story" as "one that goes on and on and nothing much happens but you feel sad at the end of it." And, reading Gallant's stories in the magazine over the years, I likewise felt that they were consistently well written, occasionally interesting, often melancholy, but rather long-winded and ultimately unmemorable. The fifteen stories collected here offer readers a chance to revisit their impressions of her stories. Behind the Jamesian tea-and-crumpet facade of Gallant's prose lurk human transplants: lost souls away from home, nomads and exiles trying to find a place in the world--Gallant has based virtually her entire career on this theme. The two exceptions are about "the French man of letters" Henri Grippes, Gallant's comic, curmudgeonly, aging alter ego. (Incidentally, the title of the collection, as Michael Ondaatje notes in the introduction, is misleading: not all the stories are set in Paris, nor are they about exiles living in Paris or from Paris; instead, Gallant wrote them all in Paris--which, since Gallant has written nearly all of her fiction there, makes the moniker rather meaningless.) One of the stylistic quirks that transform many of Gallant's stories into wrestling matches with her readers is her blithe disregard for transitional devices within and between paragraphs. Ondaatje touts this as a virtue: "the next sentence can bring a complete shift of tone or content, while a quick aside can include whole lives--sometimes halfway through one person's thought you will get another's history." At first, the reader might understandably regard these "sudden swerves" as merely untidy--that's certainly the way I felt about them when I read her stories in The New Yorker. But, as often as not, there is some method hiding in the madness; the disorder echoes the jumble of her characters' lives and especially of their thinking. Savoring these stories, one by one over a couple of months, I found that I truly began to enjoy Gallant's idiosyncratic style and her subtly wicked wit when I reached "Speck's Ideas"--the seventh story of the collection. (At some point, I should probably go back and read the first six.) In sum, I picked up this collection to revisit my judgment of her fiction and came away with a better opinion--but also with the understanding that Gallant will always suffer from that damnably faint praise: she is an acquired taste.

I was delighted to see that Mavis Gallant is back in print. I have loved her work for many years, and always eager to buy the NYer when one of her stories was featured. The only drawback to much of her writing (not present in any of the stories in this collection, though) is that much of what she writes are satirical sketches of French intellectual or expatriate life (for example, the "Grippes and Poche" stories) which would be totally lost on people who have not visited or lived there. The best of her stories are however profound meditations on loneliness and rootlessness. In this I believe she is an archtypal modern writer who can describe the almost universal experience of being an immigrant, refugee, or escapee from some previous stultifying existence. I think this is why so many people respond to her writing. She is, of course, also a master prose stylist. I urge any aspiring fiction writers to read Mavis Gallant. Contrary to what the above reviewer quoted, I think she can be very instructive and inspiring.

I was delighted to see that Mavis Gallant is back in print. I have loved her work for many years, and always eager to buy the NYer when one of her stories was featured. The only drawback to much of her writing (not present in any of the stories in this collection, though) is that much of what she writes are satirical sketches of French intellectual or expatriate life (for example, the "Grippes and Poche" stories in Paris Stories) which would be totally lost on people who have not visited or lived there. The best of her stories are however profound meditations on loneliness and rootlessness. In this I believe she is an archtypal modern writer who can describe the almost universal experience of being an immigrant, refugee, or escapee from some previous stultifying existence. I think this is why so many people respond to her writing. She is, of course, also a master prose stylist. I urge any aspiring fiction writers to read Mavis Gallant. Contrary to what the above reviewer quoted, I think she can be very instructive and inspiring.

I read this book based on an excellent review of it (a good primer for Mavis Gallant newbies, btw) in the April (or May?) Harper's (a great store room for hidden gems.) I had never heard of Ms. Galant before I read the review and her book, but after reading Paris Stories, all I gotta say is, Where the hell have I been since she's been writing for the past 30+ years? Actually I'm only 30, but still. Her writing is magical on so many levels that I'll only mention a couple of them: the consistency and the sublime richness of her prose - it's like really rich fudge, a phrase or two of one of the 15+ stories is often enough for one sitting; the hauntingly subtle rendering of European life; the authority and command of her voice - there is no doubt in my mind that Mavis Gallant was put on this earth to write fiction as her job, and she writes like she knows it. I love that.2 recommendations: read Michael Ondaajte's intro (in it he mentions that he knows other writers who intentionally refrain from reading Mavis Gallant when they are writing themselves, so they don't lose confidence in themselves); read the afterward, written by the auther herself (in it she makes the wise suggestion to the reader NOT read the stories in the book back to back, but to take one's time and savor every morsal - I concur. Read this book very slowly pausing to read other stuff perhaps - you don't want to miss a word, it's that good.)Lovers of sublime artwork in literature, read Mavis Gallant. I guarantee you will not be disappointed. I can't wait for Volume 2 to come out this fall!