Overhead in a Balloon

by Mavis Gallant

These twelve stories are set in Paris, Mavis Gallant’s adopted home, a city whose nuances she brings to life through a wide range of characters: squabbling writers, bewildered parents, scheming art dealers, beleaguered tenants, and feckless drifters. An artist’s widow proves more than a match for Sandor Speck, who hopes to make a name for himself with her late husband’s paintings. Literary rivals Prism and Grippes, the protégés of a rich, misguided American patron, battle across the years. And in the Magdalena stories, a man is caught in the pull of loyalties between his beautiful first wife from a marriage of political conscience, and the woman he truly loves. Elegant, concise, finely textured, these stories never relax the tension between detachment and compassion, understanding and mystery, memory and truth. With remarkable intelligence and an unfailing eye for the telling detail, Gallant weaves stories of intricate simplicity and spare complexity.

Genres: Short Stories, France, Fiction, 20th Century, Canada

240 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1985

About the author

Canadian journalist and fiction writer. In her twenties, Gallant worked as a reporter for the Montreal Standard. She left journalism in 1950 to pursue fiction writing. To that end, always needing autonomy and privacy, she moved to France.

In 1981, Gallant was honoured by her native country and made an Officer of the Order of Canada for her contribution to literature. That same year she also received the Governor General's Award for literature for her collection of stories, Home Truths. In 1983-84, she returned to Canada as the University of Toronto's writer-in-residence. In 1991 Queen’s University awarded her an honorary LL.D. In 1993 she was promoted to Companion of the Order of Canada.

In 1989, Gallant was made a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2000, she won the Matt Cohen Prize, and in 2002 the Rea Award for the Short Story. The O. Henry Prize Stories of 2003 was dedicated to her. In 2004, Gallant was awarded a Lannan Literary Fellowship.

With Alice Munro, Gallant was one of a few Canadian authors whose works regularly appeared in The New Yorker. Many of Gallant’s stories had debuted in the magazine before subsequently being published in a collection.

Although she maintained her Canadian citizenship, Gallant continued to live in Paris, France since the 1950s.

On November 8, 2006, Mavis Gallant received the Prix Athanase-David from the government of her native province of Quebec. She was the first author writing in English to receive this award in its 38 years of existence.

Reviews

[Frank · Rating 5 out of 5]

As always, on finishing a collection of Gallant’s stories, I can’t help feeling it her best. And if this isn’t her best, surely it’s one of her funniest? It contains several groups of connected stories. Those about the art dealer Speck and his peevish Swiss assistant Walter, a lapsed protestant ‘inching towards Rome’, as well as those about the Parisian writer Henri Grippes are full of crackling comedy and belong to Gallant’s funniest. (The series about Grippes, incidentally, contains one further story written almost ten years after his collection appeared and collected in The Collected Stories (alternately called The Selected Stories in some editions). Then, in addition to some stories that stand on their own, there’s another group of four stories that are, if leavened with Gallant’s trademark irony, less exuberantly comic and deal with the complicated relations of a French tv personality with his first wife (a Jew girl converted to Catholicism whom he married to safeguard her against arrest during the war) and his second. These stories are so densely interlinked that they read like the chapters in a short novella rather than actual short stories.
As usual, there isn’t a weak story in this collection, and especially the comedy of ‘Speck’s Idea’ and the Grippes stories is irresistible.

[Vivienne Strauss · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading this collection was like being transported to another time and place -- in a very good way !

[Judith · Rating 5 out of 5]

Overhead in a Balloon by Mavis Gallant includes some of her especially memorable stories. “Speck’s Idea” seems to me the quintessential Paris story, complete with an artist, a wealthy collector, a gallery, a dealer with plans for a retrospective show, and a Swiss assistant who has been in Paris for five years and is still trying out different churches. Also, the artist’s widow, political violence in the neighborhood bookstore, and right wing readers insisting there is a difference between “pure” Fascists and collaborators,

The title story is also delightful, and there are two unforgettable series of four stories each. In the arts, Gallant satirizes literary competitors Henri Grippes and Victor Prism as they contend for the favor of Miss Mary Margaret Pugh, patroness of the arts. During the Nazi occupation of Paris, Magdelena’s many well-connected admirers realized that a Jewish-born woman who converted to Catholicism is just as vulnerable as if she hadn’t, but conversion would mean her marriage could be blessed in the church. So, brave young Edouard married her in order to change her name to his and get them train tickets so she could get to Cannes where she would be hidden in a friend’s villa. He went on south to leave France to join the Gaullists in London. After the war he fell in love with a woman his own age and wanted to marry her, but he was already married!

[Ron Bernas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Found this book in a coffeehouse and bought it because I liked the cover and the title, which I had misread as "Overheard in a Ballroom." Later, I saw i was wrong and wrongly thought it was titled "Overheard in a Balloon." Still wrong, but closer. Anyway, I was not expecting the depth, beauty and humor of these short stories. It may have helped my opinion that I read it during a trip to France. I will look for more from Mavis Gallant.

[Betsy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Gallant was a great new author for me. The only thing I didn't expect was that the stories were connected by the characters.

[Socraticist · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not an enjoyable read for me. This collection and I, the reader, are not a good fit. I have the sense that in this collection (not in all the others) Mavis Gallant does not love, sympathize or even empathize with most of her characters. For some she shows a barely concealed contempt. So it is hard for me to care about them, and that makes the richness of her writing feel over my head, stilted and empty.

I know, I know, the book is about the meanness of people to each other, but if no one has clean hands then I’m apt to say, “It just serves them right, ALL of them.”

Not totally bad though. Almost, but not quite saving the book are the four stories about Eduoard, Juliette and Magdalena. In these I don’t feel the contempt or dislike. But even here there is a distance from the characters that cannot be bridged to get to their genuine core.

[Diane L]

Witty, amusing, sad