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Varieties of Exile
Mavis Gallant is the modern master of what Henry James called the international story, the fine-grained evocation of the quandaries of people who must make their way in the world without any place to call their own. The irreducible complexity of the very idea of home is especially at issue in the stories Gallant has written about Montreal, where she was born, although she had lived in Paris for more than half a century.
Varieties of Exile, Russell Banks's extensive new selection from Gallant's work, demonstrates anew the remarkable reach of this writer's singular art. Among its contents are three previously uncollected stories, as well as the celebrated semi-autobiographical sequence about Linnet Muir—stories that are wise, funny, and full of insight into the perils and promise of growing up and breaking loose.
Varieties of Exile, Russell Banks's extensive new selection from Gallant's work, demonstrates anew the remarkable reach of this writer's singular art. Among its contents are three previously uncollected stories, as well as the celebrated semi-autobiographical sequence about Linnet Muir—stories that are wise, funny, and full of insight into the perils and promise of growing up and breaking loose.
324 pages, Paperback
First published November 30, 2003
119 people are currently reading
2405 people want to read
About the author
Mavis Gallant
89 books256 followersCanadian 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.
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.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 85 reviews
September 29, 2021
[2.8] So dreary, I feel weary. I did enjoy the first three stories in this collection. Gallant sprinkles her stories with sharp observations and insight. But by the time I got through the connected stories about Linnet Muir, including the title story, I was done - ready to escape this stultifying landscape.
August 13, 2011
Everyone else seems to think this book deserves a minimum of 4 stars, and maybe it does. Maybe it's some kind of highbrow chicklit. No matter. I disliked it thoroughly -- I found these stories almost unreadable.
The marketing hook for this collection (in the jacket blurb and the worshipful introduction by Russell Banks) is a biographical one. Gallant was born in Montreal to English-speaking, Protestant parents, an only child who was shipped off to a French Catholic boarding school at age four. Her father died early, her mother remarried, but from an early age, in Gallant's own words, she was "set afloat". Russell Banks assures us that this background, the experience of being forced at a very early age to navigate the straits dividing Catholic/Protestant, franco/anglophone, children/adults, men/women, of being, as he puts it "situated simultaneously inside and outside her given worlds", places Gallant at the Borderlands, the ideal site for a writer of short stories*.
The stories in this particular collection are undeniably somewhat autobiographic, and are firmly situated in the Quebec of Gallant's youth. That doesn't necessarily make them interesting, or good. I found them dull, and ultimately claustrophobic. After the sixth or seventh exploration of the stultifyingly provincial concerns of the singularly joyless Quebecois that populate these stories, I'd had enough. I'm happy for Mavis Gallant that she managed to escape, and to live in Paris for the last 50 years. I can understand why she might feel impelled to pick at the scabs of her childhood. But I don't want to watch. Most of the characters in these stories live lives that are circumscribed or emotionally stunted. It's entirely possible to write gracefully about the way cultural pressures or tribal differences can limit or distort people's emotional well-being -- William Trevor has been doing it his whole life. But there's a humor and affection for his characters that rescue Trevor's stories from total bleakness. There's not much affection in Gallant's representation of the milieu she grew up in - the stories read more like the work of someone who is settling scores, or still trying to work through the legacy of her own idiosyncratic childhood (the prevailing narrative voice is that of an adult reinterpreting earlier events from childhood).
Even though Gallant is adept at characterization, you get the feeling that she never warms up towards her own characters. She definitely failed to make me care about them. Giving myself permission not to read the remaining six or seven stories was a great relief.
* the common fallacy of confusing an eventful biography with good writing; clearly, an eventful life is not necessary to be a good writer (Flannery O' Connor, Emily Dickinson, the Brontes), neither is it sufficient.
The marketing hook for this collection (in the jacket blurb and the worshipful introduction by Russell Banks) is a biographical one. Gallant was born in Montreal to English-speaking, Protestant parents, an only child who was shipped off to a French Catholic boarding school at age four. Her father died early, her mother remarried, but from an early age, in Gallant's own words, she was "set afloat". Russell Banks assures us that this background, the experience of being forced at a very early age to navigate the straits dividing Catholic/Protestant, franco/anglophone, children/adults, men/women, of being, as he puts it "situated simultaneously inside and outside her given worlds", places Gallant at the Borderlands, the ideal site for a writer of short stories*.
The stories in this particular collection are undeniably somewhat autobiographic, and are firmly situated in the Quebec of Gallant's youth. That doesn't necessarily make them interesting, or good. I found them dull, and ultimately claustrophobic. After the sixth or seventh exploration of the stultifyingly provincial concerns of the singularly joyless Quebecois that populate these stories, I'd had enough. I'm happy for Mavis Gallant that she managed to escape, and to live in Paris for the last 50 years. I can understand why she might feel impelled to pick at the scabs of her childhood. But I don't want to watch. Most of the characters in these stories live lives that are circumscribed or emotionally stunted. It's entirely possible to write gracefully about the way cultural pressures or tribal differences can limit or distort people's emotional well-being -- William Trevor has been doing it his whole life. But there's a humor and affection for his characters that rescue Trevor's stories from total bleakness. There's not much affection in Gallant's representation of the milieu she grew up in - the stories read more like the work of someone who is settling scores, or still trying to work through the legacy of her own idiosyncratic childhood (the prevailing narrative voice is that of an adult reinterpreting earlier events from childhood).
Even though Gallant is adept at characterization, you get the feeling that she never warms up towards her own characters. She definitely failed to make me care about them. Giving myself permission not to read the remaining six or seven stories was a great relief.
* the common fallacy of confusing an eventful biography with good writing; clearly, an eventful life is not necessary to be a good writer (Flannery O' Connor, Emily Dickinson, the Brontes), neither is it sufficient.
October 31, 2017
Excellent. Definitely on the list of my favourite Canadian short story writers and collections. Or short story writers and collections, period. I know Alice Munro seems to be the most lauded short story writer in Canada, but Mavis Gallant gets my vote for short story monarch for her style, intelligence, wit and sass.
Many of the stories in this collection have a feeling that is biographical or autobiographical; many have a very distinctive sense of time and place; and several have a pointedly female point of view - yet each has a timelessness and universality that is a mark of topnotch writing.
"Reading Mavis Gallant" author Janice Kulyk Keefer writes, “Gallant is a writer who dazzles us with her command of the language, her innovative use of narrative forms, the acuity of her intelligence, and the incisiveness of her wit. Yet she also disconcerts us with her insistence on the constrictions and limitations that dominate human experience.” Yes.
The audiobook narration is also excellent. And the use of music between stories is done with a light touch. Well done, Rattling Books.
I listened to each story multiple times, and will likely return to these stories in both audio and print.
Many of the stories in this collection have a feeling that is biographical or autobiographical; many have a very distinctive sense of time and place; and several have a pointedly female point of view - yet each has a timelessness and universality that is a mark of topnotch writing.
"Reading Mavis Gallant" author Janice Kulyk Keefer writes, “Gallant is a writer who dazzles us with her command of the language, her innovative use of narrative forms, the acuity of her intelligence, and the incisiveness of her wit. Yet she also disconcerts us with her insistence on the constrictions and limitations that dominate human experience.” Yes.
The audiobook narration is also excellent. And the use of music between stories is done with a light touch. Well done, Rattling Books.
I listened to each story multiple times, and will likely return to these stories in both audio and print.
Read
March 12, 2016In his introduction to Mavis Gallant’s short story collection, Varieties of Exile, Russell Banks offers us a quote from the other herself—
"Stories are not chapters of novels. They should not be read one after another, as if they were meant to follow along. Read one. Shut the book. Read something else. Come back later. Stories can wait."
Banks, of course, offers the feeble, “But, trust me, these can’t.” As particular as the advice may come to readers of short story collections—among them, the odd creatures like me who merely take deep breaths in the pause between stories—the quote Banks pulls feels out of place, given the collective nature he selected for this NYRB Classics edition: The Gallant stories here are linked, in one way or another.
There are three sets or sequences to the stories—the first, about the adventures of Linnet Muir, trying to make her way into the world, when her refugee state and her gender are already two strikes against her; the second, the sisters Carette, growing up, loving, forging different lives; the last, of a male narrator [Banks stresses that there is a need to disabuse the notion that Gallant is cruel to her male characters].
What these three grand narratives have in common? One, they’re “Canadian stories,” as Banks dubs them—a matter of the characters’ nationality, we are informed, especially during a time when the very aspect of national identity for Canada was dubious. For another, their preoccupations: These are old-fashioned stories about people who were quite modern within the time they belonged. However, life seems to us pretty mundane and prosaic and seemingly trivial—but oh-so-oppressive in its politeness!—in Gallant’s world, despite the heavy cloak of formality, which is no doubt brought on by her strident tone and formalistic language. [There are strains of this formality, this scope and sometimes-glib omniscience in the stories of Alice Munro and Carol Shields, who both wrote a generation or two after Gallant, whom I both love madly.]
Again, linked stories, a generous survey. After the first two stories where you recognize the main character, you know where this collection wishes to take you, and you tag along. You can’t wait to see a life unfolding before you, told through stories [or installments] whose relevance was chosen with the author’s discretion. Think of the collection as three different novellas, told in episodes. After a while, well, of course these stories can’t wait—each of them is part of a specific arc!
Moving on. In theory, at least, I should have enjoyed Gallant. I’m certainly in awe of her—she is accomplished, this Grand Dame of Short Fiction. [Banks, too, addresses this, as Gallant “has mostly been viewed as a ‘writers’ writer’: “For what is a writers’ writer, anyhow? Merely one who honors in every sentence she writes the deepest, most time-honored principles of composition: honesty, clarity, and concision. So, yes, in that sense she is a writers’ writer. But only in that sense.”] So, yes, all that. Oh, I have admiration in buckets. But this reader didn’t have enough room to move, despite the expansiveness in the stories and the genius Gallant so clearly has—this reader just couldn’t feel it and fall in love and fall quiet.
"Stories are not chapters of novels. They should not be read one after another, as if they were meant to follow along. Read one. Shut the book. Read something else. Come back later. Stories can wait."
Banks, of course, offers the feeble, “But, trust me, these can’t.” As particular as the advice may come to readers of short story collections—among them, the odd creatures like me who merely take deep breaths in the pause between stories—the quote Banks pulls feels out of place, given the collective nature he selected for this NYRB Classics edition: The Gallant stories here are linked, in one way or another.
There are three sets or sequences to the stories—the first, about the adventures of Linnet Muir, trying to make her way into the world, when her refugee state and her gender are already two strikes against her; the second, the sisters Carette, growing up, loving, forging different lives; the last, of a male narrator [Banks stresses that there is a need to disabuse the notion that Gallant is cruel to her male characters].
What these three grand narratives have in common? One, they’re “Canadian stories,” as Banks dubs them—a matter of the characters’ nationality, we are informed, especially during a time when the very aspect of national identity for Canada was dubious. For another, their preoccupations: These are old-fashioned stories about people who were quite modern within the time they belonged. However, life seems to us pretty mundane and prosaic and seemingly trivial—but oh-so-oppressive in its politeness!—in Gallant’s world, despite the heavy cloak of formality, which is no doubt brought on by her strident tone and formalistic language. [There are strains of this formality, this scope and sometimes-glib omniscience in the stories of Alice Munro and Carol Shields, who both wrote a generation or two after Gallant, whom I both love madly.]
Again, linked stories, a generous survey. After the first two stories where you recognize the main character, you know where this collection wishes to take you, and you tag along. You can’t wait to see a life unfolding before you, told through stories [or installments] whose relevance was chosen with the author’s discretion. Think of the collection as three different novellas, told in episodes. After a while, well, of course these stories can’t wait—each of them is part of a specific arc!
Moving on. In theory, at least, I should have enjoyed Gallant. I’m certainly in awe of her—she is accomplished, this Grand Dame of Short Fiction. [Banks, too, addresses this, as Gallant “has mostly been viewed as a ‘writers’ writer’: “For what is a writers’ writer, anyhow? Merely one who honors in every sentence she writes the deepest, most time-honored principles of composition: honesty, clarity, and concision. So, yes, in that sense she is a writers’ writer. But only in that sense.”] So, yes, all that. Oh, I have admiration in buckets. But this reader didn’t have enough room to move, despite the expansiveness in the stories and the genius Gallant so clearly has—this reader just couldn’t feel it and fall in love and fall quiet.
August 4, 2014
Most lives are wasted. All are shortchanged. A few are tragic.
I skipped over Montreal Stories by Mavis Gallant many times while searching the audiobook database from my library -- I was never in the mood and I had never heard of Gallant; why bother? What a pleasure it was, then, to listen to these short stories as though I were discovering a secret treasure; and what a shame to then learn that the author passed away this year at 91. More celebrated outside of Canada, Gallant had 114 stories published in The New Yorker (only exceeded by John Cheever) and yet still I had never heard of her -- had not even noted her passing.
The short stories in this collection (known as Varieties of Exile outside of Canada) are in three groupings of related characters, and although each story is a complete world unto itself, it was often unsettling to finish one and then have that world shaken up by the new information or perspective revealed in the next. Told from the points of view of Anglo Montrealers, this collection explores the culture and customs that, while firmly situated in the mid-20th century, laid the groundwork for today's Montreal where the Anglos have become even less welcome (despite the long roots in the community demonstrated here).
Listening to this collection was a good experience because voice and accent were often described and the narrators did a wonderful job of demonstrating them (what would I know about the posh lisping French of a convent boarding school?) I'd suspect most of the Rest of Canada thinks about the Quebec issue from time to time, and this collection -- wholly apart from being works of real literary genius in themselves -- is an intriguing perspective. I may have jumped on the Mavis Gallant bandwagon a little late, but I'm looking forward to continuing the journey.
April 17, 2009
I first read the collection "Paris Stories" and thought perhaps I was a wee-bit in love with Mavis Gallant because of the Paris backdrop of her stories. But no. Paris, Quebec, Florida, she can take me wherever, and I am just as as enthralled.
May 28, 2024
Canadian fiction from a narrator that reads like Eve Babitz, with the insight of Joan Didion; and a characterisation humourous enough to remind me of all Shirley Jackson’s silliness of Merricat Blackwood. In the short time I had reading this it purely mesmerised me. It feels like Lost In Translation’s predecessor, like a combination of everything I would love. Truly magical prose I feel like I’ll become obsessed with. Details a part of early womanhood that seems to transcend time. Both dry and sentimental and lovely.
“Perhaps that silent coming and going was the way people stayed in each other's lives when they were apart. What Frank Cairns was to me was a curio cabinet. I took everything out of the cabinet, piece by piece, examined the objects, set them down. Such situations, riddled with ambiguity, I would blunder about with for a long time until I learned to be careful.”
“Perhaps that silent coming and going was the way people stayed in each other's lives when they were apart. What Frank Cairns was to me was a curio cabinet. I took everything out of the cabinet, piece by piece, examined the objects, set them down. Such situations, riddled with ambiguity, I would blunder about with for a long time until I learned to be careful.”
January 3, 2008
Mavis Gallant grew up in and around Montreal, but has been living in Paris for the last half century. She's published mainly short stories (her stories have appeared in the New Yorker since the 1950s. The backdrop of this particular collection of short stories is Canada. Her upbringing, as the lone Protestant/English child that went through the conservative school system of the French Catholic church)in pre-post war Montreal is mirrored in many of these stories. Her writing captures the duality of her life experiences(French vs. English speaking Quebec as a child; Canadian exile living in Paris).
March 30, 2019
I suffered through the first chapter and lost interest as the focus was lost in the storyline. I tried other stories in the book and could not be enamored. The writing is similar to the old writing of the 1800's or early century. It was written in 2003 in Montreal Canada. Could it be the translation if it was written in French? I prefer a more contemporary real time writing and storyline. :((
November 15, 2018
A very strong collection, and maybe an ideal introduction to Gallant’s work. It contains three groups of connected stories, and three stories that stand alone: ‘The Fenton Child’, ‘The End of the World’ and ‘New Year’s Eve’. All are among her best, and all are dealing with Canadians, mostly still living in Canada and some (notably in ‘New Year’s Eve’) living abroad (or dying abroad, as in ‘The End of the World’). These standalone stories had already been published in book form in previous collections, as had the two groups of connected stories about Linnet Muir and the Carette sisters. The latter two series of tales are also implicitly connected in that Linnet Muir’s nurse is called Olivia Carette, and may hence be plausibly taken to be the mother of the Carette sisters in that group of stories.
In addition, the collection contains a group of three long stories that had never been collected before: ‘Let it Pass’, ‘In a War’ and ‘The Concert Party’. In these late stories from 1988/89, Gallant is really at the top of her game. Like the Linnet Muir and Carette sisters stories, like all the other stories in this collection in fact, they have a mellower tone than some of Gallants’ more acerbic work from the 70s and 80s. And they are also interesting because, as Russell Banks notes in his brief introduction, they are ‘narrated by a man, un homme d’un certain âge, whose life’s story and sad fate ought forever to disabuse any critic of suggesting that Gallant is hard on her male characters. Ironic, perhaps, but always sweetly forgiving.’
So, a good introduction to Gallant for novices, and a must for any Gallant fan, since these three stories, with a total length of more than 110 pages amounting to a short novella, aren’t available elsewhere. (They were originally published in the New Yorker, but even in the New Yorker archive they can’t be read completely: something seems to have gone wrong with the digitalization, resulting in part of the text of ‘In a War’ being missing from both the online archive and the ‘Complete New Yorker’ on dvd brought out ten years ago.)
In addition, the collection contains a group of three long stories that had never been collected before: ‘Let it Pass’, ‘In a War’ and ‘The Concert Party’. In these late stories from 1988/89, Gallant is really at the top of her game. Like the Linnet Muir and Carette sisters stories, like all the other stories in this collection in fact, they have a mellower tone than some of Gallants’ more acerbic work from the 70s and 80s. And they are also interesting because, as Russell Banks notes in his brief introduction, they are ‘narrated by a man, un homme d’un certain âge, whose life’s story and sad fate ought forever to disabuse any critic of suggesting that Gallant is hard on her male characters. Ironic, perhaps, but always sweetly forgiving.’
So, a good introduction to Gallant for novices, and a must for any Gallant fan, since these three stories, with a total length of more than 110 pages amounting to a short novella, aren’t available elsewhere. (They were originally published in the New Yorker, but even in the New Yorker archive they can’t be read completely: something seems to have gone wrong with the digitalization, resulting in part of the text of ‘In a War’ being missing from both the online archive and the ‘Complete New Yorker’ on dvd brought out ten years ago.)
October 10, 2023
I was excited to read this collection because I love expatriate stories, but I found much of the writing - while technically sound - rather drab, full of characters whose conflicts (and fates) I wasn't fully invested in. Usually even from something minor I can extract a profound significance. I wasn't able to find it with Gallant's creations. There seemed to be a lot of Catholic/Protestant tension (or Catholic guilt) in the stories, as well as questions of heritage (was one of an Anglican or French background?). Perhaps I am not privy to the nuances of Eastern Canadian life to understand the significance of such travails, though I gather they are very important. The problem is that I shouldn't need to. I don't mind doing work for a story, but it has to provide something in return, some sense of what's at stake, and there was too much contextual baggage to sift through to find out what that was.
July 7, 2025
Not my cup of tea at all. Coming from Montreal myself I was hoping for more of a mix of Quebequois and Anglophone stories that showed the richness of both cultures back in the day. I did enjoy the first three stories but lost interest after.
October 9, 2024
"What I craved at this point was not love, or romance, or a life added to mine, but conversation, which was harder to find."
sigghhhh so beautiful
sigghhhh so beautiful
December 31, 2022
pointless and painful
October 24, 2017
“Age has its points,” my mother went on. “The longer your life goes on, the more chance it has to be interesting. Promise me that when you're thirty you'll have a lot to look back on.”
Perhaps desires and secrets and second thoughts threading from person to person, from bachelor to married woman, from mother of none to somebody's father, formed a cat's cradle—matted, invisible, and quite dangerous.
In another season, in the country, my parents had other friends, summer friends, who drank old-fashioneds and danced to gramophone records out on the lawn. Winter friends were mostly coffee drinkers, who did what people do between wars and revolutions—sat in a circle and talked about revolutions and wars.
My parents and their friends were, in their way, explorers. They had in common a fear of being bored, which is a fear one can afford to nourish in times of prosperity and peace.
If A was the daughter of B, and B rattled the foundations of C, and C, tho cautious and lazy where women were concerned, was committed in a way to D, and D was forever trying to tell her life's story to E, the husband of B, and E had enough on his hands with B without taking on D, too, and if D decided to lie down on or near a railway track with F, then what are A and F? Nothing. Minor satellites floating out of orbit and out of order after the stars burned out. Mrs. Erskine reclaimed Dr. Chauchard but he never married anyone. Angus reclaimed Charlotte but he died soon after. Louis, another old bachelor, had that one good anecdote about the fur cloak. I lost even the engraving of The Doctor, spirited away quite shabbily, and I never saw Dr. Chauchard again or even tried to.
Once Satan had approached me—furry dark skin, claws, red eyes, the lot. He urged me to cross the street and I did, in front of a car that braked in time. I explained, “The Devil told me to.” I had no idea until then that my parents did not believe what I was taught in my convent school. (Satan is not bilingual, by the way; he speaks Quebec French.)
August 15, 2009
This book took me forever to finish. Even now, I feel like I haven't truly read this book, despite taking my time on each individual story. As Gallant herself says, "Stories are not chapters of novels. They should not be read one after another, as if they were meant to follow along. Read one. Shut the book. Read something else. Come back later. Stories can wait."
However, this collection really should be read cover-to-cover, as many of the stories follow after one another: 3 stories focus on Linnet Muir, 3 on the Carette sisters, and 3 by a man who sometimes goes by "Burney."
The stand-out stories for me were: "Let It Pass," "In Youth is Pleasure," and "Between Zero and One." Still, I could take weeks reading these stories, distracted by the amazing tidbits of information and sentence structures. The book just feels so dense; it's as if the characters themselves walk around with their entire lives hanging over their head, and many of them do just that.
I was sent this book because a friend who traveled with me to India had read another story of Gallant and thought I would find inspiration in a traveling female writer. In a way, Gallant lives a life I could only dream of, having abandoned everything to go and live in France for the sole purpose of writing fiction. And yet, after seeing her in a video interview, I wonder how she can be so fragile, so humorous herself, with all these deep and interesting characters plaguing her through the years. And what of the fact that she's a "writer's writer" who's sold over 100 stories to The New Yorker, yet still overshadowed by most of her peers?
I identified so much with Linnet, even in her less desirable traits. I don't think I've ever read a character who sounded so much like me. The lines within her stories could have been taken from my own writing; at times they read like poetry, each story an innovative quilt Gallant has painstakingly sewn together by hand with golden thread, bits of hard-working flannel there, laughing pink tulle here.
Moral of the story: Gallant is hard to read. There is a reason for this. She's a genius.
However, this collection really should be read cover-to-cover, as many of the stories follow after one another: 3 stories focus on Linnet Muir, 3 on the Carette sisters, and 3 by a man who sometimes goes by "Burney."
The stand-out stories for me were: "Let It Pass," "In Youth is Pleasure," and "Between Zero and One." Still, I could take weeks reading these stories, distracted by the amazing tidbits of information and sentence structures. The book just feels so dense; it's as if the characters themselves walk around with their entire lives hanging over their head, and many of them do just that.
I was sent this book because a friend who traveled with me to India had read another story of Gallant and thought I would find inspiration in a traveling female writer. In a way, Gallant lives a life I could only dream of, having abandoned everything to go and live in France for the sole purpose of writing fiction. And yet, after seeing her in a video interview, I wonder how she can be so fragile, so humorous herself, with all these deep and interesting characters plaguing her through the years. And what of the fact that she's a "writer's writer" who's sold over 100 stories to The New Yorker, yet still overshadowed by most of her peers?
I identified so much with Linnet, even in her less desirable traits. I don't think I've ever read a character who sounded so much like me. The lines within her stories could have been taken from my own writing; at times they read like poetry, each story an innovative quilt Gallant has painstakingly sewn together by hand with golden thread, bits of hard-working flannel there, laughing pink tulle here.
Moral of the story: Gallant is hard to read. There is a reason for this. She's a genius.
August 11, 2012
Quattro racconti di media lunghezza che parlano di separazioni per abbandono o rimozione. Di solitudine. Di incomunicabilità. E, soprattutto, del fare e dell'essere per l'utile.
Quattro storie come tante, nascono nella banalità e in essa si sviluppano e concludono.
L'io narrante, odiosamente ironico e onnisciente, mai identificabile con uno dei personaggi, gronda distacco e superiorità. Lo sguardo è gelido, manca del tutto un barlume d'afflato umano, un'ombra di dolore nel rappresentare pochezze e miserie altrui. Lo stile rispecchia l'assenza di sentimento: è freddo e asettico come il bisturi di un rinomato chirurgo mentre esegue un'incisione.
Al termine della lettura degli abitanti di Montreal, pateticamente contrapposti tra anglofoni e francofoni, non importa granché. Si rimane con un profondo senso di insoddisfazione e la convinzione che per sapere delle meschinerie dell'uomo basta leggere un articolo di cronaca.
Gallant con la grandiosa Munro condivide solo la nazionalità, non il talento.
Quattro storie come tante, nascono nella banalità e in essa si sviluppano e concludono.
L'io narrante, odiosamente ironico e onnisciente, mai identificabile con uno dei personaggi, gronda distacco e superiorità. Lo sguardo è gelido, manca del tutto un barlume d'afflato umano, un'ombra di dolore nel rappresentare pochezze e miserie altrui. Lo stile rispecchia l'assenza di sentimento: è freddo e asettico come il bisturi di un rinomato chirurgo mentre esegue un'incisione.
Al termine della lettura degli abitanti di Montreal, pateticamente contrapposti tra anglofoni e francofoni, non importa granché. Si rimane con un profondo senso di insoddisfazione e la convinzione che per sapere delle meschinerie dell'uomo basta leggere un articolo di cronaca.
Gallant con la grandiosa Munro condivide solo la nazionalità, non il talento.
January 11, 2015
This book was really more 2.5 stars, but despite my best efforts, I can't honestly say I liked it. The stories lack a certain warmth, the characters aren't generally sympathetic, and the settings seem very dated. Often stories set in the past can come alive with a vibrancy that makes them seem current, but there's something about the settings in these stories that make them seem like they happened, in a duller, more conservative time that is long past and not mourned. They are little worlds trapped in amber, that one cannot relate to and appear as relics from a forgotten time. I know Mavis Gallant is well-respected for her short stories, but after reading two collections of her works, I have to say, I just don't get it.
June 11, 2025
A brilliant, extremely well-written book. Mavis Gallant has an awesome knack for explaining who her characters are in granular detail, and she can do it in one very witty sentence or in a four-page withering takedown of an entire community. Here is one passage that left me breathless:
"Who can remember now a picture called The Doctor? From 1891, when the original was painted, to the middle of the Depression, when it finally went out of style, reproductions of this work flowed into every crevice and corner of North America and the British Empire, swamping continents. Not even The Angelus supplied as rich a mixture of art and lesson. The two people in The Angelus are there to tell us clearly that the meek inherit nothing but seem not to mind; in The Doctor a cast of four enacts a more complex statement of Christian submission or Christian pessimism, depending on the beholder: God's Will is manifest in a dying child, Helpless Materialism in a baffled physician, and Afflicted Humanity in the stricken parents. The parable is set in a spotless cottage; the child's bed, composed of three chairs, is out of a doll's house. In much of the world--the world as it was, so much smaller than now--two full generations were raised with the monochrome promise that existence is insoluble, tragedy static, poverty endearing, and heavenly justice a total mystery.
It must have come as a shock to overseas visitors when they discovered The Doctor incarnated as an oil painting in the Tate Gallery in London, in the company of other Victorian miseries entitled Hopeless Dawn and The Last Day in the Old Home. The Doctor had not been divinely inspired and distributed to chasten us after all, but the work of someone called Sir Luke Fildes--nineteenth-century rationalist and atheist, for all anyone knew. Perhaps it was simply a scene from a three-decker novel, even a joke. In museum surroundings--classified, ticketed--The Doctor conveyed a new instruction: Death is sentimental, art is pretense.
Some people had always hated The Doctor. My father, for one. He said, "You surely don't want that thing in your room."
The argument (it became one) took place in Montreal, in a house that died long ago without leaving even a ghost. He was in his twenties, to match the century. I had been around about the length of your average major war. I had my way but do not remember how; neither tears nor temper ever worked. What probably won out was his wish to be agreeable to Dr. Chauchard, the pediatrician who had given me the engraving. My father seemed to like Chauchard, as he did most people--just well enough--while my mother, who carried an uncritical allegiance from person to person, belief to belief, had recently declared Chauchard to be mentally, morally, and spiritually without fault.
Dr. Chauchard must have been in his thirties then, but he seemed to me timeless, like God the Father. When he took the engraving down from the wall of his office, I understood him to be offering me a portrait of himself. My mother at first refused it, thinking I had asked; he assured her I had not, that he had merely been struck by my expression when I looked at the ailing child. "C'est une sensible," he said--an appraisal my mother dismissed by saying I was as tough as a boot, which I truly believe to have been her opinion.
What I was sensitive to is nearly too plain to be signaled: The dying child, a girl, is the heart of the composition. The parents are in the shadow, where they belong. Their function is to be sorry. The doctor has only one patient; light from a tipped lampshade falls on her and her alone.
The street where Dr. Chauchard had lived began to decline around the same time as the popularity of The Doctor and is now a slum. No citizens' committee can restore the natural elegance of those gray stone houses, the swept steps, the glittering windows, because, short of a miracle, it cannot resurrect the kind of upper-bourgeois French Canadians who used to live there. They have not migrated or moved eastward in the city--they have ceased to exist. The handful of dust they sprang from, with its powerful components of religion and history, is part of another clay. They were families that did not resent what were inaccurately called "The English" in Montreal; they had never acknowledged them. The men read a newspaper sometimes, the women never. The women had a dark version of faith for private drama, a family tree to memorize for intellectual exercise, intense family affection for the needs of the heart. Their houses, like Dr. Chauchard's, smelled of cleanness as if cleanness were a commodity, a brand of floor wax. Convents used to have that smell; the girls raised in them brought to married life an ideal of housekeeping that was a memory of the polished convent corridor, with strict squares of sunlight falling where and as they should. Two sons and five daughters was the average for children; Simone, Pauline, Jeanne, Yvonne and Louise the feminine names of the decade. The girls when young wore religious medals like golden flower petals on thin chains, had positive torrents of curls down to their shoulder blades, and came to children's parties dressed in rose velvet and white stockings, too shy to speak. Chauchard, a bachelor, came out of this world, which I can describe best only through its girls and women."
"Who can remember now a picture called The Doctor? From 1891, when the original was painted, to the middle of the Depression, when it finally went out of style, reproductions of this work flowed into every crevice and corner of North America and the British Empire, swamping continents. Not even The Angelus supplied as rich a mixture of art and lesson. The two people in The Angelus are there to tell us clearly that the meek inherit nothing but seem not to mind; in The Doctor a cast of four enacts a more complex statement of Christian submission or Christian pessimism, depending on the beholder: God's Will is manifest in a dying child, Helpless Materialism in a baffled physician, and Afflicted Humanity in the stricken parents. The parable is set in a spotless cottage; the child's bed, composed of three chairs, is out of a doll's house. In much of the world--the world as it was, so much smaller than now--two full generations were raised with the monochrome promise that existence is insoluble, tragedy static, poverty endearing, and heavenly justice a total mystery.
It must have come as a shock to overseas visitors when they discovered The Doctor incarnated as an oil painting in the Tate Gallery in London, in the company of other Victorian miseries entitled Hopeless Dawn and The Last Day in the Old Home. The Doctor had not been divinely inspired and distributed to chasten us after all, but the work of someone called Sir Luke Fildes--nineteenth-century rationalist and atheist, for all anyone knew. Perhaps it was simply a scene from a three-decker novel, even a joke. In museum surroundings--classified, ticketed--The Doctor conveyed a new instruction: Death is sentimental, art is pretense.
Some people had always hated The Doctor. My father, for one. He said, "You surely don't want that thing in your room."
The argument (it became one) took place in Montreal, in a house that died long ago without leaving even a ghost. He was in his twenties, to match the century. I had been around about the length of your average major war. I had my way but do not remember how; neither tears nor temper ever worked. What probably won out was his wish to be agreeable to Dr. Chauchard, the pediatrician who had given me the engraving. My father seemed to like Chauchard, as he did most people--just well enough--while my mother, who carried an uncritical allegiance from person to person, belief to belief, had recently declared Chauchard to be mentally, morally, and spiritually without fault.
Dr. Chauchard must have been in his thirties then, but he seemed to me timeless, like God the Father. When he took the engraving down from the wall of his office, I understood him to be offering me a portrait of himself. My mother at first refused it, thinking I had asked; he assured her I had not, that he had merely been struck by my expression when I looked at the ailing child. "C'est une sensible," he said--an appraisal my mother dismissed by saying I was as tough as a boot, which I truly believe to have been her opinion.
What I was sensitive to is nearly too plain to be signaled: The dying child, a girl, is the heart of the composition. The parents are in the shadow, where they belong. Their function is to be sorry. The doctor has only one patient; light from a tipped lampshade falls on her and her alone.
The street where Dr. Chauchard had lived began to decline around the same time as the popularity of The Doctor and is now a slum. No citizens' committee can restore the natural elegance of those gray stone houses, the swept steps, the glittering windows, because, short of a miracle, it cannot resurrect the kind of upper-bourgeois French Canadians who used to live there. They have not migrated or moved eastward in the city--they have ceased to exist. The handful of dust they sprang from, with its powerful components of religion and history, is part of another clay. They were families that did not resent what were inaccurately called "The English" in Montreal; they had never acknowledged them. The men read a newspaper sometimes, the women never. The women had a dark version of faith for private drama, a family tree to memorize for intellectual exercise, intense family affection for the needs of the heart. Their houses, like Dr. Chauchard's, smelled of cleanness as if cleanness were a commodity, a brand of floor wax. Convents used to have that smell; the girls raised in them brought to married life an ideal of housekeeping that was a memory of the polished convent corridor, with strict squares of sunlight falling where and as they should. Two sons and five daughters was the average for children; Simone, Pauline, Jeanne, Yvonne and Louise the feminine names of the decade. The girls when young wore religious medals like golden flower petals on thin chains, had positive torrents of curls down to their shoulder blades, and came to children's parties dressed in rose velvet and white stockings, too shy to speak. Chauchard, a bachelor, came out of this world, which I can describe best only through its girls and women."
October 15, 2010
Slow moving, graceful, subtle as anything. No climaxes! Huge human stories. Gallant is an example to all (though some of the stories ran slow for even my tastes, with more lavish detail than I could handle. But still.) At its best moments this includes some of the best writing of the 20th century.
January 9, 2012
There were points where I was sick of the characters (as this collection has several groupings of stories where the characters are carried over) but I was almost never sick of Gallant. She is conspicuously good. I will most definitely be seeking out more of her work.
October 27, 2014
Excellent collection of short stories-theme is Canada or Canadians. Some of the stories are semi-autobiographical. Superb characters, compelling stories, well-written.
September 23, 2022
Mavis Gallant published over a hundred short stories in the NEW YORKER during her life, mostly spent in France, and many of them are set in Europe. This collection of eleven stories, however, concentrates on characters obviously based on Gallant’s early years of growing up in Montreal where she was born. Some of the characters overlap stories and their various “exiles” revolve around restrictions placed on them by provincial Canadian society with their attempts to rebel.
In the title story the narrator is an idealistic nineteen year old girl who for the third time in a year is engaged to be married. She doesn’t crave love so much as the satisfaction of intelligent conversation, hard to come by in the office where she works. She is intrigued by the flood of refugees coming to Montreal and sees them as “prophets of a promised social order” of justice and equality. What she doesn’t understand, she “turned into fiction, which was my way of untangling knots.” She encounters death and disillusionment, but she says that putting life through a sieve, her fiction, and then discarding it is her “variety of exile.”
Most of the exiles are not so articulate in their breaks with their surroundings. In the first story, “The Fenton Child”, one of the longer ones, a perceptive teenager begins to realize the limitations of the adults around her, and her critical rejection of them is a mental one, only. This is true of many of the stories which in looking back on them tend to become a blur.
In all of them, though, there is the uneasy relationship between French-speaking Canada and the much wider world of English North America, particularly to the south. Characters who step beyond traditional French households suffer the consequences. One young woman is told she is “cold snobbish, and presumptuous” and “if anyone ever marries you, he’d better have an iron hand,” expressing an belief in orderly and patriarchal households.
It’s true that many of Gallant’s characters are narrow-minded and provincial, but the strength of Gallant’s writing is that she makes them interesting in their individuality. In a sense, they are museum pieces, but well-wrought and worth looking at. And who knows, in the future we all may well become museum pieces. In the last story, “The Concert Party” a character comments on the present, opposed to a seemingly quaint past, , People will be remembered for “their thin faith in endless renewal – new luck, new love. Nothing worked out for them.”
In the title story the narrator is an idealistic nineteen year old girl who for the third time in a year is engaged to be married. She doesn’t crave love so much as the satisfaction of intelligent conversation, hard to come by in the office where she works. She is intrigued by the flood of refugees coming to Montreal and sees them as “prophets of a promised social order” of justice and equality. What she doesn’t understand, she “turned into fiction, which was my way of untangling knots.” She encounters death and disillusionment, but she says that putting life through a sieve, her fiction, and then discarding it is her “variety of exile.”
Most of the exiles are not so articulate in their breaks with their surroundings. In the first story, “The Fenton Child”, one of the longer ones, a perceptive teenager begins to realize the limitations of the adults around her, and her critical rejection of them is a mental one, only. This is true of many of the stories which in looking back on them tend to become a blur.
In all of them, though, there is the uneasy relationship between French-speaking Canada and the much wider world of English North America, particularly to the south. Characters who step beyond traditional French households suffer the consequences. One young woman is told she is “cold snobbish, and presumptuous” and “if anyone ever marries you, he’d better have an iron hand,” expressing an belief in orderly and patriarchal households.
It’s true that many of Gallant’s characters are narrow-minded and provincial, but the strength of Gallant’s writing is that she makes them interesting in their individuality. In a sense, they are museum pieces, but well-wrought and worth looking at. And who knows, in the future we all may well become museum pieces. In the last story, “The Concert Party” a character comments on the present, opposed to a seemingly quaint past, , People will be remembered for “their thin faith in endless renewal – new luck, new love. Nothing worked out for them.”
June 21, 2018
I read these stories this past April, after moving into a spacious but odd New England apartment: a garage below my living room, a too-low bathroom mirror lit by a kitschy pair of tulip-shaped lamps...a great environment in which to read this book. Mavis has a knack for funky details of working class pleasures: white suede pumps and bar-b-que chicken-in-basket, both featured in my favorite story "The Chosen Husband" which moves from acid disparagement toward the nerdy prospect for a marriage-of-convenience to a revelation of his essential goodness, uplifting in a real way. So rich in detail and interior monologue are many of the stories, Mavis comes off as a working-class Proust; in this way, her voice eludes the "kitchen sink" label. / She depicts life in the weirdly repressed and ludicrously coded Montreal of the late 1930s & early '40s, much of which revolves around the Catholic and Protestant churches and rootless or stateless second or first generation emigres: a weird, needlessly complicated, narrow, darkly funny background. It's crazy stuff, seems miles apart from your own weird background, until Mavis communicates very well the environment's universal pain, alienation and confusion. The sometime first-person narrators, the author's alter-egos, often openly disparage and ridicule relatives, co-workers, even lovers, and the bitterness recalls certain of Lawrence's stories./ I wasn't too keen on the last three stories, the protagonist the obviously invented Steve Burnet: too many chi chi stuff antiques, décor, etc. But even one of those ("The Concert Party") held the social comedy of a bunch of swells, or wanna-be swells, hanging out in a remote third -rate resort area.
August 22, 2025
Maybe I should read the intro to see what these stories are...about?
The Fenton Child - I thought this had the best atmosphere and Nora was a compelling protagonist. I have to confess I didn't quite understand if the kid was the nephew and if so, why would the dad want his nephew to live with an alcoholic and a depressed person? And then they just decide to send the kid to the hospital, ie back to the orphanage with the mean nuns? This was very hard to read while breastfeeding a 3 month old baby. Love that baby, someone!!
The End of the World - forgettable one about an estranged dad who dies in France. Not sure if it's tied in to any others as I think the name Beryl comes up in another story (?)
New Year's Eve - friend of dead daughter visits Canadian couple in Russia (I guess they're diplomats). Guess what, parents are more messed up than young people think (especially when their kid dies young)
The Doctor, Voices Lost in Snow, In Youth Is Pleasure, Between Zero and One, Varieties of Exile: Linnet the somewhat independent-minded woman in various stages of her life
1933, The Chosen Husband, From Cloud to Cloud, Florida - about Marie Carette. Am I reading it right that she's got like a learning disability of some kind and the family managed to marry her off without the guy noticing? But she seems pretty functional as an adult.
Let it Pass, In a War, The Concert Party - about Steven the grad student/diplomat and his wife (or not) Lily
Some interesting characters but I feel like I'm an alien observing 1930s-1960s culture in Canada and France. What in the Greatest Generation?
The Fenton Child - I thought this had the best atmosphere and Nora was a compelling protagonist. I have to confess I didn't quite understand if the kid was the nephew and if so, why would the dad want his nephew to live with an alcoholic and a depressed person? And then they just decide to send the kid to the hospital, ie back to the orphanage with the mean nuns? This was very hard to read while breastfeeding a 3 month old baby. Love that baby, someone!!
The End of the World - forgettable one about an estranged dad who dies in France. Not sure if it's tied in to any others as I think the name Beryl comes up in another story (?)
New Year's Eve - friend of dead daughter visits Canadian couple in Russia (I guess they're diplomats). Guess what, parents are more messed up than young people think (especially when their kid dies young)
The Doctor, Voices Lost in Snow, In Youth Is Pleasure, Between Zero and One, Varieties of Exile: Linnet the somewhat independent-minded woman in various stages of her life
1933, The Chosen Husband, From Cloud to Cloud, Florida - about Marie Carette. Am I reading it right that she's got like a learning disability of some kind and the family managed to marry her off without the guy noticing? But she seems pretty functional as an adult.
Let it Pass, In a War, The Concert Party - about Steven the grad student/diplomat and his wife (or not) Lily
Some interesting characters but I feel like I'm an alien observing 1930s-1960s culture in Canada and France. What in the Greatest Generation?
March 5, 2025
This is a fine collection of stories, many with overlapping characters, all either set in or including reference to Montreal, primarily the Montreal of the 1940s and 1950s. Like another great Canadian storyteller, Alice Munro, Gallant is skilled at dropping hints in one story that get picked up and developed in another, of putting down false leads, but above all of demanding attentiveness to nuance and mood from her readers. The very good introductory essay by Russell Banks, a writer for whom I have great respect, provides some sagacious advice for someone coming to Gallant's work for the first time, advice quoted from Gallant herself: "Stories are not chapters of novels. They should not be read one after another, as if they were meant to follow along. Read one. Shut the book. Read something else. Come back later. Stories can wait." Savor away, dear reader.
August 21, 2017
Stile impeccabile sebbene è impossibile negare la presenza di un "io narrante, odiosamente ironico e onnisciente, mai identificabile con uno dei personaggi, gronda distacco e superiorità" (citando un'altra recensione).
Non concordo con chi, però, afferma che manca sentimento.
L'anima sta nella costruzione dei racconti. Impareggiabile! Essa rendere reale il realismo. Rende in parole la percezione quotidiana della vita.
L'intreccio de "Il bambino dei Fenton" mi ha catturato. Non è da thriller: è da scrittrici navigate che lavorano come artigiane a quello che vogliono raccontare. L'ho riletto appena letto.
Non concordo con chi, però, afferma che manca sentimento.
L'anima sta nella costruzione dei racconti. Impareggiabile! Essa rendere reale il realismo. Rende in parole la percezione quotidiana della vita.
L'intreccio de "Il bambino dei Fenton" mi ha catturato. Non è da thriller: è da scrittrici navigate che lavorano come artigiane a quello che vogliono raccontare. L'ho riletto appena letto.
February 24, 2020
I am cured of any further Mavis Gallant curiosity. I read all the short stories here over a five week period without enjoying a single one. She may indeed be precise and painfully observant of the French and English Canadians in her tales but her references, allusions, intimations added up to little for me. I just didn't get her obscure intentions.
I did read commentary by her admirers but even they didn't seem to understand her, offering cryptic comments instead. If they did understand Gallant's "point" they didn't reveal it. So I was left with pointless observations and details about people and times whose subtext I didn't fathom. I suspect you had to be there.
I did read commentary by her admirers but even they didn't seem to understand her, offering cryptic comments instead. If they did understand Gallant's "point" they didn't reveal it. So I was left with pointless observations and details about people and times whose subtext I didn't fathom. I suspect you had to be there.
February 7, 2022
I enjoyed the stories from the first half of the book more than the second half, especially "The End of the World" which captured so very well an intense need, but when that need is met in an unexpected way, the results are deflating. "The Doctor" was amusing and gossipy, always a fun kind of read for me. And "Between Zero and One" reminded me what I went through as a young woman entering the men's territory at work. Interesting. I enjoy Ms. Gallant's character observations, but all the personalities were so cold, unemotional, and judgey. No one seemed to feel joy or enthusiasm for anything, which became tiring and boring.
December 31, 2022
A superb collection of stories that illuminate post-war Montreal as both its English and French communities struggle to cast off both religious and social traditions. Gallant is a masterful observer of what it was like to be a woman in the 50s - caught between new opportunities for self-determination and the necessity to follow form and become a wife and mother. I enjoy reading about this time in history because it reflects the era when my mother was a young woman and undoubtedly faced the same choices. Highly recommend.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
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