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Telegraph
10-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Born in 1922 – and now the literary sensation of 2025
Mavis Gallant mostly didn't keep her reviews; even when they were kind, she too often felt they were 'off the target'. But there was one review in El País, when she was first translated into Spanish, which she liked and kept. The reviewer said that when Gallant came to Western Europe from Canada after the Second World War, no one knew who she was and she didn't know anyone – she had lived as anonymously as possible with an exercise book, a notebook and a pencil. She was like Kafka 's invisible woman, the reviewer went on, and the invisible woman took note of everything that Europeans thought was of no importance. Now, people saw that these things were indeed important. I have recently edited and introduced a selected volume of Gallant's short fiction for Pushkin Press, The Latehomecomer (its title taken from one of the tales within), and this seems to me to describe wonderfully well both Gallant's history as a writer, and the mood and form of her stories. To begin with, there's the uprootedness, and the not-quite-belonging, the origins of which she traces very early in her own life. She was born in 1922 and grew up in Montreal, the only child of restless, attractive, heedless parents; similar figures haunt a number of her stories, like the couple who 'drank old-fashioneds and danced to gramophone records out on the lawn' in summer in 'The Doctor'. For reasons she's not wholly able to fathom, although they were both English-speakers and nonbelievers, they thought it a good idea to send their small daughter, aged four, to board at a French convent school run by nuns, 'where Jansenist discipline still had a foot on the neck of the 20th century'. In one of her stories, when a child explains that Satan approached her – 'furry dark skin, claws, red eyes, the lot' – and made her cross the street in front of a car, she realises suddenly that her parents don't believe in Satan, or in most of what she's being taught at school. The writing instinct may begin in such jolts to apprehension, the registering of deep dissonance between two cultural systems – unbolting the door, as she puts it, 'between perception and imagination'. Two contradictory ways of seeing can coexist in the same world; best to test everything you're told. Gallant's adored, glamorous father, a thwarted painter, died of kidney disease when she was just 10; they told her he'd gone to England, and she waited for him to return, until, aged 13, she began to doubt, and set about uncovering the truth. Her mother remarried and Gallant was packed off to one school after another in Canada and America, where she didn't thrive. She returned eventually to Montreal: in actuality, first to work as a reporter on the Montreal Standard, and then forever afterwards, in some of her best stories. Aged 27, she writes, she was 'becoming exactly what I did not want to be: a journalist who wrote fiction along some margin of spare time'. She also dreaded finding that she had 'a vocation without the competence to sustain it'; her father had not lived long enough to discover whether or not he could actually paint well, and had made his living in a firm selling furniture. That anxiety never left her, it fuelled her: she was one of those writers driven by doubt to be good, to be better. She'd had a couple of stories published in a Canadian literary review, but now she set herself a test, and decided to send three to The New Yorker, one after another: one acceptance would be good enough. If she couldn't live off her writing, she would 'destroy every scrap, every trace, every notebook, and live some other way'. The second story was taken, the third she sent from Paris, where she would eventually settle for good: a youthful wartime marriage in Canada didn't last long, and she never had children. Her vocation, and the need to write anonymously, where no one knew who she was and she didn't know anyone, sent her to Europe. 'I still do not know,' she wrote, 'what impels anyone sound of mind to leave dry land and spend a lifetime describing people who do not exist.' In her diaries, she recorded months of semi-starvation in Madrid in 1952 while she waited to see whether The New Yorker would take any more stories. In fact, they already had, and a crooked literary agent had pocketed the money; she found this out eventually by a lucky chance. 'The sensation of disgust was curious, as if a colony of flies were stuck to me... The first thing I bought was good white bread.' Her relationship with The New Yorker, and with its fiction editor William Maxwell, would be fundamental. One hundred and sixteen stories, the lion's share of her work, appeared in the magazine. Gallant did publish two novels – Green Water, Green Sky, in 1959, and A Fairly Good Time, in 1970 – and for years she toiled on a book about Dreyfus, which she eventually shelved, but it's for her short stories that she will be remembered. Her imagination works in pieces of broken-off intensity; life reveals itself to her in signs, snatches of speech, fragments of memory. Sometimes, she runs together 'suites of connected stories', as the novelist Brandon Taylor has called them, which suit her vision exactly; these don't pretend to join the pieces of a life into a single shape, but place them side by side, like discontinuous phases of experience, each with its own centre, its own sharp point – rather like an actual life, in fact. Everyone is interesting in her fiction. Gallant's protagonists may not be particularly sympathetic, they may be dense or narrow or just feeble, yet they're all felt and conveyed with the same evenhandedness, the same keen appetite. Stella, in the story 'In Italy' – a foolish nice girl, a 'compound of middle-class virtues' married to a cynical sophisticate more than twice her age – tries to keep warm over the stove in their rented Italian villa, reading copies of Woman's Own and The Lady, which her mother sends from England. 'I thought it would be fun,' she says mournfully about her marriage. Lightweight snob Peter Frazier in 'The Ice Wagon Going Down the Street', trying and failing to profiteer in post-war Europe, is demoralised by his new colleague and Canadian compatriot Agnes – she's from such a different background to his, so solemn and so striving. He feels 'as you feel the approach of a storm, the charge of moral certainty round her, the belief in work, the faith in undertakings... ashes in the mouth'. The French-Canadian doctor who makes such a fuss of Linnet Muir (a recurring figure in Gallant's fiction), presenting her with a sentimental picture, won't help her when she runs away from school; to the child's disappointment, he sides with her parents' adult authority. Gallant tells what is clearly her own story with the same mix of detachment and fascination. She reports on Linnet's childhood and youth in Canada in the first person, but as coolly as if they had happened to somebody else. The quirks and oddity of her history are for adding to the oddity of all those others. Gallant doesn't belong to any obvious tradition of women's writing: her protagonists are as likely as not to be men, and we're not much invited to identify with them – we are to watch them, rather. Her narrative approach and writing temperament feel almost opposite to those of her compatriot Alice Munro, who was a decade younger, and from such a different Canada. In a Munro story, we're often submerged in the reality of one moment after another; in a Gallant story, we seem to be told about events after the fact, across some distance of time. Both writers can, of course, do the other thing as well. Gallant's stories map out a considerable stretch of history: mid-century Canada, then post-war Europe, then Europe after 1968. Her diaries of the événements, published as Paris Notebooks, are a nuanced and complex record of heady days. She is an instinctively political writer, not partisan but a moralist, charting the shadowy black comedy of the intricacies of allegiance, ideology, history, action. 'Even the name he had given his daughter was a sign of his sensitivity to the times. Nobody wanted to hear the pagan, Old Germanic names anymore – Sigrun and Brunhilde and Sieglinde.' 'The Latehomecomer' is especially poignant, painful: Thomas returns to Berlin having spent years after the war as a prisoner in France, through a series of bureaucratic errors. His mother meets him at the station and turns out to be remarried now to a boor, living in a flat whose previous tenants left in a hurry; she has a new gesture, too, of hiding her mouth with her hand, ashamed of having lost her front teeth. When she tells Thomas to wish on the new moon, he wishes he were 'a few hours younger, in the corridor of a packed train, clutching the top of the open window, my heart hammering as I strained to find the one beloved face'. If Gallant isn't lyrical exactly, her flights of language can be breathtaking. But this story's fine emotional positioning couldn't work if its tone were merely outrage, or denunciation: that would be too sentimental in the face of what has happened to Thomas. Gallant is a great comic writer, though, and finds absurdity in the darkest places. Thomas's mother's neighbour asks him what he was paid as a prisoner. 'I had often wondered what the first question would be once I was home. Now I had it.' She's good, too, at skewering ponderous public conscientiousness. 'Irina' features the elderly widow of a great man, a Swiss writer, Nobel Prize-winner – the last 'of a Tolstoyan line of moral lightning rods... prophet, dissuader, despairingly opposed to evil, crack-voiced after having made so many pronouncements'. Gallant isn't obviously a feminist writer, and yet Irina gives such an eloquent account, to her little grandson, of how women have been short-changed in their relationships, from generation to generation. 'You see, in those days women had nothing of their own. They were like brown paper parcels tied with string. They were handed like parcels from their fathers to their husbands. To make the parcel look attractive it was decked with curls and piano lessons, and rings and gold coins and banknotes and shares.' On every page of all Gallant's collections there are such sumptuous sentences: the intelligence so forceful and distinctively hers, the perception so original, the phrasing so economical and elegant, the words gorgeous in their solidity, comedy and tragedy tangled inseparably together. She died in 2014: she had 'lived in writing', she said, 'like a spoonful of water in a river'. Taking note of the small things that seemed of no importance, Gallant traced in them the large shapes of our history.
New Statesman
07-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New Statesman
From Isabel Allende to Tim Wigmore: new books reviewed in short
Cooking in the Wrong Century by Teresa Präauer, translated by Eleanor Updegraff Astute observations on the absurd theatre of aspirational living in the age of social media abound in Teresa Präauer's Cooking in the Wrong Century. Translated by Eleanor Updegraff, the novel tells of a dinner party, but is fractured by vignettes of past and present, recipes and a jazz playlist. Our hostess, as she is only ever known, attentively folds linen napkins hoping to orchestrate an effortless charm offensive. But her guests arrive late and tipsy, exposing both the delicate fiction of taste, class, and curated identity as well as just how easily a cultivated cool can peel at the edges. There's wit here, but also melancholy: a woman in her forties trying to pin herself to a world where the rules of cultural capital are constantly shifting. Präauer skewers performativity adroitly, revealing how objects – a Danish dishtowel; a star chef's cookbook – are less about utility and more about belonging. The real subject, perhaps, is taste: how we acquire it, display it, and ultimately suffer for it. Culture, under Präauer's gaze, is a mood that can be blurred by candlelight and the Thelonious Monk Septet: it's irresistible, disorienting, and slightly out of reach. By Zoë Huxford Pushkin Press, 176pp, £14.99. Buy the book My Name Is Emilia del Valle by Isabel Allende Set on the cusp of the Chilean Civil War in 1891, and told in the author's familiar memoir-style prose, Isabel Allende's 28th book, My Name Is Emilia del Valle, introduces the newest member of the Del Valle clan. Emilia, the illegitimate daughter of Chilean aristocrat Gonzalo Andrés del Valle (whom some may recall from brief mentions in previous books) and Irish novice nun Molly Walsh, subverts the rigid social norms and becomes a journalist in San Francisco. Her work at the Daily Examiner appears under a male pseudonym. It is only while documenting the civil war that she convinces her editor to publish her writing under her given name. Seamlessly blending history with fiction, Allende vividly brings to life one of the most gruesome parts of 19th-century Chile's history and its lasting impact. Full of comedic characters – some readers will come across them for the first time; others will be reintroduced to them – and whirlwind romances, the novel provides social commentary on the life of women, the class system and the cultural differences between California and Chile. My Name Is Emilia del Valle is the perfect addition to the Del Valle literary universe. By Zuzanna Lachendro Bloomsbury, 304pp, £18.99. Buy the book The Lost Orchid: A Story of Victorian Plunder and Obsession by Sarah Bilston The 17th-century Dutch lost their minds and their fortunes to tulips; for Victorian Britons it was orchids that were the bloom of obsession. As the empire reached its apogee, these plants made their way back from the furthest corners of the globe and 'orchidelirium' affected everyone from the Queen and botanists to the well-to-do, old money or new – a single rare plant could cost as much as £95,000 in today's money. To service this demand, a cadre of plant hunters scoured the tropics, at great personal danger, for unknown varieties. Sarah Bilston's book is about the 1891 expedition that set out to find a near-mythical example, a purple and crimson flower – Cattleya labiata – that grew deep in the Brazilian rainforest. Her cast includes the Swedish plant hunter Claes Ericsson, the nurseryman Frederick Sander who sponsored him, and Erich Bungeroth, a rival in the quest. The story sometimes has the trappings of a chase thriller but Bilston is assiduous in revealing that behind the expedition lay a host of other forces: from colonialism, commerce and communication, and the hold plants had on the imagination of writers, all the way to Darwin and the scientific revolution. By Michael Prodger Harvard University Press, 400pp, £29.95. Buy the book Test Cricket: A History by Tim Wigmore 'Cricket more than any other game is inclined towards sentimentalism.' So wrote one dolorous scribbler in the early-20th century, and the Test (now standardised at two innings over five days, played in whites) is the most romanticised of all the sport's forms. The journalist Tim Wigmore has written what the book's publisher slightly tendentiously calls 'the first narrative history of the Test'. He captures all the great stories in Test history – the Bodyline series, West Indies in the 1980s, etc – and all the great names with a great eye for fascinating details and the bizarre serendipities of history. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe Wigmore struggles with the 'arbitrary' definition of Test match, which is no shade on him, as many of the game's institutions themselves contest what counts as first-class or international matches – three days, five days, limitless? Two innings, one? He's particularly good on the importance of the empire to cricket's spread across the world, but also how it limited the sport's popularity – racism certainly, and the early restriction of Test-match status to countries within the Commonwealth. Fortunately, Wigmore manages to keep the romance out of the bog of sentimentality. By Barney Horner Quercus Books, 592pp, £30. Buy the book [See also: Joan Didion without her style] Related
The Guardian
09-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
In brief: May Our Joy Endure; The Future of the Novel; Literature for the People
Kev Lambert (translated by Donald Winkler)Pushkin Press, £18.99, pp320 Winner of the Prix Médicis, Lambert's sharp, provocative third novel embeds ever-timely themes – greed, hypocrisy and privilege – in a narrative that blends satire and lyricism, whimsy and voyeurism. At its centre is Céline Wachowski, a charismatic celebrity architect who's all too credibly flawed. You won't be able to look away as her latest project – developing a disused industrial complex on the outskirts of Montreal – turns into a career-threatening calamity, mired in controversy over indigenous land rights and anti-gentrification protests. Simon OkotieMelville House, £9.99, pp144 Okotie offers a fresh and idiosyncratic take on that perennially fretted-over topic: the state of the novel. Conscientiously grounded in theoretical debate stretching back to the start of the 20th century, it's also arrestingly current, eyeing insights derived from cognitive literary studies and threats posed by generative AI. Throughout, the author's questing vitality makes space for lightheartedness, as he cheers on fiction writers prepared to experiment while offering personal insights born of his own novelistic failings. A bracing, positive read, it's recommended even – perhaps especially – to those whose own literary tastes tend to be more conventional. Sarah HarknessPan, £12.99, pp496 (paperback) The lives of the brothers who brought the likes of Thomas Hardy and Christina Rossetti to the Victorian masses make for illuminating stories themselves. The youngest of eight surviving children, Daniel and Alexander Macmillan were raised on a croft on the west coast of Scotland, leaving school early yet going on to found an international publishing house that thrives to this day. Their rags-to-riches ascent (within just two generations, they'd be able to claim a prime minister as one of their own) is brought to life with appropriate narrative flair and an appreciation for their shared curiosity as well as their galvanising moral purpose. To order May Our Joy Endure, The Future of the Novel or Literature for the People go to Delivery charges may apply
