The first volume of Maya Angelou's autobiography begins with Marguerite arriving in Stamps, Arkansas, at three years old, with her brother, Bailey, one year older, in the care of Miss. Annie Henderson, their grandmother ("Momma"). It moves from the store to the churchyard, from hymn-singing to beatings. It crosses time and space fluidly.
Readers of Mavis Gallant’s early stories have endured a lot of unhappy spouses and unhappy children. In apartments and on beaches, in summer houses and on holiday, It’s hard enough; in confined quarters, it is stressful indeed. In “The Rejection” we have a divorced father and his daughter in
Sometimes the body count in my reading is high. Of late, the un-body count has been rising. I noticed the presence in W. G. Sebald, when I began reading Austerlitz (2001; Translated from the German, 2011) earlier this year. In the photographs which accompany his narrative, there are no
As short as “Mousse” and as sharply assembled, “On with the New in France (1981)” presents an itemized list of grievances from a frustrated citizen. In just under a thousand words, the story opens with a nod towards “La Vie Parisienne”, with a complaint rooted in the resident’s lodgings.
Although I loved books about animals when I was a younger reader, in my teens I backed off. I realised that books in which sad things happen to the four-legged and furred or feathered characters were even sadder than the books in which sad things happened to human characters.
