Before I settled on some other reading projects for 2020 (more on that tomorrow), I entertained the possibility of making a simpler goal than usual: choosing half of my reading from my own shelves and half from the library’s shelves. The idea being that I have tended to read
“All raise hands, please, who remember Rosalia. (Camera on studio smiles.)” You remember Rosalia, right? We met her in “A Painful Affair”, this collection’s fourth story: the dedicated servant of Miss Mary Margaret Pugh. Miss Pugh’s artistic patronage is not-yet-transpired in “Larry” (Larry is her half-brother), it’s an already-transpired-fact
As soon as I met Henri Grippes, I felt like I knew him. He reminded me of Charles Filandreux in “Siegfried’s Memoirs” (in Coming Ashore). Filandreux is a writer, all tied up in knots at the idea of writing a review he “would undoubtedly be requested to write”. Except
We have to assume that Speck came first, with “Speck’s Idea” published in 1979. “Overhead in a Balloon” was published five years later (both stories in the pages of “The New Yorker”, where the majority of Mavis Gallant’s stories appeared before they were bound into collections). So we have
“To take up residence in the mind of Mavis Gallant, as one does in reading her stories, is a privilege and delight,” writes Phyllis Rose, to begin her review of Overhead in a Balloon in the March 18, 1987 issue of The New Yorker. She speaks of Gallant’s ability
