Here, Eric inhabits a room like Carmela’s in “The Four Seasons”, in the Unwins’ home: the kind “assigned to someone’s hapless, helpless paid companions, who would have marvelled at the thought of its lending shelter to a dying man”. And Eric is dying, like the father in “The End
So many of Mavis Gallant’s characters inhabit between spaces. Netta, too. Which is strange, because so many of Mavis Gallant’s other itinerant women are staying in hotels, but Netta is running one. And she is just as between as the rest of them. Once she said yes and, then,
Today marks the launch of another Mavis Gallant short story collection): From the Fifteenth District. (Apologies for the double-post, but both Mavis Gallant and Margaret Atwood were scheduled to appear today: what a power-house duo!) The first story in this collection is billed as a novella, which is curious
Having had such a difficult relationship with her mother, Mavis Gallant must have hoped for more from her father. But think of the separateness of the child and father in “Wing’s Chips” (a story with outward similarities to some of Gallant’s childhood experiences). And the outright conflict in “The Rejection”. She
Amabel is just a few years older than young Shirley, who lost her young husband Pete when they were newlyweds in “The Accident”; barely married, not yet disappointed. Had Amabel and Shirley been friends, able to discuss their brief experiences of married life, I wonder how their opinions might
