Continuing in the vein of "From Gamut to Yalta" and "Dido Flute, Spouse to Europe", in only four pages, Mavis Gallant presents a cursory view of a life. Background music for Siegfried and Charles Although ostensibly an exercise in objectivity, a writer's imagined review of a man's memoirs,
Presented as the "Addenda to a Major Biography", noted to be nearly 1000 pages long, these three pages are not a typical short story. Readers are left to assemble their impressions of Dido based on fragments of a relationship which occupied only a fragment of her life from a relational
The widow has let her hair go. It is half mahogany and half dull grey. Not only grey, but dull grey. Paola and Renata's listening that summer One has the sense that being a widow might have brought this about. The simple act of inhabiting widowhood. But that
So short. Four pages. And, yet, a man considering his entire life and the geo-political map of his day. Its shifting (and not-so shifting) borders are intertwined with his ideas about his marriage. This seems to draw the noose of relationship between the personal and the political uncomfortably - even
At nearly one hundred pages long, it's unsurprising that this is the most complex of Mavis Gallant's stories I've read this year. It's neither the length nor the breadth of the story which complicates it, but the intricate arrangement of details, as readers are gradually immersed in the narration of
