Word: french
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...persistent is the plight of small children in Home Truths that the reader may fairly guess at some trauma glimpsed or experienced during the author's childhood in Montreal. In Orphans' Progress, for example, two wretched little girls are locked up in a French-Canadian convent school. Eight-year-old Mildred and twelve-year-old Cathie are bathed every two weeks, the one wearing a rubber apron and the other a muslin shift so they cannot see their own bodies. The state of Mildred's thumb tells it all: "Sucked white, (it) was taped to the palm of her hand...
...group of stories under the rubric "Canadians Abroad" finds Gallant's characters pursuing an elusive freedom in Europe. A young woman seeks love on the French Riviera with the most improbable of romantic figures, a retired inspector of prisons in one of Britain's former Asian colonies. When she leaves him she takes up with a fellow "in terrible trouble -- back taxes, ex- wife seizing his salary." A pair of perpetual expatriates seem doomed to misadventure: they pile up debts; they are ostracized by fellow Ca- nadian exiles; they have rows with hotel managers, and their children throw...
Linnet arrives in Montreal during World War II, alone and with $5 in her purse. As she describes her prospects, "My only commercial asset was that I knew French, but French was of no professional use to anyone in Canada then -- not even to French Canadians; one might as well have been fluent in Pushtu." Still, she perseveres, ultimately finds a job on a local newspaper and sets out to become a writer, much as the author herself did in the late 1940s. Such determination and pluck are rare among Gallant's outcast characters. When the girl's native country...
...four Americans and two Frenchmen, delivered last Thursday to several daily newspapers in Beirut and printed by some of them the next day, came accompanied by an ominous warning: unless the government of Kuwait agreed to release 17 Muslim fundamentalist terrorists jailed there for bombing the U.S. and French embassies in December 1983, the American captives would suffer "catastrophic consequences" and their captors would "terrorize America and France forever...
EXPECTING. Candice Bergen, 39, placidly beautiful blond film actress (Starting Over, Rich and Famous), photojournalist and best-selling autobiographer (Knock Wood); and her husband Louis Malle, 52, French film director (Atlantic City, Alamo Bay): their first child (he has two children from a previous marriage); in October...