Word: gallant
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...Palais des Festivals, and the townsfolk swooned as if a god had descended to earth. Another Hollywood deity ambled onto the Palais stage, heard himself introduced as "Mon General James Stewart" and watched a couple of thousand people in evening clothes stand up to cheer and salute. Earlier, gallant as always, Stewart had served as foil for June Allyson's sparkle at a press conference celebrating the screening of their 1954 film The Glenn Miller Story. Cher, the star of Mask, impressed everyone by winning a prize for best actress and, earlier, by arriving with 25 suitcases and a trampoline...
Irony serves to sharpen, and humor leaven, the mishaps that befall the book's eccentric families. Unrelentingly bleak, however, are the descriptions of cruelty to children, which are a hallmark of Gallant's stories in Home Truths. Indeed, with a mother like the matriarch in Saturday, there is no need to blame family tensions on Canada's ethnic problems. "She told each of her five daughters as they grew up that they were conceived in horror; that she could have left them in their hospital cots and not looked back, so sickened was she by their limp spines...
...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...
...this bad news about Canadians is mercifully tempered by the tale of Linnet Muir, told in the six final stories, which rank among Gallant's best. At 18, Linnet has already been blighted by a cold father and a merciless mother. Battling back with her only weapons, "secrecy and insolence," she manages to make her getaway from parental oppression...
...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 fails to meet her standards, she puts up a fight. "If I say . . . that the Winter Palace was stormed on Sherbrooke Street, that Trafalgar was fought on Lake St. Louis, I mean it naturally," she says. "They were the natural backgrounds...