Word: gallanting
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FROM THE FIFTEENTH DISTRICT by Mavis Gallant Random House; 243 pages...
...Mavis Gallant. The name has a romantic ring to it, suggesting a pretty girl, sunlight on English countryside and happy endings, possibly during the Battle of Britain. But no modern writer casts a colder eye on life, on death and all the angst and eccentricity in between. A Canadian, Mrs. Gallant has lived in France since World War II. There she produces her lapidary long stories and an occasional dazzling short novel, usually set in Europe. Her work appears regularly in The New Yorker. Canada seems about to give her the Governor General's Literary Award...
...reason for lack of popularity may be that Gallant rarely leaves helpful signs and messages that readers tend to expect of "literature": This way to the Meaning or This story is about the Folly of Love. She can sum up the postwar history of a social class in a paragraph. She can effortlessly keep three levels of memory working in a seamless narrative. But in the end the stories are simply there-haunting, enigmatic, printed with images as sharp and durable as the edge of a new coin, relentlessly specific. "God protect us from generalizations," said Chekhov, the writer whose...
...Gallant's characters have been in trouble. They are exiles and émigrés, always from the provinces of the heart, often from some place in Europe tossed by convulsions of war or politics. One story follows the sad, late return (1950) to Berlin of a German prisoner of war in France. Another recounts the trials of an Italian servant girl on the Riviera, working for a neurotic English couple just before Mussolini declared war on France...
...shared many of these attitudes toward Nixon, although I had little direct evidence on which to base a judgment. I attended the gallant press conference in which Rockefeller conceded to Nixon and I was sick at heart...