We were a petite comité indeed at Les
Editeurs – only Maren, Michel, and Phoebe to discuss the late Mavis Gallant’s
OVERHEAD IN A BALLOON.
Since I selected The Book That Decimated
the Book Club, I’ll draft the minutes. First, I’ll admit that after naming it,
I wondered if I should have chosen a different Gallant, possibly HOME TRUTHS
(which Maren presciently began reading after OIAB). I wondered if OIAB was too “special”:
too distanced, too caustic, dealing with too limited a milieu. But I couldn’t resist
images like the white boot kicking from the bushes in the Bois or lines like “’She
died in his arms,’ wrote Grippes in an unusually confidential letter to Prism,
‘though not without a struggle.’”
Michel found the historical ambiance
unbelievable – disappointing me, because it FELT real to me, and I was hoping
for native confirmation. He graciously conceded that he might simply have read
too fast and missed certain points. Part of the issue, for him, was the nature
of a short story collection, which for him doesn’t allow the mind to really
acclimate and become sensitized to the fictional milieu as it would in a novel.
Maren agreed on the short story problem.
She also felt that the settings and characters were limited – “more writers
writing about writers.”
All three of us agreed that the most
involving stories were the Magdalena series, for a number of reasons. There was
a continuity among them that made them a kind of peephole novel, with glimpses
of a single story at various times, from various perspectives. The issues –
survival in wartime, love, marriage, loyalty, selfishness and sacrifice – were
less rarefied than those of other stories. Gallant’s use of details to convey
entire worlds – the contrasted luggage of Magdalena and her young husband on
the train – was especially well deployed. I loved the Colettish atmosphere of
Magdalena’s Quai Voltaire apartment.
I was especially struck by the way the
bottom sometimes drops out of a story, the brittle surface breaking: the memory
of Algerian torture in “Luc’s Father,” Magdalena’s saying she “knew what [the
Jewish star] was like” at the end of “A Recollection.” Or the matter-of-fact
way Grippes waits in a café while the police beat up a pickpocket in his
apartment house lobby.
I forgot to mention – even though
conversation turned to the American Library in Paris! – that I once heard
Gallant read the story “Grippes and Poche” there. There was a Q&A session
afterwards, and someone asked why she decided to move to Paris. She said
because of reading about it in books. I asked which, and she harrumphed a bit,
then said, “Colette.”
Here’s a nice article on Gallant:
