Friday, May 16, 2014

Mavis Gallant, OVERHEAD IN A BALLOON


We were a petite comitĂ© 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 cafĂ© 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:


-- Phoebe

No comments:

Post a Comment