Mavis Gallant

Its always a great pleasure to discover a new writer that you like,
or an old writer that you hadn't paid attention to before. Such is the
case with Mavis Gallant. I was on the New Yorker web site where I found an audible short story selected and read by Antonya Nelson (whose father was a college professor of mine).
Online it was entitled Waiting but the real title is "When we were almost young". It was originally published in 1960. It stuck me as such a great story I had to rush to the library to
check out the complete Collected Stories.
Here is the abstract summary of the story:
Mavis Gallant, Fiction, "When We Were Nearly Young," The New Yorker,
October 15, 1960, p. 38 October 15, 1960 Issue

In Madrid, 9 years ago, the writer & her companions lived on the
thought of money. The re were four of them: two men & two girls. The
men, Pablo & Carlos, were cousins. Pilar was a relation of theirs. The
writer was not Spanish & not a relation, just an accidental friend.
The thing they had in common was waiting for money. Carlos & Pablo
shared a room in a flat; writer lived in another room in the same
house. Pilar had her own small flat. They were all in their 20's &
worried about approaching their thirties. Getting along on their
meagre funds was a constant challenge. The Spaniards' characteristic
trait was a certain passiveness. One day the writer received some
money, but it aroused bitterness. Carlos remarked that the difference
between them was that something would always come for the writer but
not for them.

(That doesn't do the story justice.) There are a couple of quotes I remember:
"Poverty is not a goad but a paralysis."
..."we were not afraid because after all, what was the worse that could happen. No one seemed to know."

Thats when I thought, that would be a good question for the Buddha.
Me: What is the worse that can happen?
Buddha: Life is suffering.

Biography

An only child, Gallant was born in Montreal, Quebec. Her father died when she was young, and her mother remarried. Gallant received her education at seventeen different public, convent, and French-language boarding schools. In her twenties, she worked as a reporter for the Montreal Standard (1944-1950). She married John Gallant, a Winnipeg musician in 1942. The couple divorced five years later in 1947. Gallant left journalism in 1950 to pursue fiction writing.

Gallant has been forthright about the protectiveness she feels towards her autonomy and privacy. In an interview with Geoff Hancock in Canadian Fiction magazine in 1978, she discussed her “life project” and her deliberate move to France to write by saying, “I have arranged matters so that I would be free to write. It's what I like doing.” In the preface to her collection of stories, Home Truths: Selected Canadian Stories (1981), she uses the words of Boris Pasternak as her epigraph: “Only personal independence matters.”

In 1981, Gallant was honoured by her native country and made an Officer of the Order of Canada for her contribution to literature; that year, she received the Governor General's Award for literature for her collection of stories, Home Truths. In 1983-84, she returned to Canada to be the writer-in-residence at the University of Toronto. Queen’s University awarded her an honorary LL.D. in 1991. She was promoted to Companion of the Order of Canada in 1993.

In 1989, Gallant was made a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2000, she won the Matt Cohen Prize, and in 2002 she received the Rea Award for the Short Story. The O. Henry Prize Stories of 2003 was dedicated to her.

With Alice Munro, Gallant is one of a few Canadian authors whose works regularly appear in The New Yorker. Many of Gallant’s stories have debuted in the magazine before subsequently being published in a collection.

[edit] Critical assessment

Grazia Merler observes in her book, Mavis Gallant: Narrative Patterns and Devices, that “Psychological character development is not the heart of Mavis Gallant’s stories, nor is plot. Specific situation development and reconstruction of the state of mind or of heart is, however, the main objective.” Frequently, Gallant’s stories focus on expatriate men and women who have come to feel lost or isolated; marriages that have grown flimsy or shabby; lives that have faltered and now hover in the shadowy area between illusion, self-delusion, and reality. As well, because of her heritage and understanding of Acadian history, she is often compared to Antonine Maillet, considered to be spokesperson for Acadian culture in Canada.

In a critical book, Reading Mavis Gallant, Janice Kulyk Keefer says, “Gallant is a writer who dazzles us with her command of the language, her innovative use of narrative forms, the acuity of her intelligence, and the incisiveness of her wit. Yet she also disconcerts us with her insistence on the constrictions and limitations that dominate human experience.”

In a review of her work in Books in Canada in 1978, Geoff Hancock asserts that “Mavis Gallant's fiction is among the finest ever written by a Canadian. But, like buried treasure, both the author and her writing are to discover.” In the Canadian Reader, Robert Fulford has said, “One begins comparing her best moments to those of major figures in literary history. Names like Henry James, Chekhov, and George Eliot dance across the mind.”

[edit] Major works

Gallant has written two novels, Green Water, Green Sky (1969) and A Fairly Good Time (1970); a play, What is to be Done? (1984); numerous celebrated collections of stories, The Other Paris (1953), My Heart is Broken (1964), The Pegnitz Junction (1973), The End of the World and Other Stories (1974), From the Fifteenth District (1978), Home Truths: Selected Canadian Stories (1981), Overhead in a Balloon: Stories of Paris (1985), and In Transit (1988); and a non-fiction work, Paris Journals: Selected Essays and Reviews (1986).

[edit] Current life

Although she maintains her Canadian citizenship, Gallant has lived in Paris, France since the 1950s.