![]() As part of its aid programme to publishers, the Ministry of Culture had asked me to assess the just-completed translation of Gallant’s recently published and highly acclaimed story collection Across the Bridge ( 1993). ![]() The political, cultural, and literary issues raised that morning were pursued during the afternoon we spent together, and came out as the first of our interviews - capped in the last stage of her career by the interview which would be published in this journal ( Dvorak, 1995 2009). She read and discussed “The Colonel’s Child”, the story of a (deliciously naïve) young Frenchman who went to London to join General de Gaulle and the Free French, convinced “the weight of presence could tip the scales of war, like one vote in a close election” ( Gallant, 1985: 166). Three hundred of them wanted to hear her, though, and liberated a hall where the small, elderly, but gumptious Gallant ignored her osteoporosis and stood for an hour without a microphone (the technicians refused to run the risk of damaging any sound equipment). ![]() She arrived the evening before when the students had just voted to strike and barricaded the lecture halls. I had invited Mavis to come and read from her work. I was not yet a professor at the Sorbonne Nouvelle, but a senior lecturer at the University of Rennes, where in March 1994 Gallant once more found herself in the middle of student riots (this time following the French government’s passing of a subminimum wage for young people under the age of 26). Later, when Gallant realized we had the same birthday, 11 August, she dubbed us the Leo twins, and our professional relations morphed into one of the strong friendships to which the otherwise very private writer granted (and triggered) a fierce loyalty. ![]() It was one of the rare stories by Gallant The New Yorker had declined to publish out of a policy of plausibility (which she greatly contributed to fracturing), and which has been overlooked in story collections. But Gallant was delighted when I told her my favourite story was a quirky fantasy I had discovered in a magazine I’d just been asked to review. Who can forget aphorisms such as “there are two races, those who tread on people’s lives, and the others” ( Gallant, 1981/1992: 244). ![]() Best known for her stories of cultural dislocation, of borderlines and bridges, and for her ability to capture the behaviour of “the out-of-place citizen” ( Ondaatje, 2002: ix) and “dissect the misunderstandings of the people from different continents who collide on our streets” ( Henighan, 2014), Gallant awed listeners/readers with an acuity of thought and lapidary concision encountered in great ironists and essayists. Or that on 18 February 2014 I would be accompanying her along with her other close friends to her final resting place almost next door, the Montparnasse Cemetery, to be surrounded by the artists she had crossed an ocean for. When I first met Mavis Gallant in the early 1990s at a reading she gave at the prestigious Village Voice bookshop in Paris, I could not suspect I would be reading to her two decades later when poor health and failing eyesight confined her to her small Left Bank apartment. All subjects Allied Health Cardiology & Cardiovascular Medicine Dentistry Emergency Medicine & Critical Care Endocrinology & Metabolism Environmental Science General Medicine Geriatrics Infectious Diseases Medico-legal Neurology Nursing Nutrition Obstetrics & Gynecology Oncology Orthopaedics & Sports Medicine Otolaryngology Palliative Medicine & Chronic Care Pediatrics Pharmacology & Toxicology Psychiatry & Psychology Public Health Pulmonary & Respiratory Medicine Radiology Research Methods & Evaluation Rheumatology Surgery Tropical Medicine Veterinary Medicine Cell Biology Clinical Biochemistry Environmental Science Life Sciences Neuroscience Pharmacology & Toxicology Biomedical Engineering Engineering & Computing Environmental Engineering Materials Science Anthropology & Archaeology Communication & Media Studies Criminology & Criminal Justice Cultural Studies Economics & Development Education Environmental Studies Ethnic Studies Family Studies Gender Studies Geography Gerontology & Aging Group Studies History Information Science Interpersonal Violence Language & Linguistics Law Management & Organization Studies Marketing & Hospitality Music Peace Studies & Conflict Resolution Philosophy Politics & International Relations Psychoanalysis Psychology & Counseling Public Administration Regional Studies Religion Research Methods & Evaluation Science & Society Studies Social Work & Social Policy Sociology Special Education Urban Studies & Planning BROWSE JOURNALS ![]()
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