Paris Stories: Selected and With an Introduction by Michael Ondaatje Book

Gallant is one of the few writers, like Proust and Nabokov, whom I approach with utter delight and dread. Delight because her writing is so beautifully crafted and each phrase a treat; dread because as a writer reading her is so intimidating one feels that, not only could one never hope to write a story as good as hers, but even a sentence. Her images are precise and perfect in a way that renders them all familiar and identifiable, yet unexpected and fresh. Sentences such as, "All the fat men of comic stories and of literature were to be Willy Wehler to me, in the future," and "Sociable elderly ladies, such as Mme. Obier, no longer roamed the aisles looking for someone to stand them a drink but were stopped at the entrance by a charming person holding a clipboard and wanting to know if they were expected," are tossed off with as much ease and naturalness as a person taking off a coat. Toward the end of the collection, the stories delve into the territory of the political and offer some keen insights into the cultural shift that occured in Europe during the 60's and 70's. But in my opinon the real standouts are the stories toward the beginning of the collection that deal with the Europe of and around the World Wars. "The Latehomecomer," about a young man returning to Germany after being taken prisoner and kept in exile in Paris as a teenager in the Nazi army is a moving rumination on family, becoming an adult, and fate, and is a brilliant exercise in humanizing the seemingly deplorable. And my favorie story of the lot, "The Moslem Wife," about a pair of cousins who marry and run a hotel together until the husband embarks on a romantic tryst abroad just at the outbreak of World War II, leaving the wife saddled with a hotel full of foreign troops in the South of France, is one of the most devastating depictions of how experience -- particularly experience of war -- unites and divides us that I have ever encountered. It may be a cliche, but Mavis Gallant truly is a "writer's writer" and this is a collection to be savored by any and all fans of short fiction.