Across the Bridge
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
In Across the Bridge, four of the eleven stories are connected, following the fortunes of the Carette family in Montreal. In “1933,” their widowed mother teaches Berthe and Marie to deny that she was a seamstress and to say instead that she was “clever with her hands.” In “The Chosen Husband,” the luckless suitor Louis has to undergo the front-parlour scrutiny of Marie’s mother and sister: “But then Louis began to cough and had to cover his mouth. He was in trouble with a caramel. The Carettes looked away, so that he could strangle unobserved.” We then follow their marriage, the birth of Raymond, and Raymond’s flight from his mother and aunt to his eventual role as a motel manager in Florida.
With the exception of “The Fenton Child,” an eerie story set in postwar Montreal, the other stories take place in the Paris Mavis Gallant knows so well. “Across the Bridge,” the title story, begins with the narrator’s mother throwing her reluctant daughter’s wedding invitations into the Seine: “I watched the envelopes fall in a slow shower and land on the dark water and float apart. Strangers leaned on the parapet and stared, too, but nobody spoke.”
This is a superb collection of stories by a writer at the top of her form.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The 11 stories in this collection demonstrate Gallant's capacious knowledge of human nature, refracted through her ironic views of the battle of the sexes and of the conflict between generations. Penetrating and insightful, these tales reflect the sensibilities of conservative Catholic Montrealers and Parisians coping with the crises of modern life. The husbands and fathers portrayed here prefer their women placid, pretty and without intellectual ambition. And with few exceptions the women are compliant, either out of a general inbred dreaminess or a pathetic lack of opportunity or gumption. The most captivating characters are women who evade this fate. Berthe Carette, whose family is the subject of four interlocked stories, defies the church, remains unwed and independent and sleeps with married men. (Her purposefully helpless, blandly demanding sister Marie also gets her own way, however.) Bright, perceptive Nora Abbott, the teenaged protagonist of ``The Fenton Child,'' cleverly deals with the Montreal-Anglo disdain of French-speaking natives, and also learns how to handle her scheming father. The French heroine of the title story, romantic, naive Sylvie, regrets her moment of rebellion until she finds the ``true life that was almost ready to let me in.'' Gallant's sharp tongue cuts through churchly cant, moral hypocrisy and the myth of male superiority; her finely honed prose captures the small details that illuminate a life. This collection will add to her deserved reputation as a superb practitioner of her craft.
