Paris Notebooks
Essays & Reviews
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
“A superb collection...Page after page, Gallant dazzles. Her voice and sensibility are penetrating, canny, graceful, and incisive.”—Washington Post
Best of the Year from Our Pages—The New Yorker
Enthralling essays on the expatriate experience in Paris and shrewd literary criticism by one of the twentieth century’s finest writers.
Mavis Gallant is revered as one of the great short story writers of her generation, but she was also an astute observer and formidable reporter. This selection of Gallant’s essays and reviews written between 1968 and 1985 begins with her impressions of the Parisian student uprising in May 1968. Originally published in The New Yorker, “The Events in May” inspired Wes Anderson’s film The French Dispatch and Gallant herself served as inspiration for the journalist portrayed by Frances McDormand.
Paris Notebooks presents a whole range of subjects portraying French society, ranging from architecture and literature to the gripping story of Gabrielle Russier, a young French schoolteacher driven to imprisonment, madness, and suicide as the result of an affair with one of her students. Also included are Gallant’s astute reviews of books by major figures such as Vladimir Nabokov, Simone de Beauvoir, Colette, and Günter Grass. No matter what form she’s working in, Mavis Gallant’s flawless prose is always full of wit and acuity.
This Nonpareil edition includes a new introduction by acclaimed literary biographer Hermione Lee.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This riveting compendium by Gallant (1922–2014), originally published in 1988 and long out-of-print, brings together the short story writer's nonfiction from her time living as a Canadian expat in Paris in the 1960s, '70s, and '80s. "The Events in May" offers a visceral, on-the-ground account of the May 1968 student uprising in Paris, as recorded by Gallant in her diary: "Police would charge past, sticks raised, roaring that awful roar of theirs, like a great animal." Another standout, the tour de force "Immortal Gatito: The Gabrielle Russier Case," interrogates how misogyny influenced the late 1960s scandal involving a 31-year-old Marseille school teacher who died by suicide after she was convicted for having a relationship with a 16-year-old male student. Gallant's book reviews offer rollicking takes on some of the most revered French authors of the day, lampooning Simone de Beauvoir's memoir All Said and Done (written, Gallant contends, in "a style that has the dazed, ruminative rhythm of a French schoolgirl chewing gum at a concert in time to Bach") and making a case for Jean Giraudoux's novel Lying Woman ("I am devoted to Giraudoux's writing in the way that some people are Gaullists or vegetarians"). Gallant follows in the footsteps of fellow expats Gertrude Stein and James Baldwin in offering astute outsider observations on French literature and culture, marrying trenchant analysis with sinewy prose. This elegantly captures a changing France reckoning with the cultural revolutions of the mid-20th century.
