If Forain was reading this story, the one which follows the story about him, in Mavis Gallant’s ninth collection, he would be so disappointed to hear that M. Wroblewski can’t find a thing to read in Paris. “There are no books worth reading—nothing but pornography and translated Western trash.”
In the late edition of the Sunday New York Times, on September 12, 1993 John McGahern describes "Forain" as “a story that is as close to perfection as possible”. What a compliment. He says that “Mrs. Gallant has always written well about the Parisian emigre world, but never better
In the first week of Covid-19 lockdown, I pulled The Box Garden off the shelf, opened it to read: “That there are no certainties in life. That we change hourly or even from one minute to the next, our entire cycle of being altered, our whole selves shaken with
Since I began this project of rereading through Mavis Gallant’s stories, in January 2017, I’ve had this story in the back of my mind, unable to place it. I should have suspected it would reside here, in my first Gallant collection. Instead, I had begun to wonder if it
If only Dr. Dominic Missierna could arrange for a weekly dinner with Charles Filandreux (from “Siegfried’s Memoirs” in Coming Ashore) and Henri Grippes (from “A Painful Affair” in Overhead in a Balloom). Every year weighs heavily on these men, even though the time seems to have passed too quickly
