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
Some of the stories NOT told in Mavis Gallant’s Dédé, a story named for Sylvie’s younger brother, Amedée: We don’t catch even a glimpse of the time in which “the future Mme Brouet was studying to be an analyst of handwriting, with employment to follow – so she [Sylvie]
This is the shortest in the cycle of Carette family stories, available to read online, with a short introduction by Lynne Tillman, on the Center for Fiction’s website. It’s one of their “model stories”—for good reason. It’s concise, yet still manages to highlight so many of Gallant’s trademarks: acute
Having published one hundred and sixteen stories in The New Yorker, Mavis Gallant’s regular readers would have had to wait from April 15 until July 8 in 1985, to learn how life has been for the Carette sisters. The story opens like this: “The family’s experience of Raymond was
In the previous story, Berthe and Marie were six and four years old, but now they are twenty-two and twenty, when the Carette family is moving house once again. Having moved around the same neighbourhood every few seasons, they and their mother are signing a two-year lease for the
