As this collection nears its end (the next story is its last), I find myself thinking more about the concept of being “in transit”. About how we often meet the characters in this story when they are at their most rooted. But how the title of the collection allows
Flickering and Imprecise: the first words I jotted down, while reading this Mavis Gallant story. It struck me that perhaps one of the reasons that her stories have endured is that her style is uncluttered and direct: there aren’t a lot of adjectives or adverbs, so when something –
Readers never meet her directly, but we are told that she looks like the Holbein portrait of Lady Barker. (Here shown in such a way that it’s easy to imagine a wallet photo.) This is the mother of Hal and Dorothy. Once George Crawley’s wife. On the surface, this
An airport is as good as a train for setting a story in, when that story is about change. So here we are, in the Helsinki airport for this very short, titular story by Mavis Gallant. (And can I just say: how wonderful is the ‘net for locating images,
“The Circus” considers the tensions between expectations and reality. Often, when that theme emerges in a Mavis Gallant story, the focus is a relationship. That is true of “The Circus” as well. On the surface, this story appears to be about Laurie’s expectations about the circus. He has seen
