Varieties of Exile by Mavis Gallant

Varieties of Exile Reviews

• 
  Lisa

  [2.8] So dreary, I feel weary. I did enjoy the first three stories in this collection. Gallant sprinkles her stories with sharp observations and insight. But by the time I got through the connected stories about Linnet Muir, including the title story, I was done - ready to escape this stultifying landscape.
• 
  David

  Everyone else seems to think this book deserves a minimum of 4 stars, and maybe it does. Maybe it's some kind of highbrow chicklit. No matter. I disliked it thoroughly -- I found these stories almost unreadable.
  
  The marketing hook for this collection (in the jacket blurb and the worshipful introduction by Russell Banks) is a biographical one. Gallant was born in Montreal to English-speaking, Protestant parents, an only child who was shipped off to a French Catholic boarding school at age four. Her father died early, her mother remarried, but from an early age, in Gallant's own words, she was "set afloat". Russell Banks assures us that this background, the experience of being forced at a very early age to navigate the straits dividing Catholic/Protestant, franco/anglophone, children/adults, men/women, of being, as he puts it "situated simultaneously inside and outside her given worlds", places Gallant at the Borderlands, the ideal site for a writer of short stories*.
  
  The stories in this particular collection are undeniably somewhat autobiographic, and are firmly situated in the Quebec of Gallant's youth. That doesn't necessarily make them interesting, or good. I found them dull, and ultimately claustrophobic. After the sixth or seventh exploration of the stultifyingly provincial concerns of the singularly joyless Quebecois that populate these stories, I'd had enough. I'm happy for Mavis Gallant that she managed to escape, and to live in Paris for the last 50 years. I can understand why she might feel impelled to pick at the scabs of her childhood. But I don't want to watch. Most of the characters in these stories live lives that are circumscribed or emotionally stunted. It's entirely possible to write gracefully about the way cultural pressures or tribal differences can limit or distort people's emotional well-being -- William Trevor has been doing it his whole life. But there's a humor and affection for his characters that rescue Trevor's stories from total bleakness. There's not much affection in Gallant's representation of the milieu she grew up in - the stories read more like the work of someone who is settling scores, or still trying to work through the legacy of her own idiosyncratic childhood (the prevailing narrative voice is that of an adult reinterpreting earlier events from childhood).
  
  Even though Gallant is adept at characterization, you get the feeling that she never warms up towards her own characters. She definitely failed to make me care about them. Giving myself permission not to read the remaining six or seven stories was a great relief.
  
  * the common fallacy of confusing an eventful biography with good writing; clearly, an eventful life is not necessary to be a good writer (Flannery O' Connor, Emily Dickinson, the Brontes), neither is it sufficient.
  
  
• 
  Sasha

  In his introduction to Mavis Gallant’s short story collection, Varieties of Exile, Russell Banks offers us a quote from the other herself—
  
  "Stories are not chapters of novels. They should not be read one after another, as if they were meant to follow along. Read one. Shut the book. Read something else. Come back later. Stories can wait."
  
  Banks, of course, offers the feeble, “But, trust me, these can’t.” As particular as the advice may come to readers of short story collections—among them, the odd creatures like me who merely take deep breaths in the pause between stories—the quote Banks pulls feels out of place, given the collective nature he selected for this NYRB Classics edition: The Gallant stories here are linked, in one way or another.
  
  There are three sets or sequences to the stories—the first, about the adventures of Linnet Muir, trying to make her way into the world, when her refugee state and her gender are already two strikes against her; the second, the sisters Carette, growing up, loving, forging different lives; the last, of a male narrator [Banks stresses that there is a need to disabuse the notion that Gallant is cruel to her male characters].
  
  What these three grand narratives have in common? One, they’re “Canadian stories,” as Banks dubs them—a matter of the characters’ nationality, we are informed, especially during a time when the very aspect of national identity for Canada was dubious. For another, their preoccupations: These are old-fashioned stories about people who were quite modern within the time they belonged. However, life seems to us pretty mundane and prosaic and seemingly trivial—but oh-so-oppressive in its politeness!—in Gallant’s world, despite the heavy cloak of formality, which is no doubt brought on by her strident tone and formalistic language. [There are strains of this formality, this scope and sometimes-glib omniscience in the stories of Alice Munro and Carol Shields, who both wrote a generation or two after Gallant, whom I both love madly.]
  
  Again, linked stories, a generous survey. After the first two stories where you recognize the main character, you know where this collection wishes to take you, and you tag along. You can’t wait to see a life unfolding before you, told through stories [or installments] whose relevance was chosen with the author’s discretion. Think of the collection as three different novellas, told in episodes. After a while, well, of course these stories can’t wait—each of them is part of a specific arc!
  
  Moving on. In theory, at least, I should have enjoyed Gallant. I’m certainly in awe of her—she is accomplished, this Grand Dame of Short Fiction. [Banks, too, addresses this, as Gallant “has mostly been viewed as a ‘writers’ writer’: “For what is a writers’ writer, anyhow? Merely one who honors in every sentence she writes the deepest, most time-honored principles of composition: honesty, clarity, and concision. So, yes, in that sense she is a writers’ writer. But only in that sense.”] So, yes, all that. Oh, I have admiration in buckets. But this reader didn’t have enough room to move, despite the expansiveness in the stories and the genius Gallant so clearly has—this reader just couldn’t feel it and fall in love and fall quiet.
• 
  Lara Maynard

  Excellent. Definitely on the list of my favourite Canadian short story writers and collections. Or short story writers and collections, period. I know Alice Munro seems to be the most lauded short story writer in Canada, but Mavis Gallant gets my vote for short story monarch for her style, intelligence, wit and sass.
  
  Many of the stories in this collection have a feeling that is biographical or autobiographical; many have a very distinctive sense of time and place; and several have a pointedly female point of view - yet each has a timelessness and universality that is a mark of topnotch writing.
  
  "Reading Mavis Gallant" author Janice Kulyk Keefer writes, “Gallant is a writer who dazzles us with her command of the language, her innovative use of narrative forms, the acuity of her intelligence, and the incisiveness of her wit. Yet she also disconcerts us with her insistence on the constrictions and limitations that dominate human experience.” Yes.
  
  The audiobook narration is also excellent. And the use of music between stories is done with a light touch. Well done, Rattling Books.
  
  I listened to each story multiple times, and will likely return to these stories in both audio and print.
• 
  Krista

  Most lives are wasted. All are shortchanged. A few are tragic.

  
  I skipped over
  Montreal Stories by Mavis Gallant many times while searching the audiobook database from my library -- I was never in the mood and I had never heard of Gallant; why bother? What a pleasure it was, then, to listen to these short stories as though I were discovering a secret treasure; and what a shame to then learn that the author passed away this year at 91. More celebrated outside of Canada, Gallant had 114 stories published in The New Yorker (only exceeded by John Cheever) and yet still I had never heard of her -- had not even noted her passing.
  
  The short stories in this collection (known as
  Varieties of Exile outside of Canada) are in three groupings of related characters, and although each story is a complete world unto itself, it was often unsettling to finish one and then have that world shaken up by the new information or perspective revealed in the next. Told from the points of view of Anglo Montrealers, this collection explores the culture and customs that, while firmly situated in the mid-20th century, laid the groundwork for today's Montreal where the Anglos have become even less welcome (despite the long roots in the community demonstrated here).
  
  Listening to this collection was a good experience because voice and accent were often described and the narrators did a wonderful job of demonstrating them (what would I know about the posh lisping French of a convent boarding school?) I'd suspect most of the Rest of Canada thinks about the Quebec issue from time to time, and this collection -- wholly apart from being works of real literary genius in themselves -- is an intriguing perspective. I may have jumped on the Mavis Gallant bandwagon a little late, but I'm looking forward to continuing the journey.
  
• 
  Elizabeth Cart

  I suffered through the first chapter and lost interest as the focus was lost in the storyline. I tried other stories in the book and could not be enamored. The writing is similar to the old writing of the 1800's or early century. It was written in 2003 in Montreal Canada. Could it be the translation if it was written in French? I prefer a more contemporary real time writing and storyline. :((
• 
  Wooky

  I first read the collection "Paris Stories" and thought perhaps I was a wee-bit in love with Mavis Gallant because of the Paris backdrop of her stories. But no. Paris, Quebec, Florida, she can take me wherever, and I am just as as enthralled.
• 
  Frank

  A very strong collection, and maybe an ideal introduction to Gallant’s work. It contains three groups of connected stories, and three stories that stand alone: ‘The Fenton Child’, ‘The End of the World’ and ‘New Year’s Eve’. All are among her best, and all are dealing with Canadians, mostly still living in Canada and some (notably in ‘New Year’s Eve’) living abroad (or dying abroad, as in ‘The End of the World’). These standalone stories had already been published in book form in previous collections, as had the two groups of connected stories about Linnet Muir and the Carette sisters. The latter two series of tales are also implicitly connected in that Linnet Muir’s nurse is called Olivia Carette, and may hence be plausibly taken to be the mother of the Carette sisters in that group of stories.
  
  In addition, the collection contains a group of three long stories that had never been collected before: ‘Let it Pass’, ‘In a War’ and ‘The Concert Party’. In these late stories from 1988/89, Gallant is really at the top of her game. Like the Linnet Muir and Carette sisters stories, like all the other stories in this collection in fact, they have a mellower tone than some of Gallants’ more acerbic work from the 70s and 80s. And they are also interesting because, as Russell Banks notes in his brief introduction, they are ‘narrated by a man, un homme d’un certain âge, whose life’s story and sad fate ought forever to disabuse any critic of suggesting that Gallant is hard on her male characters. Ironic, perhaps, but always sweetly forgiving.’
  
  So, a good introduction to Gallant for novices, and a must for any Gallant fan, since these three stories, with a total length of more than 110 pages amounting to a short novella, aren’t available elsewhere. (They were originally published in the New Yorker, but even in the New Yorker archive they can’t be read completely: something seems to have gone wrong with the digitalization, resulting in part of the text of ‘In a War’ being missing from both the online archive and the ‘Complete New Yorker’ on dvd brought out ten years ago.)
• 
  sofía

  “Age has its points,” my mother went on. “The longer your life goes on, the more chance it has to be interesting. Promise me that when you're thirty you'll have a lot to look back on.”
  
  
  Perhaps desires and secrets and second thoughts threading from person to person, from bachelor to married woman, from mother of none to somebody's father, formed a cat's cradle—matted, invisible, and quite dangerous.
  
  
  In another season, in the country, my parents had other friends, summer friends, who drank old-fashioneds and danced to gramophone records out on the lawn. Winter friends were mostly coffee drinkers, who did what people do between wars and revolutions—sat in a circle and talked about revolutions and wars.
  
  
  My parents and their friends were, in their way, explorers. They had in common a fear of being bored, which is a fear one can afford to nourish in times of prosperity and peace.
  
  
  If A was the daughter of B, and B rattled the foundations of C, and C, tho cautious and lazy where women were concerned, was committed in a way to D, and D was forever trying to tell her life's story to E, the husband of B, and E had enough on his hands with B without taking on D, too, and if D decided to lie down on or near a railway track with F, then what are A and F? Nothing. Minor satellites floating out of orbit and out of order after the stars burned out. Mrs. Erskine reclaimed Dr. Chauchard but he never married anyone. Angus reclaimed Charlotte but he died soon after. Louis, another old bachelor, had that one good anecdote about the fur cloak. I lost even the engraving of The Doctor, spirited away quite shabbily, and I never saw Dr. Chauchard again or even tried to.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  

  Once Satan had approached me—furry dark skin, claws, red eyes, the lot. He urged me to cross the street and I did, in front of a car that braked in time. I explained, “The Devil told me to.” I had no idea until then that my parents did not believe what I was taught in my convent school. (Satan is not bilingual, by the way; he speaks Quebec French.)
• 
  Angie

  This book took me forever to finish. Even now, I feel like I haven't truly read this book, despite taking my time on each individual story. As Gallant herself says, "Stories are not chapters of novels. They should not be read one after another, as if they were meant to follow along. Read one. Shut the book. Read something else. Come back later. Stories can wait."
  
  However, this collection really should be read cover-to-cover, as many of the stories follow after one another: 3 stories focus on Linnet Muir, 3 on the Carette sisters, and 3 by a man who sometimes goes by "Burney."
  
  The stand-out stories for me were: "Let It Pass," "In Youth is Pleasure," and "Between Zero and One." Still, I could take weeks reading these stories, distracted by the amazing tidbits of information and sentence structures. The book just feels so dense; it's as if the characters themselves walk around with their entire lives hanging over their head, and many of them do just that.
  
  I was sent this book because a friend who traveled with me to India had read another story of Gallant and thought I would find inspiration in a traveling female writer. In a way, Gallant lives a life I could only dream of, having abandoned everything to go and live in France for the sole purpose of writing fiction. And yet, after seeing her in a video interview, I wonder how she can be so fragile, so humorous herself, with all these deep and interesting characters plaguing her through the years. And what of the fact that she's a "writer's writer" who's sold over 100 stories to The New Yorker, yet still overshadowed by most of her peers?
  
  I identified so much with Linnet, even in her less desirable traits. I don't think I've ever read a character who sounded so much like me. The lines within her stories could have been taken from my own writing; at times they read like poetry, each story an innovative quilt Gallant has painstakingly sewn together by hand with golden thread, bits of hard-working flannel there, laughing pink tulle here.
  
  Moral of the story: Gallant is hard to read. There is a reason for this. She's a genius.
• 
  charta

  Quattro racconti di media lunghezza che parlano di separazioni per abbandono o rimozione. Di solitudine. Di incomunicabilità. E, soprattutto, del fare e dell'essere per l'utile.
  Quattro storie come tante, nascono nella banalità e in essa si sviluppano e concludono.
  L'io narrante, odiosamente ironico e onnisciente, mai identificabile con uno dei personaggi, gronda distacco e superiorità. Lo sguardo è gelido, manca del tutto un barlume d'afflato umano, un'ombra di dolore nel rappresentare pochezze e miserie altrui. Lo stile rispecchia l'assenza di sentimento: è freddo e asettico come il bisturi di un rinomato chirurgo mentre esegue un'incisione.
  Al termine della lettura degli abitanti di Montreal, pateticamente contrapposti tra anglofoni e francofoni, non importa granché. Si rimane con un profondo senso di insoddisfazione e la convinzione che per sapere delle meschinerie dell'uomo basta leggere un articolo di cronaca.
  Gallant con la grandiosa Munro condivide solo la nazionalità, non il talento.
  
• 
  Benjamin Kahn

  This book was really more 2.5 stars, but despite my best efforts, I can't honestly say I liked it. The stories lack a certain warmth, the characters aren't generally sympathetic, and the settings seem very dated. Often stories set in the past can come alive with a vibrancy that makes them seem current, but there's something about the settings in these stories that make them seem like they happened, in a duller, more conservative time that is long past and not mourned. They are little worlds trapped in amber, that one cannot relate to and appear as relics from a forgotten time. I know Mavis Gallant is well-respected for her short stories, but after reading two collections of her works, I have to say, I just don't get it.
• 
  Jesse

  Slow moving, graceful, subtle as anything. No climaxes! Huge human stories. Gallant is an example to all (though some of the stories ran slow for even my tastes, with more lavish detail than I could handle. But still.) At its best moments this includes some of the best writing of the 20th century.
• 
  Jeremy Allan

  There were points where I was sick of the characters (as this collection has several groupings of stories where the characters are carried over) but I was almost never sick of Gallant. She is conspicuously good. I will most definitely be seeking out more of her work.
• 
  Tom Wascoe

  Excellent collection of short stories-theme is Canada or Canadians. Some of the stories are semi-autobiographical. Superb characters, compelling stories, well-written.
• 
  John Strange

  I am cured of any further Mavis Gallant curiosity. I read all the short stories here over a five week period without enjoying a single one. She may indeed be precise and painfully observant of the French and English Canadians in her tales but her references, allusions, intimations added up to little for me. I just didn't get her obscure intentions.
  
  I did read commentary by her admirers but even they didn't seem to understand her, offering cryptic comments instead. If they did understand Gallant's "point" they didn't reveal it. So I was left with pointless observations and details about people and times whose subtext I didn't fathom. I suspect you had to be there.
• 
  Roz Milner

  A good collection of stories, some of them set in Montreal, some set overseas, told with Gallant’s gorgeous style. Some are pretty long- and the last three seem like chapters from an unfinished novel - but overall this one held my attention and focused on the inner lives of Montreal anglophones.
• 
  Theresa

  Masterful short stories capturing the Canadian consciousness. A precursor to voicey fiction. On my bookshelf, I would put this beside Lucia Berlin more so than Alice Munro.
• 
  CaitlynK

  Somehow even better than Paris Stories.
• 
  Victoria

  My second Mavis Gallant story collection; review to come after the one for my first...
• 
  Richard

  Great writing that takes you to a place and time and the people there. The stories include people from Montreal before my time but the themes were familiar.
• 
  Tim

  Loved this quiet collection until the last 3 stories that were a real slog.
• 
  Simonew

  3.5