In his introduction Exile varietyA collection of stories by Russell Banks, who points out that short stories are more than any other literary form, “talking to everyone who thinks they are alone, disconnected from God and count as unattended, and when considered unattended. a lot of. ”

Gallant does write almost entirely about the margins of the world: orphans and exiles; abandoned and uprooted; like the protagonist of her story "New Year's Eve", people feel that they are forever stored in a place "a place where no one can talk to" and a "not loved." The loneliness in heroic writing is usually not as much as it is suggested. It hovered in the air, creating an atmosphere whose lack of emotional connection is often the existence of being-a so penetrating isolation seems to be innate. This sense of thing is the core of her writing. It is achieved not through character or plot development, but through a tone that is difficult to analyze, but is clearly present: moody, profoundly detained, feeling that human-like destiny is destined, yes, even before birth, perhaps before birth- crosses the inner fault line, to the point of striving to achieve any motivation necessary to live.

Gallant died in 2014 at the age of 91. Although her story has been repeatedly collected, over the past 20 years, New York Review Books have undertaken the task of publishing a unified version of her work: Paris Story In 2002, Exile variety In 2003, Cost of living In 2009, now, this year, Uncollected storiesmost likely the last one in the set.

She was born in Montreal in 1922 in Mavis Young, an American mother and British father, but is indifferent to her parents. They sent her to boarding school at the age of 4 and since then, she was almost never brought to the house. In the following years, she said, "I have a mother who shouldn't have children, which is very simple." When her father died (she was 10), her mother quickly got married and moved to New York to leave Mavis in Montreal with a guardian. Although she regularly joined her New York mother and stepfather in the years that followed, she felt uninitiated and would never be at home anywhere, especially within herself.

At the age of 18, she was completely alone. At the age of 20, she had a brief marriage with a man named John Gallant (the name she retained). At the age of 22, she worked as a journalist in the Montreal newspaper (none of a woman in the 1940s was a feat); she began writing stories shortly thereafter. In 1950, she sent one of them New Yorker. It was rejected, but the second story she sent was taken away, and soon, William Maxwell, the magazine's allegorical editor, directed her to send him anything else on hand. Maxwell was soon troubled by Gallant's writing and published nearly all the works she sent him over the next 45 years: a total of 116 stories. he It was given to her by Editorial Paradise. The melancholy Midwest was also saturated by childhood damage, and his sensitivity was more important than her own.

Read: Vivid, underrated short story by Mavis Gallant

It'll be there soon New Yorker Accepting the second story quickly determines three things than Gallant: All she wants to do is write, she risked making a living from work, she would leave Canada permanently because, in order to write, she said, she had to feel completely free. "Total freedom" means living as a foreigner; she has become addicted to the feeling of not being at home anywhere. So she settled Paris, She lives among the rest of the people where she lives in a culture that never felt relaxed, while the intimate people are less intimate, and her writing flourishes.

Three brave stories flow me the most - "Let it pass", "In the War" and "Concert Party" - appear in Exile variety. In my opinion, they can use Humdrum Empointiment emantiment the ur-loneliness: Gallant's iconic attention. I call them the story of Lily Quale. These three were first set in the suburbs of Montreal Before World War II, then in southern France after the war. They are based on an inner rootless nature and never relax the protagonist, they wrote it in the 1980s when Gallant (and then the 60s) knew everything she needed to know and was at the top of the game.

The stories are told by Steve Burnet, a low-ranking Canadian diplomat in his 40s or 50s, with his history and Lily Quale, both born in the 1920s in the aforementioned Montreal suburbs, who are with the upper class British Protestant, who is a working-class Irish Catholic. The cultural differences between them are strong, but they are actually irrelevant. Some desires toward the world outside the world inevitably attract them to each other. Of course, they long to experience themselves, not the wider world, but they don't know yet.

From the beginning, Lily was seen as a beautiful and seductive wild child because their desire for excitement is so extreme that it expresses an inherent need that no one can understand and nothing can eliminate. Even if she is part of a well-run family, Lily is completely alone, completely alone, not a wanderer like other brave wanderers, but a wanderer. She believes that women she often does in the world remain irresponsible.

As for Steve (smart, passive, gentle), he was bothered by Lily as long as he remembered. They have been working hard since they were teenagers, but he always knew that despite her special opinion of him, he was essentially one of many in the "big pond" who was "socially possible, almost all boys" and every boy wanted her. Surprising "the scale of her nerves" and the bottomless "use of gut" (her betrayal is routine) - though, he's there whenever she calls. He promised that he would take her out of the provinces. The mistake he made was to think that this promise had established a bond between them, which would arouse her attitude in her loyalty.

Read: Paris: The Taste of the New Era

Steve and Lily decided to get married and go to Europe in their 20s. That's what Lily has been fishing, and what she wants most is what reliable Steve is going to be possible. But, it is foreseeable that even then, she was driven to all these risks. A few days before the wedding, at her lunch time Lily works in a boring secretary in downtown Montreal, sleeping with Ken Peel, a sports-good shop owner who is notorious for making sexual contacts behind his store. Steve happened to drive across the street at the exact moment when he came out of Peel's shop, immediately intuition. He knew Lily clearly, and he saw: "He saw: "Dreaming in a narrow focus, the image of the black and white postcard is Lily's cowhide edge at the edge of Peel's sofa, attracted for the first time. Protruding out, the other bent and exposed. "The Invincible Eye" shows a lot. Suddenly, Steve knew that their situation was static: he was paralyzed like her. She would never be loyal to him. He would still marry her.

Steve, with a gift of family money, bought a shaky house in southern France, nearly bankrupted them, settled on a bunch of American and European tours in one or another or another. These men are gay in the UK and his gardener is a 19-year-old blond rent boy. Lily, soon as she is as empty as she is at home, it is a kind spirit to come to see a boy. Her restlessness, which was soon impossible to complete, she and the rent boy ran away. (Or, as Steve put it, "two blonde truantes climb the hill to the train station." Before she finishes, Lily will have two more husbands, eventually exhausting Montreal.

In the next two stories, Steve describes the frustration he fell into afterwards, “My marriage fell from height.” He would never get married again, or even fall in love again. Over the years, he was trapped in memory, obsessed with Lily's defection. He remembers his aunt being shocked by Lily and telling him that women can do nothing but they can’t do without sex and money, maybe one or the other, but definitely not both. "No," he thought, Lily had gone for a few years, "what went wrong had nothing to do with either." It flashed him, why she had actually left him.

The important thing about Lily is the ambition behind her desires. He often thought she should marry some European artist or thinker, or "the billionaire grandson of some Methodist grocer", rather than him. Now, decades later, he realized, "Lily must have seen me-my thoughts, my life, my future, my Europe--a liar." Her necessity of this swelling, this awkward hunger, this abstract loneliness: It's that way Steve's own vacancy is excellently doomed to fail.

Affable Steve is Gallant's ultimate margin, "one of the rare foreigners that the French don't immediately dislike the French." No one except Lily, nor has he not attracted his emotional attention for some time. In him, he shares a huge void with Lily. From this, everyone is foolishly hoping to be rescued by the other party. Interestingly, Lily’s class conventions from the same pursuits are not destroyed, despite Steve’s pursuits.

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These people are people who are looking for the wrong things at the wrong time at the wrong time, and in the process of making each other use each other, no one does anything about what they cannot do for themselves. But I must admit that this is my fictional favorite Lily, and I sympathize with it despite this. I suspect that as a contemporary reader, I understand that she is even better than Gallant.

Let us not forget that Lily is an era where no woman can imagine being alone in the world. any The future she offers, she will surely pursue it through someone she arouses desire: the only card she has to play with. Being loved has nothing to do with lily, except for being loved. get She: That's everything. She is hardly alone in this regard.

I have known Lily Quale all my life. She is the invasion among us. Mine is a generation of women characterized by girls like me and girls like Lily do this. Only they dare to know. The rest of us have one Steve Burnet or another years we have to remember for years To be rescued from the hungry we strangled or endured, and the wandering inside us becomes hardened.