It was a weird month up at the Milner residence. On Nov. 1, I underwent surgery in Montreal and spent most of the next two weeks in bed, hopped up on painkillers. I’ll admit I tried to read, I even brought my thickest book (The Recognitions, by William Gaddis) but I quickly found that I’d read a page and immediately forget what I’d read; fortunately, this cleared up after a week or so at home, and I was back into my usual routine of reading every day.
Montreal Stories - Mavis Gallant (Penguin Classics, 2018)
A good collection of stories by Gallant, all of them tied in some way to the second-largest city in Canada, Montreal Stories is a good way to dive into Gallant’s back pages.
Over 15 stories Gallant’s takes readers deep into the mid-century Monreal (and elsewhere) with her gorgeous, atmospheric style. Rooms are dim and musty, workplaces crammed and filled with patrionizing men. In Gallant’s Montreal, people move frequently - often leaving furniture with relatives - and the only action comes from people’s mouths: a put-down, a loose comment or, in one story, a series of journals left behind after a character’s death.
The pace is slow and leisurely, with some of the stories getting quite long. People reappear from story to story (the last three seem like chapters from an unfinished novel), giving the book a sort of continuity. At the same time, however, it feels like it’s missing something: for a book mostly set in mid-century Montreal, there’s no mention of major Francophone figures like Maurice Richard or Abbe Groulx; it feels a little like Gallant’s captured only part of Montreal - the Anglo sphere.
Gallant, who died in 2014, was one of Canada’s major literary talents, although she mostly lived in France. I think her star has faded somewhat, but these stories (nearly all of them published in the New Yorker back in its heyday as a literary magazine) show her skill at diving into the worlds of polite society, single women and men trying to assert themselves in the world. I think it’s a good place to start with Gallant. (Postscript: this collection is published in the US by New York Review of Books as Varieties of Exile).
The Vagabond - Colette (FSG, 2001)
In her life, Colette was an interesting, flawed and complex character. She seduced her step-son, wrote articles for the pro-Vichy press and claimed to be against feminism. At the same time, she was a prolific writer who was given a state funeral when she died, and (as biographer Judith Thurman notes in her introduction to this book) rubbed shoulders with writers like Proust. I guess I’m saying she was a complex person who’s hard to pin down. A little like the protagonist of The Vagabond.
A novel about a newly divorced actress and her admirer “the big noodle”, The Vagabond follows Renee Nere as she struggles to choose between love and marriage, and an artistic life with independence. Does she want to marry the rich man who’s in love with the dancer he sees on stage? Maybe, but that would mean giving up a life of writing, performance and living on her own terms. On the other hand, it would give her stability and emotional support.
Told mostly in a series of meditations and letters, it’s an interesting read (especially when it deals with the touring life) that touches on feminist themes and concepts. And although Colette’s prose sparkles, the translation struck me as very British (cigarettes are “fag ends” for example) in a way I found distracting. But not enough to keep me from finishing this novel. I’ll be checking out more of her works.
Dreyer’s English - Benjamin Dreyer (Random House, 2020)
A useful guide book to style, spelling and grammar, told in an engaging, colloquial way. Not really the sort of thing one reads for pleasure - most of it is just lists of bullet points - but there’s a lot of good advice here for writers of all sorts. Even though Dreyer’s got a bit of a thing against UK-styled English, which is the style up here. It’s hard to really review something that is essentially a textbook, but it’s helpful. It’s less concise than Strunk and White, more opinionated than the CP Stylebook and unlike the Chicago Manual, it has fun with the footnotes. Get this one for your aunt who writes stories on her Facebook, and then another for when you’ve got a few minutes here and there to brush up on your basics.