In Transit

by Mavis Gallant

Collected here for the first time, these nineteen stories originally appeared in The New Yorker during the 1950s and 60s. With scrupulous precision, a host of remarkably drawn characters are surveyed with a cool wit and sophisticated intelligence as they struggle to transcend the imprisonment of their provisional lives. Sometimes direct, sometimes tantalizingly oblique, Mavis Gallant's finely textured writing demonstrates once again that she is a master of contemporary prose.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Canada, Classics, Canadian Literature

263 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1988

About the author

Canadian journalist and fiction writer. In her twenties, Gallant worked as a reporter for the Montreal Standard. She left journalism in 1950 to pursue fiction writing. To that end, always needing autonomy and privacy, she moved to France.

In 1981, Gallant was honoured by her native country and made an Officer of the Order of Canada for her contribution to literature. That same year she also received the Governor General's Award for literature for her collection of stories, Home Truths. In 1983-84, she returned to Canada as the University of Toronto's writer-in-residence. In 1991 Queen’s University awarded her an honorary LL.D. In 1993 she was promoted to Companion of the Order of Canada.

In 1989, Gallant was made a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2000, she won the Matt Cohen Prize, and in 2002 the Rea Award for the Short Story. The O. Henry Prize Stories of 2003 was dedicated to her. In 2004, Gallant was awarded a Lannan Literary Fellowship.

With Alice Munro, Gallant was one of a few Canadian authors whose works regularly appeared in The New Yorker. Many of Gallant’s stories had debuted in the magazine before subsequently being published in a collection.

Although she maintained her Canadian citizenship, Gallant continued to live in Paris, France since the 1950s.

On November 8, 2006, Mavis Gallant received the Prix Athanase-David from the government of her native province of Quebec. She was the first author writing in English to receive this award in its 38 years of existence.

Reviews

[J. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Seedy Madrid
Mavis Gallant's collection of short fiction makes its calm and careful approach to the world very slowly in the first few stories. Often enough it is a case of losing the way, of disorientation, of trying to map the situation at hand.

I was not by any means in first youth, and I could not say that the shape of my life was a mystery. But I felt I had done all I could with free will, and that circumstances, the imponderables, should now take a hand. I was giving them every opportunity. I was in a city where I knew not a soul, save the few I had come to know by chance. It was a city where the mentality, the sound of the language, the hopes and possibilities, even the appearance of the people in the streets, were as strange as anything I might have invented. My choice in coming here had been deliberate; I had a plan. My own character seemed to me ill-defined; I believed that this was unfortunate, and unique. I thought that if I set myself against a background into which I could not possibly merge that some outline would present itself. But it hadn't succeeded, because I adapted too quickly. In no time at all, I had the speech and the movements and very expression on my face of seedy Madrid.

As we go, the traveler is beset by the strange sense of standing still, with the idea of finding the way --of orientation-- becoming increasingly irrelevant to the scenery at hand.

What begins as snippets of immediate experience in these stories broadens out to a wider appreciation of the situation overall. So what the reader gets is an elliptical rendering of things, often a kind of up-ended view of the Expatriate experience of new places. Deft, oblique and chopped up in the Cuisinart of that kind of mid-century modern authorial voice ... that lets the off-hand observation and the disingenuous remark speak for themselves.

Nice, Nearly
Alongside the mainstream flow of badly-intersecting hopes and wishes, Ms Gallant has a well tuned sense of surface tensions-- atmospheric, scenic, flora-- and how they adapt and conceal the situation. And also how they may mirror it.

The house was full of ants, and the windows, which were dirty, were smeared with rain. The most disobliging sight in nature was provided by the view--palm trees under a dark sluice of rain. Beyond a drenched hedge stood a house exactly like Aunt Val's, with spires, minarets, stained-glass windows; possibly it, too, contained a drawing room stuffed with ferns and sheeted sofas. The houses were part of a genteel settlement, built in an era of jaunty Islamic-English design, in a back pocket of the Riviera country. The district was out of fashion, crumbling, but the houses persisted; dragging their rock gardens, their humped tennis courts, they marched down the slope of a tamed minor Alp. In the old days, Aunt Val said, except for the trees and the climate and the conversation of servants, one needn't have ever known this was France.

Only some of the stories here lead across transition points; more often they only lead up to the transitions, and halt. In the grand British tradition we're led along the mangy paths of stifled resentment, unspoken hostilities, and then up onto the high street of Making Do.

Sounds kind of wearying, but it's done masterfully and the puzzle only comes together in the telling. A lot of the going or staying or agonizing is in the service of Orientation, of finding the way.

Gibraltar Straits
In this pared-down style of short story, there really isn't room for much foreground drama, so a lot of the progress is below those slowly moving surface tensions. Little shifts tell of great seismic pressures building below the appearances.

In one story situated near Gibraltar-- itself a compact metaphor for both orientation and transition, an ostensibly Spanish peninsula ruled by the British-- we have shadowy signifiers constantly making tracks across the groomed walks and driveways. Smugglers, perhaps refugees, regularly sneak across the undergrowth of the story, providing a kind of background noise of discontent, of unsettled scores. Gibraltar itself never notices, never nods, only acquiesces, as do the author's characters, people who are stuck on some borderline frontier of their own.

[Karim Rhayem · Rating 2 out of 5]

[2/5]: The book is cute, but simply did not interest me, or grab my attention. I felt very far from the characters and the stories, even though they are novellas.

[E.S.O. · Rating 1 out of 5]

I heard about Mavis Gallant from The New Yorker, Selected Shorts another literati magazine. I'd never heard of her before but I thought, "Well, she must be the writer's writer." The French Canadian left her husband and her career as a journalist to move to France to pursue fiction writing. She lives in France still.

She has always pursued autonomy and privacy. She hasn't remarried and she has arranged her life so she could be a writer. I admire that. "Only independence matters."

I'm not a big fan of her writing, however. Her striving for autonomy made me feel alienated as a reader. Her stories were too logical. I didn't feel an emotional connection at all. She is a skilled language technician, and an intellectual--two things I admire--but her work lacks heart. It isn't grounded in visceral emotions. I didn't like it.

It must be a matter of taste. I like writers who make me feel like they've stuck a pencil in my gut. I like writers who assault my heart first and my head second. Heck even David Mamet, as stiff and verbose as he is, is a master at pulling your emotions. After reading 7 of Gallant's stories, I couldn't remember the differences between them.

[Frank · Rating 5 out of 5]

As good as any of her collections are: there doesn't seem to be a dud among them. Although published in 1988, this collection features stories from the fifties and sixties that had not yet been published in book form. Not that this matters: what's remarkable in Gallant's output is how consistent her quality is. Reading any of her stories, one would be hard put to say whether it is 'early' or 'late' Gallant: there seems to be no early or late, she hatched full-fledged from the egg as soon as her first story was published in the New Yorker in 1951..
A highlight for me in this collection was the intricate polyphony of three inner voices during a single visit to the Bolshoi opera in New Year's Eve: three characters (an elderly couple and the twentysomething girl friend of their dead daughter who's paying them a holiday visit), all three at cross-purposes with each other and the world, painted in all their illusions and desillusions with a sharpness and an eye for telling detail that suggests the richness of a novel rather than a fifteen page short story.

[Jane · Rating 4 out of 5]

On many days my only time to read is on the subway so I either read a New Yorker story, but some of these are hit-and-miss, or hunt for books that are delightful but can be read in short increments - these are hard to find. I am savouring the stories in this book–it is set in places I associate with vacation so it's a good escape, but what makes it a keeper for me is that the stories are so well-crafted that I will re-read sentences I have just read for fun, and in hopes of figuring out the magic of the structure.

[S]

Every issue of the New Yorker includes a piece of short fiction that is invariably elegant and compelling. The story, whatever it might be, pulls you along and pulls you along until the very end, where it dumps you off and peaces the hell out, leaving you angry and shouting, "Is that it?!"

Mavis Gallant was much beloved of the New Yorker.

[Judith · Rating 4 out of 5]

In Transit offers twenty of Mavis Gallant’s shortest stories, all depicting transitory situations. Some are lightly felt glimpses of expatriates between destinations, or as in “April Fish,” bemoaning their present location— “Because of the income tax I am not free. I am compelled to live in Switzerland.” Others are deeply moving, such as, “An Emergency Case,” which allows us to understand the thoughts of a little English boy who is recovering from a car accident in Geneva. He has no idea that his parents died in the accident because the doctor told him his parents are now in heaven. Since his parents often travel to places he knows nothing about, he is confident his mother will come to get him and take him home, and determined he will go with nobody else.

The way I felt about the ups and downs of this collection reminded me of a quote I came across in Wikipedia:—
“In her critical book Reading Mavis Gallant, Janice Kulyk Keefer says, ‘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.’”

[Abby · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Hal stolidly tried to put together the egg puzzle he had bought in the early days, at the Palais-Royal. He had all the pieces, nothing was missing, but still could not make it whole. Dorothy pulled everything she knew apart and started from the beginning. My mother looked like Lady Something in a Holbein. George was a swallow. My mother was the net.”

— Last lines of “The Statues Taken Down”

Unreal. Utterly enamored with these gorgeously rendered stories. Each story stands alone, wholly independent from its predecessors, and Gallant manages this effortless style, creating characters that are at once entirely like us and fully alien. Ashamed that this is the first time I have read her and now committed to consuming everything else she did.

Favorite stories
“The Wedding Ring”
“An Emergency Case”
“The Statues Taken Down”
“When We Were Nearly Young”
“In Transit”
“Better Times”

[Glen · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have an older edition of this collection which concludes with "Good Deed". As the title implies these are stories of people temporarily residing in countries not their own. Most of the stories are set along or near the French or Italian Rivieras, at least one in Spain, a couple in Switzerland, but all tell tales of those whose luck was better once upon a time, and who are now either looking down the barrel of impending mortality, or looking forward in desperation for one more lucky roll of the die, or looking back over what used to be and will never more be again. Gallant is fond of the apparent non sequitur which also is meant to function as epiphany. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, but I found the stories overall to be rather laborious to read without quite enough payoff to justify the effort.

[Bel]

a few really excellent stories (when we were nearly young was my favourite), though things got pretty surreal by the last few. overall a fun blend of humour and cynicism that makes her short stories very enjoyable to read.

[Will · Rating 3 out of 5]

One of Mavis Gallant’s slighter books. The exception is the final story, “New Year’s Eve” (frequently reprinted elsewhere), which is one of her better ones.

[Saint Akim · Rating 4 out of 5]

pas ses meilleures histoires, mais Mavis Gallant reste un génie de son art.

[kate]

s/o sophies mom for putting me on this one!!!! (she doesnt know i know ……. i am a snoop)

[Elizabeth Strauch]

I’m never not reading Mavis Gallant. Her stories are my bedside staple.

[Carrie Snyder · Rating 5 out of 5]

brilliance

[Dani (The Pluviophile Writer) · Rating 3 out of 5]

For the full review, visit The Pluviophile Reader: http://wp.me/p3VFNP-6k

3/5 stars.
Read from July 22 to August 13, 2014.
Paperback, 199 pages.

Mavis Gallant was highly recommended to me from a good friend of mine and I finally took the time to follow-up in this recommendation. Mavis is a talented writer but I don't think her writing it for everybody.

While born in Canada, Mavis actually spent most of her life in France, which is extremely apparent in this collection of stories. Her writing felt very European as every story in this book was set somewhere in Europe and the tone and the personality of the writing and characters had a very European feel. If I had not know that Mavis was Canadian I would have presumed that she was a European, writing about Europeans, for Europeans, and maybe the latter of the two are true. However, this could also be because the stories seemed to reflect a period of time around the 1950s, a time frame that I found difficult to relate to in her writing, so her characters and their woes felt very foreign to me.

What I was able to appreciate in her work is how well the theme of being 'in transit' is used in each individual story. All of the characters in this collaboration of short stories is going through a phase of change, revelation, growth or progress in their personal lives. Mavis details the struggles, and often the options that the characters have in order to proceed through the phase of change that they're faced with, but every story ends right before the pinnacle of the characters decision. I found this jarring at first but by the time I finished the book I saw how fitting it really was.


While I wasn't overly enthralled with this collection I haven't given up on Mavis yet. I think that her writing is good and it reminds me of Hemingway, which I have a love/hate relationship with. So like Hemingway, I'd like to read more of her work to get a better feel for her. Overall I would recommend this book to anyone who has also recently found themselves 'in transit'.

[Julie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this 20 years ago and when Gallant passed, I wanted to revisit her writing. My opinion of her, over the course of reading this collection of short stories, went from 1-2 stars initially to 4+ stars by the end of the book. I was ready to put it down and give up after the first 3-4 stories because I found her style coldly descriptive, analytical, and lacking in heart. But I was trapped on a plane with nothing else to read, so I kept going. I began to find her characters more intriguing as people, more multidimensional. Gallant focuses on wayward North American and European expats and immigrants, largely set in Southern Europe. Their external situations gave shape to their inner lives, and Gallant dissects without sentiment these inner lives -- women trapped in marriages, mistresses vying for primacy and failing, helpless pseudo-aristocrats dependent on the vague hope of family money, meddling manipulative older women. I came to experience Gallant's style as a kind of condensed precision rather than a cold distanced observation. She skillfully exposes the range of intrigue and drama inherent in even the most mundane-seeming lives.

[Paige · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mavis Gallant writes graceful, psychologically astute short stories (many of them here deal with English/U.S./Canadian expatriates living in Europe). She ranks right up there with my other favorite Canadian fiction writers - Margaret Atwood, Carol Shields, Alice Munro and Robertson Davies.

[David W. · Rating 2 out of 5]

I know I should like this book but found it very frustrating
Short stories - found that they did not have good endings
and sometimes wondered what the hell the story was actually about
stopped reading it.

[Richard Toth · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mostly brilliant.

[Cindy · Rating 4 out of 5]

At first I couldn't get into the stories. So slow, what's this about? So I set it aside for a few months and found I was missing her writing. Good reading :)

[Laura · Rating 3 out of 5]

My last attempt at a short story book.