Reading Mavis Gallant in a rainy car.

The Remission - Mavis Gallant

Mavis Gallant Born, August 11, 1922

I have found that with my research into the author of this short – Mavis Gallant, that I developed and appreciation of the story much more after dashing through her life bundled together for me on the net.

With my years of searching, finding, distilling out the most useful parts of a requested subject, and delivering clean material - my ability to absorb important and meaningful information happens pretty rapidly.

One of the reasons why I need to slow down when I am reading these stories – to ingest them as I would pre-Google. There is something to be said for quick absorption but a slow digestion has its merits.

Discovering Gallant has been pleasurable. Once again, Elkin presents a “longer” story and I initially found it difficult to push through this one.

I actually wrote a post concerning my difficulties with this BASS volume but I am holding onto it a bit longer so that I may continue to gauge my problems.

When I assemble these posts, my first step is usually to find a picture of the author. This allows me to get slightly closer. Look into their eyes, to imagine what they were thinking when they wrote the story. Who are they? What have they done? What will they do?

I found several shots of Gallant and included my favorite with this post and my second in the next post. Both are of her when she was a few years younger. She remarked in an online article for Slate that a more recent photo of her looked like a boiled potato. A bit harsh on herself.

I was quite taken by the above photo. Where is she? What is she looking at? And, let’s be honest - she is in short – very pretty.

After I find a photo of the author, I do some back grounding of the author. Birth date, awards, quotes.

I then write a little piece about what the story gave to me and will offer my opinion and usually end up writing a bunch of nonsense.

Again, this whole project is for me. Talking to myself.

I have found that putting it online is convenient and will give those who stumble across it a little surprise or two. (Especially a living author who Googles themselves and happens across their name associated with an old story). I often think that my children will discover it someday and know a little more about their father. Children I don’t even have.

Below are some quotes that really stood out as I looked into Gallant.

Timothy Foote called Gallant "one of the prose masters of the age," and added that no modern writer "casts a colder eye on life, on death and all the angst and eccentricity in between."

Dictionary of Literary Biography essayist Ronald B. Hatch observed that the subject of children, "alone, frightened, or unloved," recurs often in Gallant's work.

Gallant told the New York Times: "I think it's true that in many, many of the things I write, someone has vanished. And it's often the father.

Foote (again) "Gallant rarely leaves helpful signs and messages that readers tend to expect of 'literature':

And it is this last observation that really stood out to me in retrospect as I assessed what “The Remission” gave me.

Within “The Remission” I found a lesson that has been presented to me in other forms in previous stories.

As much as we like to think that we are the center of the universe, the world keeps spinning... or stops spinning regardless of the influence we think we have over it. People around us, our family and loved ones, live their lives, lives that are both known to us and those that are secret. Changes occur within them that we can measure by alterations in their physical shape as well as their mental standing...but the most significant are usually the changes that occur within them that are only known to them.

We die and the world does not crumble as we disintegrate into the earth...days, weeks and years pass and finally, someday, we fail to exist even as a memory.

We have a short time on this earth. And then- we are gone forever.

Mavis gave me a needed gut-check with this story.

Score - 8 out of 10.

The One-Star Jew - David Evanier

This story took some getting used to. 

I hate that phrase.

Getting used to. I thought at one time the word was “ust”.

As in “getting ust to.”

I was under the impression that the word ust had a meaning unto itself.

Anyway, I had to look deeper into this story to find what it was attempting to teach me.

Again, I felt that this selection was an instruction into one’s place in life, a transition, as well as a discovery, of where one is positioned in the universe.

Are you Jewish? A Buddhist? A transcendentalist? An Atheist?

Can you be everything and nothing? Must you be grounded, or do you project a sense of being grounded to those you love and who you interact with our are you one who is soaring above the earth in your head...looking at the universe and all that it can become for you?

Is there a danger of not being grounded and flying too high? What is the limit?

As I’ve mentioned. I’m in a position in life where I am asking questions of myself in relation to where I stand with myself.

A spiraling circle of questions. I usually ask these questions on my runs where I spend over an hour or two or three on the road. I have plenty of time to think out there and to have an internal Q&A session with myself.

Rather than sitting still in a room concentrating on my breathing, I choose to spend my meditative moments on the road.

I like to think all of us go through life thinking about where we fit into this reality we live in, but, after working where I do, exploring what I do, I’m afraid that I believe that there is a low, dull monotone ringing across the mental landscape of a majority of my countryman’s minds. I just don’t see them thinking about themselves in a way that is as introspective as I would consider healthy for them.

I don’t need to get into a whole digression of where we are as a society an how we are now paying the price of what we have failed to see within ourselves over the past several decades. These stories will show that for me.

I just felt that this story was telling me that it was OK to settle back and constantly question where I am and where I am going.

It was a difficult story but one that provided and nice assuring lesson.

Score – 6 out of 10.

Long Calls – Frederick Busch

Frederick Busch August 1, 1941 - February 23, 2006

I have a couple of interviews open in my browser as I write this. They are interviews with the author of this selection. I am choosing not to read them before I write my piece on this story because I don’t want anything he says to contaminate what I want to write.

I did sneak a peak into one of the interviews, and it revealed that some of the discussion was going to be on the state of fiction during the time of the interview. (2005 – one year before his death)

The state of fiction is something that interest me and something that I think I have mentioned a few times in the past. I think, if I am careful, and my memory continues tio serve me that I will be able to see the different forms fiction and in particular the short story will take over the years as I read through these collections.

“Long Calls”.

This story served as a reminder that we all are worlds unto ourselves. We are and I am too guilty of this self absorption. We forget that everything that could and is going on in our lives, is simultaneously happening in someone else’s life...with a chance that it is impacting them, and those around them, with a greater degree of force than what is happening in your life at the moment.

David Foster Wallace did a nice job of illustrating this in his famous commencement speech.

I think though over the past few years, I have become better at realizing that the situation I am in now is one of relative ease and comfort. Things could be so much worse. I forget how lucky I am at times...but I do recognize that I am lucky.

Again, “Long Calls”, is a simple story giving us insight to the inner workings of a life, and the intersections, traffic, speed bumps and crashes that happen daily to people in our world.

We attempt to reach out to others, connect – heck, just survive with each other, passing along through this world, and at times we are met with characters that just are not agreeable with the current time we are in.

We need to keep in mind though that we can learn so much from everything, everybody we encounter. We need to see the signs and appreciate what others are trying to tell us. Open your eyes, and ears...your mind will follow.

Score – 7 out of 10.