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  • Varieties of Exile: New Essays on Mavis Gallant
  • Neil Besner (bio)
Nicole Côté and Peter Sabor, editors. Varieties of Exile: New Essays on Mavis Gallant Peter Lang 2002. 127. US $45.95

The tone and tenor of Mavis Gallant's 'Varieties of Exile' - one of her justly famous, semi-autobiographical Linnet Muir stories - continue to resonate in Canadian criticism, having now reappeared as the title of a second book (the first was Hallvard Dahlie's 1986 monograph on Canadian fiction, subtitled The Canadian Experience). This striking new collection, distilled from the 1999 Paris symposium of the same title on Gallant, collects four essays, each of them valuably different, on Gallant's art - by Danielle Schaub, Janice Kulyk Keefer, Agnès Whitfield, and Marta Dvorak, seasoned Gallant critics or translators all; and, just as or more valuably, offers the first intriguing openings into what I hope will soon become a more sustained study of all of the issues attending the translation of Gallant's writing into French.

The collection is ably introduced by Nicole Côté, who astutely points to the vital functions of irony in Gallant's fiction and then briskly summarizes the essays. Over the last twenty years, virtually every Gallant critic has pointed to the signal importance of irony in her fiction, but there remains much to be done here; Côté's commentary should help to move Gallant criticism in that direction, as should Schaub's extended discussion in her essay of the 'destabilizing double edge'of Gallant's irony. Kulyk Keefer's essay, grounded in her long-standing familiarity with Gallant's uses and views of European history, provides a passionate and sharp-eyed reading of two of Gallant's recent stories about Polish émigrés in Paris, while Whitfield's essay, through a careful reading of 'Across the Bridge,' astutely points to the connections between two kinds of distance in Gallant's fiction: the various (and much-remarked) strategies of deferral in her writing, and the 'singularly complex and paradoxical inter-linguistic and intercultural context from which she writes as an expatriate author.' And Dvorak's piece, drawing richly on her expertise in rhetorical analysis, gives us a carefully detailed reading of Gallant's style by considering the syntax of her sentences in 'Orphan's Progress.' (It is interesting that 'Orphan's Progress' has attracted the attention, twenty years apart, of two of Europe's most subtle critics of Gallant's stories: Michel Fabre's essay, '"Orphan's Progress," Reader's Progress: Le "on-dit" et le "non-dit" chez Mavis Gallant' appeared in 1983.) [End Page 580]

Much as I learned from each of these four pieces and the introduction, though, it is the two last sections (a table ronde and a question-and-answer session with Gallant) that I found most exciting, because they focus on translation - always a subject rife with its own complexities, but particularly intriguing in Gallant's case. Here we have a writer fluent in English and in French, with strong views (stated, for example, in her much-quoted 'An Introduction' to Home Truths in 1981, and alluded to here again) on the worlds of difference between the two languages and cultures, who for decades worked in Paris entirely in English; it is only fairly recently that her work has begun to be translated into French. It is fascinating to listen in on translators, critics, and Gallant (her voice and views remain entirely unmistakable, in English and in French) as they discuss, mainly in French, the challenges of translating her work. As these spirited discussions show, Gallant remains wonderfully certain that the writer's and the critic's worlds are quite separate; it is to the credit of the book's editors that the sparks of these live talks still fly up from the page. Much more needs to be said about translating Gallant; meanwhile, we can be thankful that Côté, Sabor, and their colleagues have opened the doors, some windows, and looked into some deep mirrors in a many-storied house.

Neil Besner

Neil Besner, Department of English, University of Winnipeg

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