Paris Notebooks: Essays and Reviews by Mavis Gallant (review)

100 LETTERS IN CANADA 19tsb . in figures ranging from Philoctetes and Paris to Buddy Bolden culminate in immediate experience in the latest collection, Secular Love. While avoiding 'excessive subjectivity, solipsistic self-dramatization, and sentimentality ,' Ondaatje has not lost 'the full texture of emotional immediacy through a too impersonal and objective artistry' (p 130). When Solecki suggests that Ondaatje in withdrawing into greater subjectivity has 'painted [himself] into a corner,' the poet defends himself, saying that Tin Roof, his most confessional work to date, is part of the larger Secular Love. In effect, the confessional mode does not mark the end of a phase but becomes the beginning of a new phase in his writing career. In the selection and arrangement of essays, Solecki's editorial skills are excellent. Spider Blues is a well-organized collection of essays that will prove useful to all students of Ondaatje's poetry. Here the major critical issues and the movement of Ondaatje's work are outlined for the reader in an orderly sequence of essays. (R.F. GILLIAN HARDING-RUSSELL) Mavis Gallant. Paris Notebooks:Essays and Reviews Macmillan. 249· $24·95 Gallant's Paris Notebooks? One could simply trot out superlatives and exhort the reader to buy: surely there is no better guarantee of lucidity, acuity, elegant intelligence than the name Mavis Gallant attached to a text. One could also devise an emblem for Gallant's kind of prose: one of those highly polished, multifaceted crystals hung up in a north-facing window, glinting and giving off flashes of colour. Because Gallant works to remain 'invisible' in her fiction ('What is Style?') it is a particular delight to have the Paris Notebooks, illuminated as they are by revelations of the mind and heart of this most private of writers. The first two essays in Paris Notebooks are incomparable. They present Gallant's troubled personal experience of 'the events in May' - the French student uprising of 1968 - and, in 'Immortal Gatito: the Gabrielle Russier Case,' her dispassionate analysis of some of the most complex as well as flagrant inequities of France's social and legal systems. Both essays reveal Gallant's unsentimental admiration for such qualities as dignity, generosity and courage, and foreground her passionate concern for justice.These texts establish the compassionate clarity of Gallant's vision, and those critics who have complained about the chilling opacity and brittle irony of Gallant's fiction may now be able to view her oeuvre with wider, more perceptive eyes. Moreover, her evocation of the 'events in May' is of compelling interest as a historical document which uncovers the reality of 'siege psychosis' and 'collective hallucination,' and refuses to force the confusion and complexity of the events and issues of May 1968 into any closed system or tidy thesis. t1UMANITlES 109 One can read the rest of Paris Notebooks for the sheer pleasure of watching a perfectly bicultural as well as bilingual mind at work. Gallant remarks in 'The Events in May' that ordinarily she never feels like a foreigner in France: certainly she is at home in the more obscure corners as well as in the widest corridors of French literature. (One regrets, however , the absence of any essay on Gallant's beloved Proust, or for that matter on Louis Hernon, whom she declares her 'favorite Frenchman.') Her piece on Marguerite Yourcenar is especially illuminating. One can even tease out certain important similiarities between the fictive worlds created by Yourcenar and Gallant: a shared pessimism about the possibilities of human relationships, for example. Less helpful, perhaps, are Gallant's own musings on fiction: 'What is Style' seems more a marvellously cadenced verbal smokescreen than a theory of fiction. Style and structure are inseparable, writing must be alive rather than dead, good writers must read in order to write well - these are, after all, truths self-evident. But then, Paris Notebooks often expresses impatience with theoretical cant and elaborate critical methodologies, and Gallant deplores the products and heirs of the 'appalling jargon, the claustrophobia, the humorless self-possession' of French intellectual life in the 1970S (,Hearts and Minds: The Common Journey of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre'). Gallant herself is superb in her treatment of...