"Florida" - A Short Story by Mavis Gallant - 1969
You may read today's story here
Included in The Collected Short Stories of Mavis Gallant
Buried in Print's Mavis Gallant Project
Mavis Gallant
April 11, 1922 - Montreal
1950 - moves to Paris
September 1, 1951- publishes, in The New Yorker, her first short story. She would publish 116 stories in The New Yorker.
February 18, 2014 - passes away in her beloved Paris
Buried in Print is doing a full read through of the short stories of Mavis Gallant,one of the masters of the form. She began in March 2017 and anticipates finishing in the fall of 2020. I have access to about half of her stories and have been following along as I can since March 25, 2017, starting with "The Other Paris". The full schedule is on her blog and all are invited to join the project.
There are four short stories about the Carette Sisters, from Montreal. I have now read all but the first of them.
THE CARETTE SISTERS 1933 (1985/8) The Chosen Husband (1985) From Cloud to Cloud (1985) Florida (1985)
As I read on in the short stories of Mavis Gallant, I do not sense any great fondness for Canada and less for America. Maybe I am reading this into her stories from her leaving Canada and never coming back.
I see Florida motels in the lines below as kind of a symbol for an empty culture:
"BERTHE CARETTE’S SISTER, Marie, spent eight Christmases of her life in Florida, where her son was establishing a future in the motel industry. Every time Marie went down she found Raymond starting over in a new place: His motels seemed to die on his hands."
Berthe has lived with her sister ever since her husband died in 1969. Raymond is presented as pretty much a failure, a man of little substance. He fought in the Vietnamese war, he says in a snide remark to his mother that he had heard better French in Saigon than Montreal. You have to wonder what a Canadian young man disliked so much he had to go to war in Vietnam to escape.
When Raymond picks his mother at the airport he has his wife Mimi with him. He never told his mother earlier of his marriage.
All of the relationships are left for us to ponder. I wondered why he married Mimi.
In just under ten pages Gallant gives us three lives, four if you count
the sister, two countries, two cities, Cleveland comes in for some knocks.
Mel u
2 comments:
I agree that she found her niche in France and did not appear to miss much about North American culture if one takes her characters' experiences and her own decision to remain in France for the duration of her days as evidence.
As for our hero in this tale, I feel as though he must have had a very difficult childhood and young-adulthood. I feel like his need to hide his cowboy outfit (so dramatic, possibly too flashy for a conservative father in a religious family) at his aunt's house reveals a much deeper injury (and I think the war would have contributed to that sadness and anger). This is one of the sadder tales in the quartet, I felt, even though some of the others are more obviously about grief and adjustment.
I love the spaces between the four stories, spaces we readers have to fill ourselves: the unrecorded wedding night of Marie and her dull husband, the presumably empty sex life, the impact of their estrangement on the only child. Gallant wasn't a novelist manque.
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