The Captive Neice - A Short Story by Mavis Gallant - 1969

The Captive Neice - A Short Story by Mavis Gallant

Buried in Print's Mavis Gallant Project

This story is included in two collections, In Transit and The Collected Short Stories of Mavis Gallant

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

I am reading along as best I can, having access to only about half of her stories, with Buried in Print on their read through of the Short Stories of Mavis Gallant.  

"The Captive Neice" has two central characters, a woman, guessing in her early twenties and a man, her loved and maybe can be seen as her captor, thirty nine years old.  For sure you will find him very annoying.  At first he keeps calling himself an old man then it is revealed he is just thirty nine.  The woman was raised by her aunt, her parents having passed.  The live together in a low rent hotel.  He stays in an reads and smoked cigarettes, the room reeks of them but it is too cold to open the window.

We are left to our imagination in deciding how their relationship began, where their money comes from and 

perhaps most of all, why the woman does not just move on.  She is 

pursuing a job in the theater.  The man seems to know the exalted man for whom she is auditioning.  They have words over this.

This is another story about a relationship that on the face of it makes little sense.  We are left to ponder the couple's 

past and future.

"The Dredgeman's Revelation" by Karen Russell

"The Dredgeman's Revelation"  by Karen Russell    (2010, 11 pages)

This is my first short story by Karen Russell.  (1981, Miami, Florida, USA)She is the author of a short story collection St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves (I have not read it but I love the title) while her second book was a novel Swamplandia set in an amusement park in the swamps of the Florida Everglades.   She has won numerous awards.   I know she has a new collection book of short stories being published today, Vampires in the Lemon Grove:  Stories which I predict will get a lot of attention form those in the book blog world who love short stories, as I do.   I was looking through one of the short story anthologies I am in possession of, Twenty Under Forty:   Stories from the New Yorker and I was happy to find a story by Russell included.   The anthology is a collection short stories by authors under forty that the editor, Deborah Treisman feels show great promise.  Treisman has been a fiction editor for The New Yorker for 15 years so she is in a position of significant influence in the contemporary short story world.    The New Yorker has done more to advance the art of the short story than any other publication in at least the last 100 years and maybe ever.   It helped lots of Irish short story writers.   Some say it has also shaped the modern short story as people write works hoping their top paying editors will like.

"The Dredgeman's Revelation" is set in the Florida Everglades in the early 1930s.   The United States was in the grips of a terrible depression, much worse than the economic issues it has suffered in the last decade.  The story opens with the birth of Louis Thanksgiving in a New York City charity hospital.    His unwed mother whose name the hospital did not know named him Louis after his mother died.   He was sent to a foundlings home.   Along with other babies he was advertised as up for adoption and they were then put on a train to the middle west of the USA where he was adopted by a farmer who used him as a slave.  He ran away at 16.   The skipped around the country looking for work and he ended up in south Florida.  He got a job working on a crew that was draining parts of the Everglades for development.  Conditions were terrible, food was horrible and the work was dangerous but Louis did not mind as he had never known anything better.  The men on the crew were the closest to friends or family he ever had.      

Russell does a very good job of letting us see what life was like for the Dredgemen, as the workers were called.  Florida in the early 1930s was not  Miami Glitz and Disney world.  It was a very different world than most think of now and I really liked how Russell this story helps us understand just how hard life was for the people in those times.

"Florida, in those days, was a very odd place: a peninsula where the sky itself rode overland like a blue locomotive, clouds chuffing across marshes; where orange trees and orderly rows of vegetables gave way to deep woods and then, farther south, broke into an endless acreage of ten-foot grass. This, finally, was the vision that reached Louis through the boxcar door: a prairie that looked as vast as the African savanna."

Am amazing surreal event takes place at the end of the story.    It involves elements of Magic Realism and it is really powerful.

I enjoyed this story and will await curiously to see how her new collection is received.

"An Honest Exit" by Dinaw Mengestu Project 196 Ethiopia

"An Honest Exit" by Dinaw Mengestu  (2010, 18 pages)

Ethiopia

Project 196

Country 15 of 196

Dinaw Mengestu

1. Georgia 
2. Canada
3. U. S. A.
4. The Republic of Korea
5. Antigua and Barbuda 
6. Haiti
7. Trinidad and Tobago 
8. Ukraine
9. Cameroon
10. Botswana
11. Sudan
12. Dominica 
13. Israel
14. Syria
15. Ethiopia

If you are a publisher that has an anthology that is done in the 196 spirit, please contact me as I will be spotlighting appropriate collections.  

At first I thought I was setting myself an impossible task but a bit of research has made me optimistic  that I can find a short story from all 196 countries in the world.   I feel this part of the project will be completed.   I also hope to publish a contemporary short story from an author from all 196 countries and I know this is a crazy idea.

If you are Ethiopian and are interested in having one of your short stories read by my readers, please contact me.

Located in the Horn of Africa, Ethiopia has a population of 92,000,000.  I found it interesting to learn it was the most populous landlocked country in the world.   Ethiopia is a multicultural and lingual country.  The majority of the population are Christians, one third Muslim.  The remaining practice a wide variety of religions.  There was once a sizable population of Jews in Ethiopia but they have almost all now migrated to Israel.  Ethiopia was not colonized by a European power until 1936, when, in an incredibly cowardly disgraceful action, the Italians attacked the country and converted it to a colony.   In 1941 when the British drove the Italians out of the country Emperor Haile Selassie re-entered Addis Ababa and returned to the throne.    Ethiopia has played an important part on the world historical stage since very ancient times.  (There is an excellent article on the history of the country here.)    

"An Honest Exit" by Dinaw Mengestu (1978, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia) was first published in The New Yorker.  I read it in the anthology 20 Under 40:  Stories From the New Yorker (2010).   The story is told in the first person by a professor of English whose father fled Ethiopia for America.  The teacher is sees the irony in his teaching English literature and composition to young Americans.  He seems a decent enough teacher but his connection to his students has always been just professional.  Then one day he begins to tell his students the story of how his father left Ethiopia for Sudan and ended up years later in America.  

The old fashioned device of a story within a story is perfectly done here.  The professor's telling of this story kept his students very interested, they now saw him as a real person, not just a teacher.  I found the details of  the life of an Ethiopia refugee in Sudan and his father's eventual escape from the country totally fascinating and very edifying.   Mengestu made the father's experiences very real for his readers. 

Author Data


Dinaw Mengestu is the author of The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears, a Los Angeles Timesbestseller and Seattle Reads pick of 2008, as well as the forthcoming novel How To Read the Air. He was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in 1978. In 1980, he immigrated to the United States with his mother and sister, joining his father, who had fled Ethiopia during the Red Terror. He is a graduate of Georgetown University and Columbia University’s MFA program in fiction and the recipient of a 2006 fellowship in fiction from the New York Foundation for the Arts and a 5 Under 35 Award from the National Book Foundation in 2007. He has written for Rolling Stone andHarper's, among other publications. He lives in New York City.