From The Fifteenth District (2001) - Plot & Excerpts
rom the Fifteenth District by Mavis GallantThe late Mavis Gallant's stories are beguiling to readThe late Mavis Gallant’s stories are beguiling to read – they creep up on you slowly, until you find yourself devouring each mostly lengthy story, wanting more. This collection, first published in 1979, and now re-released at the end 2014 by Open Road Media, is peopled by ordinary characters, ordinary but for the fact that they are caught at the crossroads of European history, and their lives are shaped by the lengthy shadow of the second world war. Comprising nine stories, the collection opens with ‘The Four Seasons’ which sets the tone for the atmosphere of these stories. They are located in a Europe battling to come to terms with the destruction wrought by the war, and the displacement of those lives affected profoundly by it. In ‘The Four Seasons’, we are introduced to Carmela, somewhere on the French/Italian Riviera – the borders shift depending on who is in power, domestic maid to an English couple, the Unwins, and their three-year-old twins. Carmela becomes intertwined in their lives – to the point that towards the end she is no longer even receiving her salary. Chronically short of money, they promise when war breaks out that they will send her wages on, but we know that will never happen. Not quite friend, a maid who becomes entrenched in the family, the nervous Mrs Unwin relying on her more and more, Carmela draws on strengths the more privileged Unwins apparently have no access to. A compelling piece. The effects come almost as a post-script‘The Moslem Wife’, the second piece is a novella length tour de force. Netta Asher, the ‘Moslem wife’ of the title, takes over the lease of a hotel her father has run for years in the south of France. She marries her younger first cousin, Jack Ross, against her family’s wishes, but theirs is a happy marriage, bound by her loyalty to the business her father started, and Jack’s acceptance of life as the husband of a hotel manager, dabbling in his music. The atmosphere of a hotel on the French Riviera in the 1930s is vividly brought to life, and life flows slowly on, with its cast of characters, hotel guests, eccentrics who live at the coast and then Jack’s ailing mother who comes to stay. But war intervenes, once more, and as usual it will have a calamitous effect on all. The effects come almost as a post-script, long before that we are caught in the dramas of this world, Netta swirling at the circle of it all, and we, in turn, circle closer and closer to her. In equally astounding ‘The Remission’ we are once more on the Riviera – this time with another English couple – Alec and Barbara Webb in the 1950s. Alec is dying and the National Health can do nothing more for him. And so they bring their three children with them, with Alec preparing to die in the sun. A crumbling Edwardian home is purchased for them by family members, and they go down for what they believe will be a short time there. But the years drag on. Alec grows weaker and weaker; the children grow older and it’s the girl, Molly, who will be responsible for bringing another man, a part-time actor, into their mother’s lives. When Alec goes, as he will, he will barely be remembered, life carries on as it will, some lives leaving nothing behind but wisps. The hapless Barbara is not a conventionally attractive character with her reckless abandon, her laissez-faire attitude towards money and her children, but such is the strength of Gallant’s writing that we’re drawn to her despite all these failings, compulsively reading on, the light of the Riviera shining throughout the story, illuminating love, and the growth we all twist through as we go on through our lives. It’s a squalid, post war world, where the bath is rough enough to scour you and the flat reeks of tiredness and povertyEqually brilliant was ‘The Latehomecomer’. Here we are introduced to Thomas Bestermann in 1950, recently released back to Berlin after being a prisoner of war and being caught up in bureaucratic delays in France, like so many other ‘late homecomers’. He returns to the flat his mother now shares with her new husband, a detail she only tells him about when they are standing at the front door. It’s a squalid, post war world, where the bath is rough enough to scour you and the flat reeks of tiredness and poverty. His brother is still missing, and his mother, in her early forties, is tired and resigned, covering her smile when she laughs, hiding the missing teeth. Strangers now to each other, they must navigate that awful space between them, a place where words can’t correct the chasms of the past.Gallant's talent shines in this collection of post war lives ‘Potter’ meanwhile focuses closely on a fortysomething a Polish poet and translator who falls for a feckless twentysomething Canadian girl/woman, Laura. Piotr, called Potter by her, watches as Laura routinely disappears, goes off with another man to Venice, with reassurances that he’s only an ‘old friend’ although they might find themselves in bed together. Piotr has a wife back in Poland, but while that relationship continues to wither away, Laura rips him in two, and we follow his agonising destruction as love tears him apart: “He hesitated; where love was concerned he had lost his bearings.” A beautifully told story that gets to the heart of unrequited love and lust and takes us right into Piotr while also providing a glimpse into the enclosed world of an ex-pat Polish community in Paris. A meditative piece, a story that moves slowly across a day – ChristmasIn ‘His mother’ we peer through the glass inside a Budapest flat: a woman lives alone after her son has managed to get out to Scotland, this is back in the Communist days. He marries, has children and his mother watches from afar, her life filled with memories, the past, letters from her son, “the insignificant sadness of a lifetime” while she shares her flat with a grandfather, and his pregnant granddaughter. She cannot kick them out, they are too powerful, know too much. In the last story, ‘Irina’ we’re in central Europe now, where a woman who was once married to a powerful man now lives out her days in a flat with a new companion. When her grandson Riri comes to stay, he discovers that life has changed even for her. This is a meditative piece, a story that moves slowly across a day – Christmas – in lives that are quiet, yet no less ‘insignificant’ than any others. Gallant’s talent in this wonderful collection shines a powerful beam over these lives, over moments, days, decades where the world turns, and lives spin and change in the tumult of the times and all that’s left is to hold on, and accept.
“When the shutters are closed on a room, it is for sleep or for love” (39).“These families, by now plaited like hair…” (39)."'Religion is more than love. It is supposed to tell you why you exist and what you are expected to do about it'" (58).“‘I can’t be Venus and Barclay’s Bank. You have to choose’” (60).“‘I’ve discovered something else,’ she said abruptly. ‘It is that sex and love have nothing in common. Only a coincidence, sometimes. You think the coincidence will go on and so you get married. I suppose that is what men are born knowing and women learn by accident’” (60-61).“‘Send me some books. As long as they are in English. I am quite sick of the three other languages in which I’ve heard so many threats, such such boasting, such a lot of lying’” (63).“‘Sentiment does not keep families whole--only mutual pride and mutual money’” (64)."And I am going to be thirty-seven and I have a dark, an accurate, a deadly memory" (72).“...though in better times it might have interested that part of his mind he kept fallow…” (76).“Christening robes had been her special joy, but fewer babies were being baptized with pomp, while nylon was gradually replacing the silks and lawns she worked with such care. Nobody wanted the bother of ironing flounces and tucks in a world without servants” (79).“Only the children were made uneasy by these strange new adults, so squat and ill-favored, so quarrelsome and sly, destructive, of nature and pointlessly cruel to animals. But, then, the children had not read much, were unfamiliar with films, and had no legends to guide them” (81).“She saw, in the way he looked at her, that she had begun her journey south a wife and mother whose looks were fading, and arrived at a place where her face seemed exotic. Until now she had thought only that a normal English family had taken the train, and the caricature of one had descended. It amounted to the same thing--the eye of the beholder” (83)."Barbar and Wilkinson made jokes about the French widow-lady, but the children did not. To replace their lopped English roots they had grown the sensitive antennae essential to wanderers. They could have drawn the social staircase of Rivabella on a blackboard, and knew how low a step, now, had been assigned to them" (106)."I had put my hand over the name, leaving a perfect palm print. I said, 'I suppose there are no razor blades and no civilian shirts in Berlin. But some ass is already engraving nameplates'" (117)."Winter twilight must have been the prevailing climate here until an air raid let the seasons in" (123)."I sat with Martin at the table, where my mother had spread a lace cloth (the vanished tenants') and over which the April sun through lace curtains laid still another design" (125)."All the fat men of comic stories and of literature were to be Willy Wehler to me, in the future" (125)."The old man observed Gabriel closely, watching to see how his orphaned nephew had been brought up, whether he broke his bread or cut it, with what degree of confidence he approached his asparagus" (140). *I love that last part."'She was said to be taking singing lessons,' he added, as if there were something wrong with that" (141)."And it would not have been in Gabriel's power to equate banknotes to a child's despair" (146)."Released from immediate danger, a few of the aliens sat and stood straighter, looked nonchalant or offended, depending on how profound their first terrors had been" (148)."Another recalled that on the subject of personal riches Christ had been ambiguous yet reassuring" (148)."His friends preferred films in which women presented no obstacles and created no problems and were show either naked or in evening dress" (150)."A woman can always get some practical use from a torn-up life, Gabriel decided. She likes mending and patching it, making sure the edges are straight. She spreads the last shred out and takes its measure: 'What can I do with this remnant? How long does it need to last?' A man puts on hi life ready-made. If it doesn't fit, he will try to exchange it for another. Only a fool of a man will try to adjust the sleeves or move the buttons; he doesn't know how" (151)."He lived about sixteen thousand and sixty days, many of which he does not remember" (163)."Mrs. Essling would like relief from this charge. 'Angel' is a loose way of speaking. She is astonished that the Professor cannot be more precise. Angels are created, not born. Nowhere in any written testimony will you find a scrap of proof that angels are 'good.' Some are merely messengers; others have a paramilitary function. All are stupid" (167)."They lay like starfish, smoking in the strewn, scattered way of the downhearted" (170).“His smile was like a sentence uttered too soon” (190).“The pregnant girl’s social clockwork gave her Piotr along with the next course” (191).“He wondered if his discovery of chestnut meringues at Rumpelmayer’s tearoom in 1938 was of the slightest interest” (191).“...otherwise he was a demand, a claim, a dead weight on her life; he was like the soft, curled-up, dejected women who seemed to make an equal mess of love and cigarette ash” (192).“Piotr noticed that when the pair were alone they argued in French. It was their language for reproach and for justification” (194).“All that prevented him from weeping in the street was the thought that he had never seen a man doing that” (195)."As they neared the Seine he had a childlike Christmas feeling of expectancy, knowing that the lighted flank of Notre Dame would be reflected, trembling, on the dark water" (197)."Perhaps she meant this kindly, but even a doctor can have curious motives, especially one who shows her gums when she laughs, and whose husband gets up early to avoid being alone with her" (198).
What do You think about From The Fifteenth District (2001)?
From The Fifteenth District is a collection of short stories about European emigres trying to find their way in the world during and after World War II. Each story spotlights a relationship, aging, longing and a feelings of loss as some seem to not have a place in the world. I would highly suggest taking an afternoon or evening to read this; whilst it is not long, it ought to not be taken lightly. Ms. Gallant’s short stories are full of the human experience, of trying to find the usual things that we all search for in life. Yet in a world where war is occurring and the aftermath, it’s apparent that the lines are blurred in trying to find these things.Ms. Gallant’s style of writing is haunting, ethereal…I loved it. You will remember her writing and you may think of her as one of the greatest voices in literature. It is an acquired taste one might say. Honestly, I think when she passed away last year, we lost one of the greats. These passages are masterpieces and I do hope that you’ll consider given them a try. I don’t think you’ll regret it in the least. Bringing her own experiences to the page, her own emotions. Truly an amazing piece of literature
—Clarissa
It's almost unfair not to give this book five stars for failing to be consistent in the level of astonishing brilliance it sets out for itself. A bunch of the stories here are the best stories I've ever read-- they're slow and deep and human, giving life to so many quiet truths about youth, age, longing, and all that. "The Moslem Wife," obviously, and the fantastic "Potter," and at least half the stories along with them.However there are a couple of times when the stories drag a little bit or their purpose becomes obscure. These stories are still huge and strong, but next to their betters they're clearly not as fine as they could be. Still-- writing doesn't get a good deal better than this.
—Jesse
The more I read and reread Mavis Gallant, the more convinced I am that she was the greatest voice in fiction of the 20th century. Every story in this collection rings true, like a clear bell. She died early this year, leaving a hole deeper than any can fill, but she also left a lifetime of reflected experience, of shiny, gem-like stories about people living in imposed and self imposed isolation and sorrow, people who live on in small lives with small gestures of strength and hard won nonchalance; these short masterpieces are her treasure, the inheritance left to those still searching for moments of sense and reason in her clear, strong words.
—Michael
