Mavis Gallant, another Canadian writer, is the first writer I encountered where her short stories teemed with characters and different settings around the world. On courses, you’re told as a short story writer that it is better to have fewer characters. Space is tight. I say, just enjoy these stories as a reader and a trip around post war Europe.
Despite the generational difference, I identified strongly with the lives of expatriates in the stories. They made me think of my parents, expatriates too, living away from ‘home’ and getting to grips with a new culture, a new way of living with people who are thrown together by circumstance.
The collection was inspiring to me as a writer. I enjoyed travelling the world from Montreal to Manhattan, but Paris seems to anchor the collection. In Ultramarine, my short story collection, I have done the same – eleven stories, eleven different countries, anchored in the world. I think it can work.
First published in The New Yorker, February 1962, and collected in The Cost of Living: Early and Collected Stories, Bloomsbury, 2009
A Personal Anthology 