It’s impossible to binge Mavis Gallant’s stories. For me, it’s actually even impossible to binge a single one of Mavis Gallant’s stories. Each line is so loaded with impressions and feelings and there are sentences which I need to read several times in a row to even get the gist of. But it’s probably most advisable to just read the story through, then come back to it over the next days (months? years?) and let it take shape in your head. ‘Voices Lost in Snow’ is the perfect example. “Dark riddles filled the corners of life because no enlightenment was thought required”, Gallant writes. Each word, perfectly placed to give childhood its atmosphere. Adult Linnet tells the story of a Saturday afternoon when she went with her father to visit her godmother, Georgie. But the story is so much more than that. It is about the distance between childhood perception and adult understanding, about the way memories shift and take on new meanings as we grow older. As a child, Linnet moves through the world with a sense of unquestioning acceptance, absorbing but not fully grasping the grown-up conversations around her. She sees but cannot yet interpret. The past, as adult Linnet remembers it, is fragmented, shaped by a child’s logic, where certain things are felt rather than known. It is the adult Linnet who recognizes what was hidden in the past moments—the absences, the evasions, the things left unsaid. In Gallant’s story childhood is a time of mystery, filled with codes and signals that only later come into their full bloom.
First published in The New Yorker, April 5, 1976, and available to subscribers to read here. Collected in Varieties of Exile, The New York Review of Books, 2003, and The Collected Stories of Mavis Gallant, Bloomsbury, 2004; also The Collected Stories of Mavis Gallant, Everyman’s Library, 2016
A Personal Anthology 