Paris Notebooks

Starred review from July 31, 2023
This riveting compendium by Gallant (1922–2014), originally published in 1988 and long out-of-print, brings together the short story writer’s nonfiction from her time living as a Canadian expat in Paris in the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s. “The Events in May” offers a visceral, on-the-ground account of the May 1968 student uprising in Paris, as recorded by Gallant in her diary: “Police would charge past, sticks raised, roaring that awful roar of theirs, like a great animal.” Another standout, the tour de force “Immortal Gatito: The Gabrielle Russier Case,” interrogates how misogyny influenced the late 1960s scandal involving a 31-year-old Marseille school teacher who died by suicide after she was convicted for having a relationship with a 16-year-old male student. Gallant’s book reviews offer rollicking takes on some of the most revered French authors of the day, lampooning Simone de Beauvoir’s memoir All Said and Done (written, Gallant contends, in “a style that has the dazed, ruminative rhythm of a French schoolgirl chewing gum at a concert in time to Bach”) and making a case for Jean Giraudoux’s novel Lying Woman (“I am devoted to Giraudoux’s writing in the way that some people are Gaullists or vegetarians”). Gallant follows in the footsteps of fellow expats Gertrude Stein and James Baldwin in offering astute outsider observations on French literature and culture, marrying trenchant analysis with sinewy prose. This elegantly captures a changing France reckoning with the cultural revolutions of the mid-20th century.