Underneath the rumblings of revolution and the sparkling notes spilling over like champagne, Chopin’s music reaches for something far away… far away in distance, or in memory. The bulk of the work written in Paris, and yet they speak of other landscapes, of nostalgia for an irretrievable time and place, of exile, of home or the lack of it.
So were and so do Mavis Gallant’s Paris Stories. Had Gallant’s heart been brought home in a jar of cognac whilst the body remained in Paris, perhaps it would also have been found to be larger than the average human heart.
But how those hearts, Chopin’s and hers, continue to beat through the music, through the stories!
“Like every other form of art, literature is no more and nothing less than a matter of life and death.” — Mavis Gallant
The Book-Butterfly 