Mavis Gallant, "From the Fifteenth District" (Canada)

It’s December 17. Welcome back to the 2021 Short Story Advent Calendar—a literary globetrotting adventure featuring 25 stories from 25 different countries.

Our editor, Alberto Manguel, is providing daily commentary on each of the stories he selected for this year’s calendar.

Here he is on Mavis Gallant’s story, “From the Fifteenth District”:

Mavis Gallant spent most of her adult life in Paris, chronicling with an anthropologist’s eye the customs of native Parisians and foreigners, and the remembered landscape of her native Quebec. The fantastic rarely intrudes in her writing—“the real world is fantastic enough for me,” she once said—but this story is a wonderful example of her ability in this little-frequented field. Ghosts, Gallant knew, inhabit the world we call real, and her narrator chronicles in careful detail three such hauntings in the fifteenth district of Paris. Evident here are Gallant’s mordant humour, her visceral dislike of stupidity of any sort, and the documentary exactness demanded of her as writer of several decades for the New Yorker magazine.

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