“I have lived in writing, like a spoonful of water in a river, for more than forty-five years,” Mavis Gallant writes in the preface to this landmark edition of her work [The Selected Stories of Mavis Gallant]. And because this year's winner of the Molson prize lives in writing with such intensity, such subtlety, such wide vision, she offers her readers the chance to experience the world differently, to have their own vision enlarged and clarified.

Reading this heavy book (she jokes in the preface that it finally had to be restricted to its present 887 pages because any larger and it “would have become one of those tomes that can't be read in comfort and that are no good except as a weight on sliced cucumbers”) can be done in two ways. The method Gallant recommends is not to treat the stories as chapters of novels. She advises: “Read one. Shut the book. Read something else. Stories can wait.” The alternative is to ignore her advice, be a Gallant gourmand and read the stories as they are presented: in groups of linked portraits or as many collections of several stories reflecting specific decades.

Greedy, I read the 35 stories that cover the thirties and forties, the fifties, the sixties, the seventies, the eighties and the nineties in one sitting and the 17 stories grouped under the titles of Linnet Muir, The Carette Sisters, Édouard, Juliette, Lena and Henri Grippes in another. Although all were familiar, from other collections and from The New Yorker, where all the stories (except “1933”) were initially published, they have a freshness and an added resonance that come from their arrangement in this book and from the added bonus of Gallant's autobiographical preface, describing her upbringing as an only child, her schooling in English and French, how English became the language of her imagination and how a story takes shape.

An intensely visual writer, she says that “the first flash of fiction occurs without words. It consists of a fixed image, like a slide or (closer still) a freeze frame, showing characters in a simple situation. … Every character comes into being with a name (which I may change), an age, a nationality, a profession, a particular voice and accent, a family background, a personal history, a destination, qualities, secrets, an attitude toward love, ambition, money, religion, and a private centre of gravity.” The slow process of transforming her material from image to fiction is compared to editing a film, until it “seems to tally with a plan I surely must have in mind but cannot describe, or when I come to the conclusion that it cannot be written satisfactorily in any other way; at least not by me.”

The satisfaction that comes from reading and re-reading Gallant's work lies in the lucid illuminations that arise from her compassionate portrayal of that inescapable junction where the political and the personal are indivisible. A Gallant story gives a sense of living in history, of understanding what it means to be in Time and in our time. Her characters are acutely aware or bewilderingly unaware of change and event. The knowing and unknowing, under her pen, are of equal complexity, worthy of our attention and respect. In “Kingdom Come,” the language scholar, Dr. Domini Missierna, muses on what he will do professionally with the rest of his life: “he could watch Europe as it declined and sank, with its pettiness and faded cruelty, its crabbed richness and sentimentality. Something might be discovered out of shabbiness—some measure taken of the past and the present, now that they were ground and trampled to the same shape and size.” In “1933,” the French-Canadian child Berthe, trying to understand what is happening to her world, “felt tears along her nose and inside her ears. Even while she sobbed out words of hope and comfort (Arno would never die) and promises of reassuring behaviour (she and Marie would always be good) she wondered how tears could flow in so many directions at once.”

Often the stories are shot through with a dazzling incandescence. Netta, in “The Moslem Wife,” meeting her husband for the first time after the Second World War in a café they used to frequent, turned to look for the waiter and “saw the last light of the long afternoon strike the mirror above the bar—a flash in a tunnel; hands juggling with fire. That unexpected play, at a remove, borne indoors, displayed to anyone who could look without blinking, was a complete story. It was the brightness on the looking glass, the only part of a life, or a love, or a promise that could never be concealed, changed or corrupted.” Reading Mavis Gallant, we expect to be shown how to look without blinking, to have light shed. That is not to say reading a Gallant story is to arrive at clear-cut meanings. Rather, it is to be immersed in lives, situations, to experience on a visceral level, to view from multiple angles.

Some stories—“Linnet Muir,” “The Carette Sisters,” “Edouard,” “Juliette,” “Lena,” “The Moslem Wife,” “The Four Seasons,” “The Fenton Child,” “Across the Bridge,” “The Remission”—needed much time to pass before they could be written. The rest, written contemporaneously to the decades they document, may refer to topical events, but they are not journalistic. Gallant, who worked on a Montreal weekly for several years as a feature writer before she left for Europe to write fiction, defines the difference between journalism and fiction as being “without and within.” She writes in the preface that “Journalism recounts as exactly and economically as possible the weather in the street; fiction takes no notice of that particular weather but brings to life a distillation of all weathers, a climate of the mind.”

The climate of the mind that Gallant offers in this book is like no other in contemporary fiction. She stands among the best writers of the century, the equal of Nabokov. Her fiction is polyphonic in its blending of voices and thoughts, Proustian in its sensate memory, Chaplinesque in its love of the absurd, like Cannetti in its social observations. Her stories leave the overwhelming impression of being close to Rembrandt's unsparing, wise gaze when he painted his late self-portraits.

Gallant's geographical canvas is Europe and Canada. Her emotional terrain is that of the interior journey, whether that journey is from innocence to experience, or rooted in assessment and recollection, or redefining the ground on which one stands. Many stories are told from the vantage point of the refugee or exile. Several are recounted by men.

The wonderfully gifted American writer Elizabeth Spencer, an admirer of Gallant's once said that stylistically she wants in her own writing a “beautiful spine of language,” neither hobbled like Hemingway's nor inflated like Faulkner's. In contrast, Gallant's style, which has deepened over the years but not changed, does not aim for the transparency Spencer seeks. Her sentences are like heavy water, richly lucid, classically balanced. There is a weighted fullness of equality and contradiction in her writing that is supple, playful, profound. Her use of the semicolon and colon to separate clauses of equal importance or to show the almost imperceptible progression of thought, or cause and effect, is masterly. The sensation for the reader is of traveling, of learning new cardinal points, of pausing for a view, of going on.

In 1953, Gallant wrote “The Other Paris.” She described the kind of domesticity an American in Paris is baffled by when she visits Felix, a refugee, and his older lover Odile—the dirty cheap hotel room with its alcohol stove, its gaudy plastic coffee bowls. In 1993, she wrote “In Plain Sight,” the last story in The Selected Stories. It, too, describes a Parisian domestic scene. Henri Grippes, a Montparnasse man of letters, is alone, at his writing desk, late on a rainy June night. “A radio lying flat on the table played soft jazz from a studio in Milan. A cat slept under the desk lamp. Moths beat about inside the red shade.” Radio waves across Europe and the Middle East, down the length of Africa, in India, in Singapore, in Western Samoa, link the bachelor to a community of “Men and women who had their own cats, moths, lamps, wet weather and incompetent goddess. …” These still-life scenes that are embedded in so many of the stories are truly peace offerings. For if Gallant writes about life's tragedies, the ravages and aftermaths of wars, of what they do to human lives, she is also full of pleasures, of wonderful comforts, of laughter, of a wonderful capacity to enjoy, to savour, to rejoice in light.

Gallant ends her preface with a tribute to her first editor at The New Yorker, William Maxwell, who she says “seems to me the most American of writers and the most American of all the Americans I have known; but even as I say this, I know it almost makes no sense and that it is undefinable and that I am unable to explain what I mean. I can get myself out of it only by saying it is a compliment.” Similarly, reading these stories, one is left with the impression there is something indefinably Canadian about Gallant. A climate of the mind that goes beyond narrow boundaries, definitions, geographies.

The one sad note about this handsome book with its red and black cover is the way it was distributed by McClelland & Stewart. Few copies were in the bookstores at Christmas, and it was not reprinted. Gallant fans were forced to buy the American edition, if they could get it, at a much higher price. Ironically, although much in demand, its Canadian sales became fictions.