Overhead in a Balloon

"That’s right. She moved here in 1950 and has been here ever since. She is still working and she is an absolutely brilliant writer and one of the things she’s done very effectively in her many short stories about Paris is capture the many communities of Paris – the foreign communities, the Parisian communities and the interaction between the two. She spent a great deal of time with all sorts of different members of society. She lived with French families. Her French is impeccable. She is bilingual. But she has never written in French because English is her language of artistic expression. Like few writers I know, Gallant really penetrated the French mind. And if you read the story “Luc and his Father”, which is the second or third story in that collection, you get a real sense of a French bourgeois family. She wrote it in the early 1980s. She is very good about the pressures that are put on French children and the sort of stifling conformism of that social class. It is a beautifully written, beautifully expressed story. France is, in a way, very liberal but in another way extremely conservative and nothing has really changed in decades or centuries. That story could have been written today."