Word: gallantly
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...minutes when its opponent is thinking. Then it says, gruffly, "Enter-your-move." There is a useful voice turn-off button for such moments. Except for this bit of coffee-housing, Challenger has no small talk and no emotion, and after the human player has forced a perilous and gallant end-game win at level 6, it is a real disappointment to hear it say, uncaring and without expression: "I -lose." Voice Chess Challenger costs a pricey $325, but you can pay that to have a couple of teeth filled and get conversation no better. The cost seems justified...
...Mavis Gallant. The name has a romantic ring to it, suggesting a pretty girl, sunlight on English countryside and happy endings, possibly during the Battle of Britain. But no modern writer casts a colder eye on life, on death and all the angst and eccentricity in between. A Canadian, Mrs. Gallant has lived in France since World War II. There she produces her lapidary long stories and an occasional dazzling short novel, usually set in Europe. Her work appears regularly in The New Yorker. Canada seems about to give her the Governor General's Literary Award...
...reason for lack of popularity may be that Gallant rarely leaves helpful signs and messages that readers tend to expect of "literature": This way to the Meaning or This story is about the Folly of Love. She can sum up the postwar history of a social class in a paragraph. She can effortlessly keep three levels of memory working in a seamless narrative. But in the end the stories are simply there-haunting, enigmatic, printed with images as sharp and durable as the edge of a new coin, relentlessly specific. "God protect us from generalizations," said Chekhov, the writer whose...
...Gallant's characters have been in trouble. They are exiles and émigrés, always from the provinces of the heart, often from some place in Europe tossed by convulsions of war or politics. One story follows the sad, late return (1950) to Berlin of a German prisoner of war in France. Another recounts the trials of an Italian servant girl on the Riviera, working for a neurotic English couple just before Mussolini declared war on France...
Critics have blamed Gallant for not judging more, for not smiling on the good, or frowning on the bad more overtly. In truth, she mostly keeps her feelings protectively compressed behind an almost Conradian irony. Children, servants, old people draw her affection, partly because they are in a better position than the strong or successful to understand the real condition of life: that it is vulnerable to mysterious sudden changes, controlled by powers that the subject does not understand. Imaginative arrangements must be made, all of them temporary. "Gabriel at that time," Gallant writes about a young refugee in France...