We start the year’s selection of Sunday Shorts with this extract, which is excerpted with permission from All the World’s a Mall by Rinny Gremaud, translated by Luise von Flotow (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2023).

On My Way

In January 2014 I went on a tour of the world. Crossed all the time zones, one of them twice, heading west. I tried to adapt to five different settings without ever managing to do so: Edmonton, Beijing, Kuala Lumpur, Dubai, Casablanca, and then home…

I went on a tour of the world, and before I left, people remarked on how exotic my waypoints were. I was, after all, going to three different continents. I would face extreme climates—minus 23 Celsius in Alberta and plus 31 Celsius in Malaysia; encounter various religions; and operate in five different languages. With anxious exclamation marks in their voices they wished me bon voyage and lots of fun. I didn’t have any fun, and for good reason: I was on a tour of the world’s biggest shopping centres, with constant air-conditioned temperatures of 21 degrees Celsius. Agreed, it was a strange idea. Because the right-minded folks of this world tend to concur that shopping centres are to be despised. They say that malls—pronounced “mawls” or “mals” or even “molls”—are sinister places, cultural and aesthetic deserts, where the dead souls of a population that has converted to the religion of consumerism mill around… But the mall is neither as exotic nor as peripheral a place as one might hope. It concentrates the shopping street and reduces the city to its mercantile function. As a laboratory that presents or prefigures, the mall, in fact, creates a model of what is happening all around us, in all our city centres. The mall is a microcosm of the world. In its own way, it is a utopia….

Edmonton [West Edmonton Mall]

…The hours go by, the day too. I lean on the railing of the ice rink, watching a lesson for a group of retirees. I think, broken tailbone. I’m in an American Apparel store, trying out a scarf I don’t believe in. I’m at the table of a coffee shop that is not Starbucks. I’m in a cinema showing the most recent film by Martin Scorsese. I talk to a sales clerk at North Face—she is twenty-two, earns 13 Canadian dollars an hour; West Edmonton Mall is the biggest employer of students in town.

I watch a sea turtle swim. I eat a cheeseburger at Swiss Chalet (in North America, Swiss = cheese). I sit on the edge of the fountain and spend thirty minutes counting the number of women with a shopping bag from a lingerie store, Victoria’s Secret or La Senza (both of which are part of the L Brands group). One out of seven shoppers. I talk to a tall teenager who has just bought a knife in the army surplus store; he plans to join the army next year. I spend a quarter of an hour in a casino watching a large woman play a slot machine. A security guard asks me to move on. I step into the ecumenical chapel and come out two hours later. The people from the association that runs it tell me people sometimes get married there. A few months ago they held a funeral service. That was a first.
Tomorrow I’ll be leaving for another continent.

—♦—