The Globe and Mail is overcome by Fences in Breathing
...
Another recent translation of a Québécois novel sidesteps story, heeding — and citing — French poet Joë Bousquet, who claimed, 'I don't believe in events enough to write stories.'
Where do you head after a 50-year literary career disbelieving events and stories in favour of reinventing language, midwifing modernism and then sending it to formalist (un)finishing school? In Fences in Breathing, the latest book by Quebec avant-garde doyenne Nicole Brossard, the answer is to plop the writer down in the middle of her own novel and take away her mother tongue.
Fences in Breathing is ostensibly about the literary and geographic exile of Anne, who is writing a novel in a foreign language, 'in order to accurately measure the impasses of my own language and not see my own limits.' She is the latest in a belle époque of writers invited to an estate somewhere near the Swiss town of Aubonne, an ethereal place that seems to embody our entire era: East meets west, medieval métiers co-exist with cutting-edge technology and 'proximity remains difficult ... to comprehend.'
How do we come to know another person? Fences asks. Another language? 'In the foreign language,' Anne muses, 'writing means to get closer, while in mine to have the desire predominates.' The mis-en-abîme novel's characters exist in a warp between desire and its articulation, between ancient and contemporary, the bodily and the intellectual: Laure, a lawyer who is analyzing the Patriot Act to shreds and caring for her aging mother; winsomely antisocial sculptor Charles, who works 'from oak and whimsy'; his sister, Kim, who leaves family, home and lover for an abstract, alluring North; Anne's hostess, Tatiana, who pulls us back into the dark mythologies of the 20th century. The voices of fiction and truth bleed in and out of each other; relationships ebb and sharpen; portraits are etched and blurred; the summer gives way to 'autumn and steel' in one breath.
Yet to consider Brossard merely a meta-manipulatrix is superficial. Fences in Breathing is not about, it is. The atmosphere of reverie that mesmerizes the novel's characters and sends them careening into other selves also overcomes the reader — we are taken by the slow eroticism of great masses of language and meaning moving into each other, by the precision of 'the dry sound of the piano cover being lifted,' the lyricism that Brossard nimbly doles out: 'I am going to the post office to buy white envelopes for my secrets there are strange flavours in my mouth tickly manoeuvres of goldfish or crazy tongues slightly naughty always very soft and full of surprises ...' Indeed.
Susanne de Lotbinière-Harwood's translation is noteworthy, bold and pulsing with Brossardesque poetic energy ('suspiteful' — yum). The English version is suggestive without being overt, and playful without seeming clever; it's the perfect translation of an elegant, complicated book.
