I must have loved spending time at that art station, but I cannot remember the feeling of holding or moving the brush.
Kathryn Mockler: What is your first memory of existing?Madhur Anand: My first memory of existing is my first memory of art-making. The memory is from my junior kindergarten classroom in Toronto. There was an easel with cheap paper and three pots of tempera paint in primary colours, a bowl with water, and a single medium-sized paintbrush on each side. Two children could work at the easel at a time. None of these details so far are memories, just inducted facts. As far as I can remember, I had not been exposed to art materials, never given the opportunity to mark up a paper with my fancy or imagination before junior kindergarten. I must have loved spending time at that art station, but I cannot remember the feeling of holding or moving the brush. I cannot remember the plastic smock. These projections into my past self come only from having my own three children. I cannot remember which colours I preferred then, nor what I painted. If I had to guess, based on who I thought I was—someone who only attempted to imitate after mastering the art of imitation—I would say abstract. Or I would say, what Cezanne said: "...consider nature in terms of the cylinder, the sphere, the cone, everything put in perspective." I can only remember the smell of the paint and the sight of the blank page. Existence lay somewhere between the two. Existence was an imminent expression, not unlike its latin origins: "to appear, to arise."
Madhur Anand is a scientist and poet who has just published her first novel, To Place a Rabbit (Knopf Canada, 2025).
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To Place a Rabbit
by Madhur AnandKnopf CanadaA witty, irresistible debut novel from award-winning poet Madhur Anand about entangled desire in books, life and love.
This delightfully clever, artfully layered novel begins when a scientist who has written a popular book of non-fiction attends a literary festival, where she strikes up a friendship with a charismatic novelist. The novelist reveals that her new work is an experiment: a novella she wrote in English only to have it translated and published solely in French—a language the novelist cannot read. Moreover, she has lost her original English manuscript of this work. Hearing this, the scientist, who is fluent in French, impulsively offers to retranslate the novella back into English for the novelist.
As she embarks on this task, the scientist finds herself haunted by vivid memories and distracting questions—particularly about a passionate affair from her own life with a French lover. These insert themselves into her translation process, troubling it, then disrupting it entirely. She desperately tries to complete her task before losing control of both the work and her well-organized existence—but soon the novelist and the French lover reappear in the present, further complicating both life and art.
Here is sparkling, irresistible debut fiction from one of our most consistently inventive voices, the award-winning and multi-talented Madhur Anand.
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