Sold-out: Etreinte/illustration: roman

by Nicole Brossard

French

125 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 1973

About the author

Born in Montreal (Quebec), poet, novelist and essayist Nicole Brossard published her first book in 1965. In 1965 she cofounded the influential literary magazine La Barre du Jour and in 1976 she codirected the film Some American Femnists. She has published eight novels including Picture Theory, Mauve Desert, Baroque at Dawn, an essay "The Aerial Letter" and many books of poetry including Daydream Mechanics, Lovhers, Typhon dru, Installations, Musee de l'os et de l'eau. She has won the Governor General award twice for her poetry (1974, 1984) and Le Grand Prix de Poesie de la Foundation les Forges in 1989 and 1999. Le Prix Athanase-David, which is for a lifetime of literary acheivement, was attributed to her in 1991. That same year she received the The Harbourfront Festival Prize. In 1994, she was made a member of L'Academie des Lettres du Quebec. Her work has been widely translated and anthologized. Mauve Desert and Baroque at Dawn have been translated into Spanish. In 1998 she published a bilingual edition of an autofiction essay titled She would be the first sentence of my new novel/Elle serait la premiere phrase de mon prochain roman(1998). In 1989, a book of her poetry in translation, Installations, was released, translated by Erin Moure and Robert Majzels. Nicole Brossard lives in Montreal.

Reviews

[Nate D]

Usually Brossard has this way of remaining both very cryptic and ambiguous without reader alienation. Her prose, advancing (or suggesting) dense ideas about text and interpretation via unfamiliar poetic constructions surely flies over my head in many ways, but she nonetheless is able to stimulate a constant murmur of thoughts, insights and recognitions as I pour over her words. Some of these may be being supplied more by me than by Brossard exactly, but her interest in the reader and in how meaning is created from a text suggests that this is actually an intended effect of her delicately open scenes and phrases. So usually we click, I get snatches of her thoghts (I believe), and find the rest very stimulating even when I'm uncertain as to her personal thrust. All meaning emerges in collaboration between page and eye.

This was very true in her beautiful narrative of desert driving and translation Mauve Desert, and even in her even more obscure and open debut novel, A Book. Turn of a Pang, however, perhaps because of its more strictly specific historical and political launch point (analogy between two instances of Canadian wartime draft legislation (1943 and 1971), is much more completely lost on me. I can appreciate her very conceptual construction, I can enjoy following the rusty red hair that binds many of these images ogether, but ultimately I'm too adrift to hold on to any lasting meaning here. That said, I'm already liking her third novel, French Kiss (or The Pang's Progress) much more, so this seems a brief lapse in my Brossard appreciation.

[Dan]

In this novel, Brossard explores history, memory, and the relation of these to language. Her "novel," a series of poetic fragments, reflects the influence of semiotic theory and of "ecriture feminin."