She falls in love with an American doctor and murders Tassy. In the early nineteenth century, Elisabeth d’Aulnières married Antoine Tassy, well-off, land-owning man, “squire” of Kamouraska. More concretely: Kamouraska is based on a true story. Not feeling that you and that young bride are one and the same.

This distance that ought to be comforting me, this sense of detachment. Because this is a patient book, one where Hébert is masterfully in control of pacing, the clearest she states it comes well into the book, once you’ve already found your grounding: That’s interesting, right? It’s no gimmick, not a thing where the voice switches between sections, but intricate movement, changing mid-paragraph, the voice of a woman confronting her past, a woman judging herself and others, a woman who detaches from her multiple selves, because they exist for others, because others act on and create those names and identities, but somewhere beyond all that is an “I” that is for her, for her most sincere connections, and from there she can try and understand what she has done and what others too. The first thing I tell people about the book is that the voice switches between third and first person, where initially third is dominate, but the first takes over, more and more, though third never disappears completely. I actually like Brontë (Charlotte, I assume), but that’s not really a selling point anymore. As a combination, it’s more meaningless than my Joyce/Salinger comparison for Ducharme last week. A quote from Canadian Forum compares her to Proust, Joyce, Kafka, and Sarraute. What’s the pitch on this one besides just calling it classic? House of Anansi’s copy tells us it “is the timeless story of one woman’s destructive commitment to ideal love.” That does nothing for me. Kamouraska is her most famous, and most widely available in English. If someone was asked to name the top five “important,” “classic,” and “literary” writers from Quebec, they’d go “What? From where?” But if you asked someone from Quebec, along with Ducharme, they’d almost certainly name Anne Hébert. I want to finish it because it’s gorgeous, it’s a bit frightening, and if you’re willing to let it, it’ll break your heart and punch you in the gut. but I don’t want to put it down, despite being in the middle of other books that I’m enjoying (like one Chad mentioned last week, Laurence Leduc-Primeau’s In the End They Told Them All To Get Lost, from QC Fiction and translated by Natalia Hero). I started in on my reread of Anne Hébert’s classic Kamouraska (translated by Norman Shapiro), planning on getting just far enough into it to have things to write here. I can tell you something about why I liked a book, but not enough. I also hardly remember any details of things I’ve read. There’re far too much sitting on my shelves and piled in stacks on my floor.

wrote weekly posts throughout February covering some of his favorite works of Quebec literature ever. But rather than hoard these recommendations or write silly things about them, we decided it would be best if P.T.

Smith to recommend a few books for me to read, since he’s one of the few Americans I know who has read a lot of Quebec literature. Before starting this month’s focus on Quebec literature, I asked P.T.

Kamouraska resume par chapitre