{"id":414942,"date":"2019-02-14T10:30:05","date_gmt":"2019-02-14T15:30:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/?p=414942"},"modified":"2019-02-14T10:23:17","modified_gmt":"2019-02-14T15:23:17","slug":"kamouraska-by-anne-hebert-quebec-literature-from-p-t","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2019\/02\/14\/kamouraska-by-anne-hebert-quebec-literature-from-p-t\/","title":{"rendered":"Kamouraska by Anne H\u00e9bert [Quebec Literature from P.T.]"},"content":{"rendered":"

Before starting this month’s focus on Quebec literature, I asked 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. But rather than hoard these recommendations or write silly things about them, we decided it would be best if P.T. wrote weekly posts throughout February covering some of his favorite works of Quebec literature ever. You can find the first entry here<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

It\u2019s rare that I reread anything. There\u2019re far too much sitting on my shelves and piled in stacks on my floor. I also hardly remember any details of things I\u2019ve read. I can tell you something about why I liked a book, but not enough. I started in on my reread of Anne H\u00e9bert\u2019s classic Kamouraska <\/em>(translated by Norman Shapiro), planning on getting just far enough into it to have things to write here . . . but I don\u2019t want to put it down, despite being in the middle of other books that I\u2019m enjoying (like one Chad mentioned last week, Laurence Leduc-Primeau\u2019s In the End They Told Them All To Get Lost<\/em><\/a>, from QC Fiction and translated by Natalia Hero). I want to finish it because it\u2019s gorgeous, it\u2019s a bit frightening, and if you\u2019re willing to let it, it\u2019ll break your heart and punch you in the gut. If you let it. If you do the work.<\/p>\n

\"\"If someone was asked to name the top five \u201cimportant,\u201d \u201cclassic,\u201d and \u201cliterary\u201d writers from Quebec, they\u2019d go \u201cWhat? From where?\u201d But if you asked someone from Quebec, along with Ducharme, they\u2019d almost certainly name Anne H\u00e9bert. Kamouraska<\/em><\/a> is her most famous, and most widely available in English. What\u2019s the pitch on this one besides just calling it classic? House of Anansi\u2019s copy tells us it \u201cis the timeless story of one woman\u2019s destructive commitment to ideal love.\u201d That does nothing for me. If anything, it turns me off. Timeless? Ideal love? Ehhhhh. A quote from Canadian Forum <\/em>compares her to Proust, Joyce, Kafka, and Sarraute. Jesus. As a combination, it\u2019s more meaningless than my Joyce\/Salinger comparison for Ducharme last week. Oh, the other quote throws out Bront\u00eb. I actually like Bront\u00eb (Charlotte, I assume), but that\u2019s not really a selling point anymore.<\/p>\n

\"\"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. That\u2019s interesting, right? It\u2019s 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 \u201cI\u201d 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. Because this is a patient book, one where H\u00e9bert is masterfully in control of pacing, the clearest she states it comes well into the book, once you\u2019ve already found your grounding:<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not the unrelenting light. No, it\u2019s this terrible stillness. This distance that ought to be comforting me, this sense of detachment. It\u2019s worse than all the rest. Seeing yourself as someone else. Pretending to be objective. Not feeling that you and that young bride are one and the same.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"More concretely: Kamouraska <\/em>is based on a true story. In the early nineteenth century, Elisabeth d\u2019Aulni\u00e8res married Antoine Tassy, well-off, land-owning man, \u201csquire\u201d of Kamouraska. He\u2019s awful to her. She falls in love with an American doctor and murders Tassy. Later, she remarries. Years later, many, many children later, that husband is dying, and it\u2019s time for Elisabeth to turn towards her memories, confess her past to herself. The movements from pasts to the present and back can happen quickly, though as the novel goes on, the story of her life with Tassy becomes more and more linear, more consistently told. At first she is afraid to go there, to think of the horrors she lived through, and the horror she inflicted, not only murdering Tassy.<\/p>\n

The memories burst through her present contemplation of death, triggered by little thoughts and little moments. There are multiple pasts, the time before her marriage, when her aunts molded her into a \u201cproper lady\u201d in Catholic Quebec, the early days of meeting her husband, the time after his death, and most persistently, the time of her trial for his murder. It\u2019s the trial that most frequently forces its way to her consciousness, so much so that she speaks defenses of herself to a nameless judge, sometimes defenses of actions well after and not involving the murder.<\/p>\n

At times the movements are hard to follow, much as third- and first-person perspective overlap, so do pasts and presents. The more she contemplates that life before, the more comfortable she becomes there, or maybe she\u2019s not comfortable, but it becomes more and more difficult to escape, more necessary to reside in:<\/p>\n

That time. That one time. A certain time of my life, moved back to, into like an empty shell. Enclosing me again. With the sharp little click of an oyster snapping shut. I\u2019m forcing myself to live within this narrow space. I\u2019m settling into the house on Rue Augusta. I\u2019m breathing its rarefied air, an air I\u2019ve already breathed before. I\u2019m taking the steps I\u2019ve already taken. There is no Madame Rolland. Not anymore. I\u2019m Elisabeth d\u2019Aulni\u00e8res, the wife of Antoine Tassy. I\u2019m pining away. Dying, dying. I\u2019m waiting for someone to come and save me. I\u2019m nineteen years old . . .<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Spoiler: no one saves her. Why would someone save her? Sure, a lover comes along, but is she saved? Or is she just condemned to a different form of punishment? I don\u2019t fully remember the end, but with a hundred pages to go on the reread, and given the state Elisabeth was in when I stopped to write this, I\u2019m pretty sure it\u2019s the latter.<\/p>\n

\"\"Kamouraska <\/em>is a cruel book. That\u2019s one of the things I admire about it. It\u2019s also a compassionate book. It\u2019s haunting. Elisabeth d\u2019Aulni\u00e8res married an awful man when she was a child. He cheats on her openly, he abuses her. He rapes her. And like a proper lady of the time, like a woman raised in religious Quebec, she\u2019s meant to let him, because what\u2019s marital rape, right? So she kills him. She doesn\u2019t regret this, but she still lives with guilt. She feels for her younger, broken self. But she also feels for this man who was tormented, who was not only violent towards her, but towards himself. The doctor who she loves, he\u2019s not an innocent either. There are no innocents, not the other women involved with her husband, not her husband, not herself. Maybe her new husband, but probably not, after all, she birthed him many children, and was that a choice? But every single person enacts cruelty. Every single person her narrative aggresses towards, and boy does it come at people, she also opens her heart to. Which itself causes her pain.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a beautiful book. It\u2019s a feminist book. It\u2019s at times a difficult book, because of the prose, because of the emotions at stake. It\u2019s accessible because of that heart, because in the end it wants to connect, Elisabeth wants to have her voice heard, needs to have it heard. It\u2019s a Quebecois book. The deep religiosity of the region is inescapable for her. Read it for all of these reasons. It does things you haven\u2019t seen before, I promise you, and how many books do that?<\/p>\n

Now, the final factor in why I picked this book? Because it touches on my home, on Vermont. That I\u2019m so close to Quebec is only one of the reasons I\u2019ve tried to read so much from the province. When the books cross into my land, it touches me a little.<\/p>\n

Find my love, at the end of the earth. In Burlington. Burlington. The United States.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"P.S. I\u2019ve got two others for you. First: another book where I think the perspective of the voice is more of a reason to read than any plot description: Ana\u00efs Barbeau-Lavalette\u2019s Suzanne<\/em><\/a>, translated by Rhonda Mullins. A finalist for last year\u2019s BTBA (Peter McCambridge wrote the Why This Book Should Win post<\/a>), this book is about a relationship between a woman and her grandmother . . . but it\u2019s written in second person, to the grandmother, about her life. It does wonderful things with that. It\u2019s also another portrayal of just how intensely Catholicism ran Quebec life, until rather recently. Second: Marie-Claire Blais\u2019s These Festive Nights<\/em><\/a>, translated by arguably the GOAT translator of Quebec lit: Sheila Fischman. I force it in here because like the jacket copy of Kamouraska <\/em>compares it to Bront\u00eb \u201cbut modern in style and explicitness,\u201d except way, way, more accurately, let\u2019s say that These Festive Nights <\/em>is Woolf, but modern in style and explicitness.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Before starting this month’s focus on Quebec literature, I asked 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. But rather than hoard these recommendations or write silly things about them, we decided it would be […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":292,"featured_media":414972,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67486],"tags":[52096,19776],"class_list":["post-414942","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-articles","tag-p-t-smith","tag-quebec-literature"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/414942","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/292"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=414942"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/414942\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":415022,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/414942\/revisions\/415022"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/414972"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=414942"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=414942"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=414942"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}