The Review of Contemporary Fiction

The Blue Books, by Nicole Brossard
reviewed by Jeffrey Twitchell-Waas

Nicole Brossard. The Blue Books. Trans. Larry Shouldice and Patricia Claxton. Coach House, 2003. 352 pp. Paper: $19.95.

“She rides eager astride the delible ink.” This volume reprints translations of the first three “novels” by a major experimental Quebecois writer, originally published in the early 1970s. In her preface Brossard recalls the excitement of this period when young writers saw the text as the site for social and personal transformation, which in her case focused on emerging new identities as Quebecois, female, and lesbian. In these works Brossard develops her transgressive writing procedures, in which the novel is evoked only as a set of presuppositions to be written against and exploded. Linearity, indeed any form of formal predictability, is rejected as representative of patriarchal power, against which this writing deploys all means possible. The works insistently point to themselves as texts and elicit the active participation of the reader. Fiction for Brossard is precisely the consciousness of possibilities denied by the powers that be as unrealistic. These three works evidence a clear trajectory as Brossard rapidly complicates and broadens the scope of her writing so that each serves as preparation for the demands of its succeeding text. A Book is relatively abstract and homogeneous in style, characters and settings are sketchy, and at least half the text is directly critical and self-reflective in manner. The text consists of ninety-nine short segments printed one per page, leaving ample blank space intended to activate the reader in generating the book. Turn of Pang is formally similar but incorporates a much broader range of linguistic registers and visual effects, as well as being more overtly political. A natural extension of these textual complexities, French Kiss, or, A Pang’s Progress is the real dazzler of the collection. The text is ostensibly organized around a drive by Marielle along Sherbrooke Street, which transverses Montreal. As always for Brossard, the city itself is the text, with its labyrinthine possibilities and diverse voices, haphazard and simultaneous goings-on, its apparent thereness and incessant imaginative remaking. Marielle too, or alternatively her car, named Violet, becomes an expanding and unpredictable text. Separately are various other characters, two of whom perform the French kiss in the heart of the Latin Quarter. Actually, of course, the kiss is a stretch of text, very effectively translated by Patricia Claxton, in which Brossard pulls out all the stops of linguistic play and association to enact the full erotic and exploratory possibilities of the text as kiss. French Kiss is a wonderful achievement, linguistically exuberant and politically sophisticated.