The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Elle, by Douglas Glover
reviewed by Danielle Dutton

Douglas Glover. Elle. Goose Lane, 2003. 205 pp. Paper: $17.95.

Based on the true story of a Frenchwoman abandoned on the Isle of Demons during one of Jacques Cartier’s colonization trips to Canada in the mid-sixteenth century, Douglas Glover’s new novel and its eponymous narrator are trapped between the Old World and the New. Left for dead on an island populated by shit-covered rocks and seabirds, Elle, a headstrong girl fond of reading, fucking, and public executions, survives by stumbling through a mad terrain of ice, reminiscence, and intense solitude. As she recounts this ordeal/adventure, languages, landscapes, religions, and cultures mix in a dreamlike mélange in what she calls an unofficial nonhistory or antiquest. And like many a dispossessed antiheroine, Elle’s reality is that she has always been alone. “My mind screams, I want to go home. But then I have a depressing thought—all my life, even in France, I have struggled to learn new customs, found myself on the outside looking in, always spoken of in words I could not fathom.” Elle’s understanding of European society’s treatment of women, if not unique, is certainly evolved, but during her time on the island she becomes almost clairvoyant in her expectation of what a modern world will require from the Western mind; in exile she is transformed into a woman aware that she belongs nowhere and to no one and that she is not alone in this. Simultaneously, she goes through a somewhat more remarkable transformation: she becomes a bear. While it remains unclear to both Elle and the reader whether or not this transformation occurs only in her mind, Elle knows that what she has certainly become is “more like a garbled translation than a self.” As she loses touch with her original sense of self/reality, the reality of the narrative also becomes less clear and perhaps less important. We pass through a period of disorder in Elle’s hallucinatory brilliance; Greek myth, medieval theology, and Native American creation stories come together in a patchwork of observation until finally Elle is left with a splintered new image of humanity, outside the collective story-making machines of her time. A surprisingly likable character in all her degenerate in/coherence, Elle’s tale is not only smart and strange, but funny too, and really rather touching.