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The Alien House

by Élise Turcotte, Sheila Fischman

Reading Elise Turcotte’s The Alien House is a little like overhearing the thoughts of one of Ingmar Bergman’s nearly silent film heroines. Like Liv Ullman in The Hour of the Wolf, Turcotte’s nameless narrator finds her dreams pressing down on her, and her life changing before her eyes.

The novel opens with the narrator’s lover moving out, leaving her in a half-empty flat in which she must reinvent her life. A previously systematic and organized person, she sinks deep into herself. She feels compelled to paint the room – a study whose light and openess she’d previously loved – a deep forest green.

This room becomes her retreat, but soon she is no longer using it for work on her thesis on medieval manuscripts. Instead she destroys all her work and spends the summer making intense love (described in graphic detail) with a man she picks up in a bar. She resists going back to teaching in the fall, but she finally does, just as she finally rejects the memory of her lover. At the end of the novel, she seems ready to join the living, just as her father, long in mourning for his late wife, prepares to visit an old love in Sweden.

It is an appropriate destination because many of Turcotte’s images are as troubling as those in a Bergman film. The narrator says that before her collapse, the only things she hadn’t tamed in her neat, clean space were the electric cords: “They snaked across the floor … suggesting the existence of a parallel world where there was neither beauty nor harmony. That world existed, it was growing….”

Turcotte, who won the 2003 Governor General’s Award for French fiction with this novel, wants to lead us into that domain, and then out to some new understanding. But what that new knowledge consists of is no clearer than a Bergman film that leaves you feeling like you’ve touched on something profound yet unexplainable. Sheila Fischman’s translation is elegant and exact, and does its best not to muddy the philosophic waters further.

 

Reviewer: Mary Soderstrom

Publisher: Cormorant Books

DETAILS

Price: $29.95

Page Count: 246 pp

Format: Cloth

ISBN: 0-896951-75-9

Released: Sept.

Issue Date: 2004-11

Categories: Fiction: Novels

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