Looking Back on Lot's Wife

Lot's Wife [La Femme de Loth]
Monique Bosco [trans John Glassco]
Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1975
151 pages

De temps à autre, un mot, une phrase, entendus malgré moi, me frappent comme un autre soufflet immérité.

– La Femme de Loth, Monique Bosco, 1970

There was a time in this great land when translations of French-language books were published with near exclusivity in hardcover. There were no second printings and there were no paperback reissues. I'm thinking of titles like In Quest of Splendour (Pierre le magnifique), Orphan Street (Un Chaîne dans la parc), and The Scarecrows of Saint-Emmanuel (L'épouvantail).

Lot's Wife met the very same fate.

I was a child when La Femme de Loth was published. I was an adolescent when it appeared in English translation. I was adult when I first read Lot's Wife. I was an older adult when I wrote Monique Bosco to ask about her working relationship with the translator. This was when I was working on A Gentleman of Pleasure, my biography of John Glassco. The letter I received in response was generous and gracious. She'd had very limited correspondence. Though they were both living in Montreal they'd never met.

I never met Monique Bosco, either. She died two years after posting that letter, just short of her eightieth birthday.

Author photo on the jacket of Lot's Wife.

I wish our correspondence hadn't ended there. She was a remarkable woman and this novel is one of the best to come out of 1970s Quebec. It was an extraordinary decade.

Lot's Wife opens with the narrator addressing a physician. These aren't the very first lines, but they are my favourite:

You're used to passing terrible sentences on people. Your technique is remarkable. First deliver the blow: the illness may be fatal. Then announce the remedy: amputation. The solution is hailed with positive joy. Those condemned to an imminent death are equally "reasonable." As a reward, the pretty joys of the invalid world are danced before them.

Though not obvious at first, the physician was her married lover. He's ended their decade-long affair and has sent her off for two weeks in Venice to recover, as if from surgery. What we're reading is the narrator's writing. She's writing because she cannot sleep. She cannot do anything but write. The text, disjointed and at times confusing, consists of 240 numbered segments that skip back and forth in time. The shortest, not more than two or three sentences, tend to be self-revelatory. The longer touch here and there on past events in her life. The total is addressed to her former lover.

She was the unwanted child of a Jewish mother and Catholic father, both blessed with good looks she did not inherit. Her earliest memories are of Paris. As clouds of the Second World War begin drifting westward, the small family relocates to New York. This proves a disaster for two reasons, the least of which has to do with her parents' broken English and inability to find employment. The second has to do with a dark episode she had always kept hidden.

Fortunes change with a chance encounter with a family friend. This results in relocation to Montreal where the narrator's parents thrive while striving to avoid any and all news of the country they left behind.

As the narrator grows into womanhood and the Nazis occupy Paris, her parents show the first signs of middle-age. Self-absorbed, they cling to what remains of youth with such desperation that they attempt to recast their daughter as more of a friend than a child. Their campaign is cut short when both die in an automobile accident on the way back from a ski trip in the Laurentians. Their adolescent daughter survived because she'd been left alone in their Montreal apartment.

Much of what the narrator writes she's told no one, not even the physician. She shares it now through her writing – the humiliations and horrors of a short-lived marriage included – though she knows it won't make a difference. The only person she has ever loved, the person she still loves, has cast her aside. She goes over her past because she cannot imagine a future. She doesn't want a future:

God was right. Those must be saved who value life enough to flee, following their noses, letting flames devour the wreckage behind them. Lot and his family. His daughters are young, their life is all before them. But for the old wife, it is her whole past that is being swallowed up. So she turns her head, trying to see what is happening – and what has happened. She looks back, breaking the commandment. Poor old woman. In the Bible you have no name. Lot's wife, that was enough.

It's not until the second half of the novel that the narrator reveals that her name is Hélène. The physician's name is Pierre. She was not his wife, though she very much wanted to be.

Monique Bosco published seventeen volumes in her seventy-nine years, consisting of novels, short story collections, and verse. La Femme de Loth is the best known, having received the 1970 Governor General's Award for French-language Fiction. A half-century after publication, Lot's Wife remains the lone translation of her work.

More, please.

Dedication:

Trivia: Curiously, McClelland & Stewart rejected Lot's Wife as the title of the translation and kept pushing the nonsensical The Woman of Lot. The pressure was such that in desperation Glassco offered an alternative: You Found Me Beautiful.

The critic's rave: Glassco's translation was well received. The only negative review I've found came from Pat Barclay. In the 19 July 1975 edition of the Victoria's Times-Columnist, Barclay writes that it "brings with it the whiff of the original French in its clipped yet dramatically effective phrasing. I found it dreary, depressing, almost maudlin – yet at the same time impressively well planned and presented."

The critic concludes:

Two things:

It's Hélène, not Helene.

No committee "one mad spring day in 1970, decided to select Lot's Wife [here I assume the critic means La Femme de Loth] as the winner of a Governor General's award [sic]" for the simple reason that La Femme de Loth was released in the autumn of that year.

Object and Access: A slim hardcover with black boards and a jacket by David Shaw. Does the woman depicted not resemble Margaret Atwood?

As I write, five copies are listed online with prices beginning at $9.95. Mine was purchased in 1999 from The Word in Montreal. Price: $60.

La Femme de Loth was first published in 1970 by Robert Laffont. I was surprised to learn that the novel is no longer in print. It was last published in 2003 by Bibliothèque québécoise.

Related posts:

A Novel That Killed a Novelist?
Langevin's Masterpiece; McClelland's Disappointment

Lost in Translation

Fun With Translation!

Day fourteen of Women in Translation Month and I've yet to participate. What with car troubles, appliance breakdowns, other unforeseen expenses, and health issues (not mine), it has been a summer of distractions. All is capped by the most violent and most frequent thunderstorms I've ever experienced. The most recent passed not two hours ago.

In lieu of a review, I present something light.

Published in 1974, They Won't Demolish Me! is Sheila Fischman's translation of Roch Carrier's Le deux-millième étage, which had been published the previous year. It was her fourth translation of Carrier. Many more have followed.

Thirteen of the eighteen Sheila Fischman translations of Roch Carrier in my collection.
Floralie, Where Are You? appears twice. The first is a copy signed by the author.
The second belonged to John Glassco and bears his signature.

Le deux-millième étage isn't one of Carrier's best-known works, but I think of the translation often as it contains a nod and a wink to her friend and fellow translator John Glassco. This comes on page 68 of They Won't Demolish Me! 

The original French, which appears on page 88 of the 1973 Éditions du Jour edition reads:

Such a subtle change, one letter for another. Having written Glassco's biography and editing his selected letters, I'm certain it was done with both great affection and a sense of fun.

How could she resist!

Of Problem Children and Adolescent Angst

Sunburst
Phyllis Gotlieb
New York: Fawcett, 1964
160 pages

Sorrel Park is no place to live, but this wasn't always so. A smallish city not far from Chicago, it was once a place of industry and well-paying jobs. During the "Open-The Door-In-Eighty-Four" policy, immigrants from Western Europe flooded in until it all went horribly wrong. First came the 1994 nuclear reactor explosion and resulting deaths. The federal government was quick to impose a press ban, the city was sealed off, martial law was imposed, the old coal plant was fired up, and the rest of the country continued on as before.

Shandy Johnson was born in Sorrel Park on June 3rd, 2011 to second generation Americans. Her father's family came from Denmark, changing their surname from Jensen along the way. Shandy's mother was named Mary O'Brian; as might be supposed, her family immigrated from Ireland. Until the explosion, Mary cleaned the offices at the nuclear facility, after which she was transferred to the coal plant. Shandy's father worked in both, even after being being struck on the back of the head with hot material. The wound would never close.

Shandy's birth, seventeen years after "the Blowup," came as a surprise. Her parents had assumed they'd been rendered sterile, but here they were in their forties with a baby girl. The joy they experienced as parents was short lived: "I was three and a half when they died, and since I can't remember much that happened before I was eighteen months old, that means I can't have really known them for more than two years..."

The novel begins on Shandy's thirteenth birthday. A strong-willed, savvy girl, she spends much of it evading capture. It didn't begin this way. Shandy had been celebrating the day with a vanilla cone and licorice stick when spotted. Shandy is a target because she is unusual. "I can't remember much that happened before I was eighteen months old," suggests something, don't you think?

New York: Berkley, 1983

Years earlier, not long after Shandy was born, dozens of Sorrel Park teens, offspring of the men and women exposed to radiation from the explosion, went on a violent rampage. It lasted no more than a few hours, but was devastating just the same. Much of the downtown lay in ruins, thanks entirely to newly awakened telepathic and telekinetic powers. It was only through dumb luck in the form of a freak accident that authorities were able to round them up. They've lived ever since in "the Dump," a prison compound equipped with a device that shields the outside world from their abilities. What sets young Shandy apart is that her mind cannot be read by those imprisoned in the Dump. She is a mutant amongst mutants, and thus of great interest to the government. 

I've never been one for stories in which radiation exposure brings the superhuman – something to so with having seen film footage of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at an early age, I suspect. It's probably the reason why the Hulk, Spider-Man, and the Fantastic Four never really appealed. 

The Hulk #1, May 1962

Yet Sunburst did appeal. It would be enough to say this all comes down to Shandy, but all the characters are brilliantly drawn. There's Jason Hemmer, who first spots the girl. He is the one mutant who cooperates with the authorities, and so is tasked with finding others. Colonel Prothelo was assigned to Sorrel Park in the aftermath of the Blowup. The son he fathered in Sorrel Park instigated that night of destruction. Cigar store owner Ma Slippec is a fleeting character, but just as fully formed. It was she who took in the orphaned Shandy, provided a modicum of stability, and introduced her to bootlegging in what is a dry city.

Of course, at the centre of it all is Shandy, a tall, awkward looking girl who is bothered by her flat chest. She longs for adolescence to really kick in, all the while worrying that she'll also develop abilities that will lead her to incarceration the Dump.

Sixty-two years ago, Fawcett positioned Sunburn as "A Science Fiction Classic of Tomorrow," and here we are in that past's tomorrow. While we don't have superhuman mutants, we do have government and corporate surveillance, suppression, manipulation and brutality. Sunburn is a classic of today.

About the author: 

Phyllis Fay Gotlieb (née Bloom)

Phyllis Fay Gotlieb (née Bloom) was born in Toronto one hundred years ago today. She attended the University of Toronto (BA, 1948; MA, 1950) where, I'm guessing, she met her husband (see: Dedication).

As far as writing goes, she was known first a poet. In 1961, John Robert Colombo's Hawkshead Press published her a pamphlet of verse. Sunburst landed in 1964, the very same year as Within the Zodiac, her first book of poems.

Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1964

Phyllis Gotlieb is remembered more as a writer of science fiction than as a poet. Her bibliography features twelve books in the genre, including A Judgement of Dragons for which she received the inaugural Aurora Award. 

New York: Berkley, 1980

Phyllis Gotlieb died in Toronto on 14 July 2009 at the age of eighty-three.

Dedication:

Kelly is the author's  husband, Calvin Carl Gotlieb, CM FRSC (27 March 1921 - 16 October 2016), considered the father of Canadian computing.

Of Phyllis Gotlieb's twenty other books, the one I'm most interested in reading is Phyllis Loves Kelly, (Toronto: University of Toronto Libraries, 2014), a posthumous collection of poems written to her husband over the course of their sixty year marriage.

Object and Access: A typical Fawcett Gold Medal mass market paperback original in excellent condition, it showed no sign of having been read before I got to it. I took good care.

The novel first appeared, abridged, in Amazing Stories (March - May 1964). 

Two years after the Fawcett, Coronet published the first British edition. 

When cropped, the image looks like a 'sixties LP I'd buy in a second.

Other editions followed in Australia from Eclipse (1969) and the United States from Berkley (1978). In 2002, Insomniac Press published the only Canadian edition to date as part of its Bakka Books series. 

The novel is currently available from Wildside Press of Cabin John, Maryland.

The six-decade-old Fawcett first edition is cheap in more than one way. Prices listed online range from US$6.00 to US$19.00. Condition is not a factor. At under twenty-one dollars, two signed copies of the Insomniac edition tempt, but the one you really want is a copy of the Fawcett the author inscribed to Miriam Waddington (and was subsequently owned by Maurice Forget, OC). It is being sold for $36.00 by a Gatineau bookseller.

Sunburst has been translated into French (Psycataclysme) and German (Die Geißel des Lichts).

Related post:

The Dustiest Bookcase: G is for Gotlieb

A Wedding, but No Wedding Night; or, A Sorry, Tragic Tale of Two Solitudes (in two editions)

Antoinette de Mirecourt
   or, Secret Marrying and Secret Sorrowing
Rosanna Leprohon
Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1973
200 pages

Antoinette De Mirecourt,
   or, Secret Marrying and Secret Sorrowing
Rosanna Leprohon
Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1989
334 pages

Six summers ago, I made slow progress through Armand Durand; ou, La promesse accomplie, the French translation of Rosanna Leprohon's 1868 novel Armand Durand; or, A Promise Fulfilled. It made some sense to take on the challenge. As I noted at the time, the author's novels had been far more popular in French than in the original English. Consider The Manor House of De Villerai, which first appeared in 1859 and 1860 issues of the Montreal Family Herald. Le manoir de Villerai, E.L. de Bellefeulle's translation, was published as a book in 1861, then enjoyed four more editions, the last being in 1925. It wasn't until 2014, a full 154 years after the end of its run in the Family Herald, that The Manor House of De Villerai finally appeared in book form. Credit goes to academic publisher Broadview Press.

In the late 'eighties I began collecting Centre for Editing Early Canadian Texts titles. Antionette De Mirecourt, sixth in the series, was purchased upon publication, taking advantage of the ten percent discount offered by my employer, a library wholesaler. I preferred the bland, jacketless hardcover editions because they seemed more substantial. Must add that the paperback editions, released simultaneously, weren't particularly attractive. 

This year being one dedicated to women writers (see my New Year's resolution), I decided, at long last, to read what had been Rosanna Leprohon's most popular novel amongst anglophone readers.

But which copy?

I've owned the first New Canadian Library edition for some time. Where did I buy it? When did I buy it? Somehow, its purchase is nowhere near as memorable as the CEECT edition. Might this have something to do with the ten percent discount?

The decision was easy. Madame Leprohon's title is Antoinette De Mirecourt, not Antoinette de Mirecorte, as the NCL edition would have you believe. What's more, the heroine's name is misspelled throughout the text. I would later discover that a significant spoiler appears on the front cover.

I still don't know what to make of the author portrait on the back cover.

The novel begins in November 1763, nine months after the Treaty of Paris, with Antoinette De Mirecourt's arrival in Montreal from her widowed father's Valmont seigneury. On the edge of seventeen, she has been invited by her cousin Lucille D'Aulnay to pass the winter at her elegant rue Nôtre-Dame home. Cousine Lucille is older and her husband older still, though by how much is left up to the reader's imagination. A contemplative man, Monsieur D'Aulnay devotes his days to philosophical works. Lucille's tastes run more toward romantic novels and sentimental verse.

Theirs was an arranged marriage.

Young Antoinette has always been intrigued by the structure of the union, so "with her childish inexperience, rich, poetic imagination, and warm, impulsive heart," wastes no time in asking Lucille whether she was in love with her husband when they wed:

"Oh dear, no! My parents, though kind and indulgent in other respects, showed me no consideration in this. They simply told me Mr. D'Aulnay was the husband they had chosen for me, and that I was to be married to him in five weeks. I cried for the first week almost without intermission. Then, mamma having promised me I should select my own trousseau and that it should be as rich and costly as I could desire, a different turn was given to my feelings, and I became so very busy with milliners and shopping, that I had not time for another thought of regret, till my wedding day arrived. Well, I was happy in my lot, for Mr. D'Aulnay has ever been both indulgent and generous; but, my darling child, the experiment was fearfully hazardous, – one which might have resulted in life-long misery to both parties."

"Remember Antoinette," concludes Lucille, "that the only sure basis for a happy marriage, is mutual love, and community of soul and feeling."

Is the D'Aulnay marriage happy? Not that this reader could see, though it is comfortable. Monsieur D'Aulnay is content to spend his days and nights surrounded by books, while his wife delights in being surrounded by men in uniform. The departures of the gentry to la vielle France and the retreat of the seigneurs to their seigneuries has left a social void that Lucille happily fills with English officers. Chief amongst these is Major Aubrey Sternfield. Monsieur D'Aulnay thinks of him as a "long-legged flamingo," but Lucille and sees an altogether different man:

A tall and splendidly-proportioned: figure – eyes, hair and features of faultless beauty, joined to rare powers of conversation, and a voice whose tones he could modulate to the richest music, were rare gifts to be all united in one happy mortal.

So say all the ladies.

Though Antoinette had been raised on a seigneury, she is all but overcome by the decor, perfume, gauzy dresses, and music of the contra dance of a Montreal soirée. I get it. This was Montreal when I was her age:

Major Sternfield, "handsome as an Apollo," pursues Antoinette. His success is such that the capture of her heart precedes the first letters Antoniette receives from Valmont. One contains a mild bloomer:

The first, which was from her father, was kind and affectionate; spoke of the void her absence made in the household; told her to enjoy herself to her heart's utmost desire; and ended by warning her to watch well over her affections, and bestow them on none of the gay strangers who might visit at her cousin's house, for assuredly he would never under any circumstances countenance any of them as her suitors.

A third letter arrives shortly thereafter. Composed by Monsieur De Mirecourt, it serves to inform Antoinette that she will be marrying Louis Beauchesne, her childhood playmate. What follows is uncomfortable. Louis himself has delivered the letter. While Antoinette, an only child, has great affection, it is as a brother. Louis, who has siblings, knows that his love for her is very different than the one he feels for his sisters. What remains hidden in their encounter is this: Antoinette accepted Sternfield's ring.  

Lucille has been living vicariously through her cousin. Whether under the influence of romantic prose and poetry or the regrets of her own arranged marriage, she has pushed Antoinette into the major's embrace. This secret engagement is known only to the betrothed, and of course Lucille D'Aulney.

Antoinette De Mirecourt and Aubrey Sternfield are married at the D'Aulay residence during a particularly stormy winter evening. The master is in his library, entirely oblivious to anything happening elsewhere in this house. Regimental chaplain Doctor Ormsby is the officiant. Lucille is troubled by his appearance and manner. All is so different from her Catholic faith, but she's keen on seeing it through.  

After the ceremony, Antoinette makes an uncharacteristic stand insisting that her new husband that will keep their union secret until it is blessed by her own church. Sternfield readily agrees. As we shall see, the major has his reasons. The evening becomes even more dramatic with the unexpected arrival of Antoinette's father. He is, of course, ignorant as to what has transpired, and so is too late in laying down the law, employing another mild bloomer:

"I forbid you child, to, have any intercourse, beyond that of distant courtesy, with the men I have mentioned; and if you have entangled yourself in any disgraceful flirtation or attachment, break it off at once, under penalty of being disowned and disinherited."

What's unstated is that the "gay strangers" with whom Antoinette is not to partake in "intercourse" are the English. This is perfectly understandable. The Battle of the Plains of Abraham had taken place just four years earlier. The capitulation of Montreal was a year after that. 

A View of Montreal in Canada, Taken from Isle St. Helena in 1762
Thomas Davies, 1762

I'll say no more for wont of spoiling, except to recommend Antoinette De Mirecourt to lovers of nineteenth-century romance, lovers of gothic romance, and to any Montrealer who share a love of reading. I was born in Montreal two hundred years after the novel is set and one hundred years after it was written, yet its past was not a foreign country. Descriptions of the island, the weather, and the climate are recognizable. This passage raised a smile:

It was the first really good sleighing of the season, for the few slight falls of snow that had hitherto heralded winter’s approach, descending on the muddy roads and sidewalks, had lost at once their whiteness and purity, and becoming incorporated with the liquid mud, formed that detestable, combination with which we Canadians are so familiar in the spring and fall, and which we recognize by the name of “slush.”

And here I'd assumed that "slush," like "smog," was a twentieth-century term.

Rosanna Eleanor Leprohon (née Mullins)
12 January 1829, Montreal, Lower Canada
20 September 1879, Montreal, Quebec

Rosanna Leprohon has much in common with her darker, even more successful New Brunswick contemporary May Agnes Fleming, whose Wedded for a Week; or, The Unseen Bridegroom I read earlier this spring. They may not have been sisters under the skin exactly, but they were cousins. Both were adept at writing complex plots involving romance, marriage, duplicity, nefariousness, and death. If you've enjoyed the company of one you'll like spending time with the other. And so, I've ordered a copy of The Manor House of De Villerai.

God bless our academic publishers.

Bloomer (not mild):

"God bless my soul. Miss De Mirecourt!" he ejaculated, involuntarily starting back.

Trivia (not really): The first sentence has it that the novel takes place "in year 176–, some short time after the royal standard of England had replaced the fleur-de-lys of France." As editor John C. Stockdale notes in the CEECT edition, this can only be 1763: "The year is confirmed by the fact that Madame D'Aulnay's St. Catherine's Eve party was held on a "Thursday" night; in 1763 St. Catherine's Day was Friday, 25 November.

Fun fact: Janet Friskney's New Canadian Library: The Ross-McClelland Years, 1952-1978 (Toronto: University of Toronto, 2007) tells us that The Manor House of De Villerai was once considered for inclusion in the New Canadian Library.

Object and Access: Antionette De Mirecourt was first published in 1864 by John Lovell & Sons. A second printing followed the very same year. Such is the sorry state of Canadian literature that a first edition can be purchased online for a mere $255.

Interestingly, the Lovell edition was the last until 1973 when both McCelland & Stewart's New Canadian Library and the University of Toronto Press's Reprint Library of Canadian Prose and Poetry returned the novel to print.

The CEECT edition is still available through McGill-Queen's University Press. Penguin Random House is selling an ebook of the last New Canadian Library edition (2010), complete with copyright-free stock photo of an American Revolutionary War reenactor.

Penguin Random House charges $9.95 for a text that has been in the public domain since the nineteenth-century.

Related post:

Armand Durand; or, A Summer Project

Tales of Terror, Torment, and... Charm?

The Torrent [Le torrent]
Anne Hébert [trans Gwendolyn Moore]
Montreal: Harvest House, 1973
141 pages

Anne Hébert completed Le torrent in 1945, but it didn't reach bookstores until five years later. No Quebec publisher would touch the work, which explains how it is that the first edition was printed privately. A slim collection of five short stories, it was considered too dark, too disturbing and, according to the author, too violent. That's the story anyway. The truth is much more complicated, as detailed in Marie-Andrée Lamontagne's brilliant, exhaustive biography Anne Hébert, vivre pour écrire. (Montreal: Boréal, 2019).

When Le torrent was reissued in 1963, the Quiet Revolution was well underway, which may explain why Éditions Hurtubise took it on, adding two stories. The Torrent was released ten years after that as the fifth title in the all-too-brief Harvest House French Writers of Canada series.

 

Remarkably, Le torrent, was the first Anne Hébert title to be translated. By the time The Torrent was published, she her bibliography consisted of Les songes en equilibre (1942), Le torrent (1950), Le tombeau des rois (1953), Poèmes (1960), and Kamouraska (1970), her masterpiece.

Growing up in Montreal, the 1973 film adaptation of Kamouraska was everywhere.

As a result, I knew Anne Hébert's name at age ten, though another eight years passed before I read anything she'd written. My introduction was 'The House on the Esplanade' ('La maison de l'Esplanade'), the fifth of the seven stories in The Torrent.

The titular house belongs to elderly spinster Stéphanie de Bichette, "a curious little creature [...] with limbs that were poorly formed, and too thin." It dates from the time of New France: "You  know them, those narrow houses with their steep roofs and their rows of gabled windows, the upper ones about as large as a swallows nest." Stéphanie de Bichette lives there with her chambermaid Géraldine, occupying no more than one or two rooms on each floor. The other rooms – there are many – have been gradually been closed off. The two belonging to her younger brothers, who'd both died of scarlet fever when Mlle de Bichette was ten, were the first. Her mother died shortly thereafter. Irénée, the older brother was killed in a hunting accident, and so his room was shut off. Once sister Desneiges entered the Ursuline convent, her room was also sealed. And then there's Charles... Charles was disowned for marrying a girl from the Lower Town. His former room is treated like all the others. When Géraldine enters to clean, she makes certain to place each item in the very same place as when the room was vacated. The chambermaid looks to the day she will be able to do the same with her mistress's room.

I've reviewed two other French Writers of Canada books over the years: The Temple on the River (Les Écœurants) by Jacques Hébert and Bitter-Bread (La Scouine) by Albert Laberge. Both were dark, but not nearly so dark as The Torrent, which has me wondering about its peculiar back cover copy: 

The titular story does indeed "strike with devastating impact." François, the narrator, grows up on a small remote farm, cut off from the rest of the world. It begins:  

As a child, I was dispossessed of the world. By decree of a will higher than my own, I had to renounce all passion in this life. I related to the world by fragments, only at those points which were immediately and strictly necessary , and which were removed from me as soon as their usefulness had ended.

François knows only his mother, a threatening figure. He dares not look at her face; it is unlikely that he would recognize her on the street.

But there is no street. The boy's early years are spent on the farm, and the farm alone. There is such a sense of foreboding in the early pages that nothing is spoiled in revealing that the story features child abuse, animal abuse,  nd almost certainly murder.

Returning to the cover copy, this sentence stands out: "The background of course [emphasis mine], is a small Quebec community with its morally repressive environment."

In fact, The story features no Quebec community of any size. The morally repressive environment is the sole creation of the boy's mother, who keeps a ledger detailing "the wages of sin."

What strikes even more is this: "Included under the title The Torrent, are a group of stories that are charming, except for 'The Torrent' itself..."

There is not one charming story in The Torrent.

'Springtime for Catherine' is set in wartime. A population is forced to flee, discarding the elderly, infirm, and pregnant to fend for themselves in the face of the approaching enemy. Catherine, a servant girl, is awkward and unattractive, but is able to keep up. Endless years of toil with little sleep have prepared her for such a challenge. She is a "foundling," a "dirty little beast," a "Child of Sin;" Catherine is her name, but she's referred to as "The Flea." 

Having taken refuge in a barn, one night the girl is discovered by a drunken soldier. His clumsy hands undress her and for "one spark of time" she is a princess, she feels loved. In the light of the early dawn, she considers the youth and beauty of the sleeping soldier. How much ridicule might he receive for having slept with her? He would soon awaken and discover his mistake: "He must never know that he had made love to the Flea, the servant girl death's head, the joke and scorn of everyone."

And so, Catherine plunges a knife into his throat.

Have I spoiled 'Springtime for Catherine?' Trust me, there's so much more to the story. My intention was to show the absurdity of the cover copy. Were it not for the fact that the same text continues to be used to sell copies today, I wouldn't have bothered.

Besides, I haven't even touched upon 'A Grand Marriage' ('Un grand mariage') which is Anne Hébert's very best short story.

Wish I'd found it at eighteen.

Object: A mass market paperback printed on paper that is far superior to that typically used in that format, fifty-three years later there's not a hint of yellowing. The cover design is by Robert Reid. The cover illustration is by Gilberte Christin de Cardaillac. I purchased my copy this past autumn at the Merrickville Book Emporium. Price: $2.00.

Access: Though Harvest House is long out-of-business, copies are available through the University of Ottawa Press at $14.95 (plus shipping).

Le torrent is currently available from Bibliothèque Québécoise. Two editions are available. I recommend the most recent, published just last year, for its inclusion of an introduction by Natalie Watteyne. Priced at $10.95, you can purchase it by way of Jeff Bezos, but wouldn't you rather going directly to the publisher? Here's the link.

Related post:

A Father's Love on Father's Day

Wild Geese on Film (Part 2): Ruf der Wildgänse

The second of three addendums to the recent post about Martha Ostenso's 1925 bestselling novel.

It's hard to know what to make of Ruf der Wildgänse, the 1961 Austrian-German film adaptation of Wild Geese; it comes and goes from YouTube, but never with subtitles. Because I know no German, some of what I have to say about the movie may be mistaken, particularly as I'm relying on memory.

We begin with the opening credits, which features the most disorganized flock of Canada geese I've ever seen. 

For those unfamiliar with the bird, this is more typical.

For those really unfamiliar, Canada geese look nothing like the drawings featured on the cover of the 1952 Deutsche Hausbücherei edition:

Back to the movie:

The first scene is extremely exciting. The year is 1886. Three men in red jackets and what look to be Prussian helmets ride in pursuit of a young man and woman through the dark forests of Manitoba. There's a good amount of gunfire. At least one of the men in red is hit and the man being chased is shot dead.

Who are the men in red?

No idea.

Why are they after the couple?

Ditto.

The important thing is that the woman, Amelia Jasper (Regine Felden-Hatheyer), is captured and receives a prison sentence. From what I've been able to glean, she gives birth to a son while incarcerated. The boy, whom she names after his father Mark Jordan, is seized and handed over to missionaries. 

I expect Amelia is released at some point because the next we see she's wandering about the countryside in search of shelter. She finds it in the home of Caleb Gare (Ewald Balser).

Cut to the sunny summer of 1910.

Amelia's dramatic, violent backstory owes its existence entirely to screenwriters Alf Teichs and Per Schwenzen. From this point on Ruf der Wildgänse adheres more closely to its source material. Nearly all of the primary and secondary characters are present, the exception being schoolteacher Lind Archer. Given her influence on Amelia's daughter Judith, this seems a mistake, but who am I to judge? Again, I don't know German. It may have been a stroke of genius.

Those planning to read Wild Geese may want to stop here. There will be spoilers.

In Ruf der Wildgänse the role of schoolteacher is assigned to Mrs Sanbro (Brigitte Horney). As in the novel, her son Sven (Horst Janson) and Judith Marisa Mell) have something going on, but work has taken him away from his family's farm. In Ruf der Wildgänse, Caleb intercepts letters the young man writes to his daughter. The apparent silence leads Judith to believe that Sven isn't as into her as she is in him.

Enter handsome Mark Jordan (Hans Neubert), who in this version of the story is a surveyor sent to map out the area. Caleb sees the unexpected appearance of Amelia's secret love child as a tool to be used for further control and humiliation, and so he invites Mark to visit. This move has unintended consequences, sending the film of in a direction that makes it an uncomfortable first date movie.

Mark falls in love with Judith, who he doesn't know is his half-sister. He wants her to be his wife and shares his intention with the woman he doesn't know is his mother. Amelia (played as an older woman by Heidemarie Hatheyer) puts a stop to all this in a great reveal.

From here the plot is more or less back on track, culminating in the fiery death of Caleb, thus liberating the rest of the Gare family. In the final scene, Judith and Sven ride off... but not into the sunset.

There's much more to Ruf der Wildgänse, of course. I've yet to mention that Sven is a singing cowboy. If interested, you can enjoy him break into song in the trailer.

 

The character Malcolm, described in the novel as having "Indian blood in his veins," is a subject of further study. Ellen's love interest, he's played by Ray Maa, an actor with no other credits on IMDb.

Then there's the presence of firearms, which do not figure in Martha Ostenso's novel.

Finally, there's the matter of typography and geographical features.

Ruf der Wildgänse was shot almost entirely in Canada, but this sure as hell ain't Manitoba:

The film's German-language Wikipedia entry informs that after her incarceration Amelia is exiled from Manitoba, suggesting that the screenwriters knew nothing about Canadian law.

It would appear poor Amelia crossed well over one thousand kilometres of Canadian prairie before being taken in by Caleb. 

Go west, young woman.

I've watched Ruf der Wildgänse twice. Next time I chance upon it on YouTube I'll watch it a third time. 

Here's hoping there are subtitles.

Related post:

Wild Wild Geese

Wild Geese on Film (Part I): Wild Geese