The Sandwoman

Marguerite Andersen is a professor of French studies at the University
of Guelph.

Madeleine Ouellette-Michalska, whose feminist essay L’Йchappée des
discours de l’oeil won a Governor General’s Award in 1981, is a
well-known Quebec writer, poet and, literary critic. The Sandwoman,
finely translated by Luise von Flotow, is a collection of short stories
set in North Africa.

This background of sand, heat, music, and flowers, of beauty,
sensuousness, and ever-possible violence, gives the stories passion and
a poignant clarity. The author has captured North African life, as well
as its Weltanschauung.

In “Trivia,” the last of the texts, Ouellette-Michalska cannot
resist the temptation of comparing her country “of ice that chills you
to the bone” with North Africa, where “the sun splinters into hard
sparks.” Those who have read Camus’s The Outsider will remember what
the sun does to Meursault; in The Sandwoman the ice has the same
overpowering strength.