Mauve Desert

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

A number of excellent, experienced and sensitive translators have, over
the last 10 years or so, provided the anglophone public with
translations of Brossard’s work. De Lotbiniиre-Harwood is a new voice
and maybe a most remarkable one. With her we have a poet translating a
poet. The result is one of pure pleasure.

Mauve Desert is a novel composed of three novels. In the first novel,
titled “Mauve Desert,” a young girl drives across the Arizona
desert, away from her mother and the mother’s lover Lorna. In the
second, “A Book to Translate,” a writer reads the first novel,
reflecting on its author and the meaning of the text. The third,
“Mauve, the Horizon,” is the translation of the first novel.

It is a novel of encounters then (which Margaret Atwood—in her
appreciation of Brossard’s postmodern text—calls collisions):
encounters/collisions of reader and text, of author and fictional
author, of translator and writer, of daughter, mother, and
“shelove”—as Lorna is called here. (In the translation of
Brossard’s Amantes, Barbara Godard had created the word “lovhers”
to render the feminine contained in the French amantes) Encounter with
death and with “longman,” a male who is the subject of a photo file
within the book, and a disturbing figure. Collision in a landscape that
is wasteland and paradise, where the violence of the moment propels
consciousness, where all and nothing is possible. “Why,” asks young
Mélanie in the first novel, “why do they in books forget to mention
the desert?” In this mauve desert, passion is at its best.

The first and third novels are 36 pages each. The middle novel (or
analysis), which has more than a hundred pages, attempts to understand
each character and each scene, as all of us try to understand life, try
to translate for ourselves whatever happens to us.

Mauve Desert is an intellectually dramatic and intriguingly beautiful
book. If literature is, as Sartre says, a critical mirror in which we
can see ourselves, then Nicole Brossard confronts us here with reality
and its nothingness, as well as with our utmost desire for the absolute.