Death of the Spider

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

It is quite unusual and very interesting to have the translation of a
Québec novel prefaced by an author as important as Marie-Claire Blais.
It is the case for Mailhot’s Death of the Spider, translated by Bishop
who, according to Blais, has “understood this novel’s urgency and
despair” and its appeal for a solidarity of the sexes.

Born at age 40, a woman/child experiences the world. She bakes pies
like her mother and grandmother, but blows up the “ghastly,
gut-filled” pie machine when her daughter also starts to bake pies.
She is a businesswoman who refuses to talk to the Pope and can’t talk
to Jesus because he hasn’t learned French yet. She is a prisoner
condemned to forever ride a swing; she is one-armed yet building a
house.

And then there is Philippe, her husband. Mireille, her friend.
Teachers, lawyers, psychiatrists, men and women. Finally, she is in a
garden, her garden of Eden, alone, naked, vulnerable, yet conscious of
the possibility of dignity.

The whole novel reads like one long dream, which often becomes a
nightmare but has its luminous passages. This is the human condition as
seen by a woman who has a “vast, unspecified desire, a sort of active
love for all that lives. . . . The sun, the cats, the garden . . . ,”
and the miracle of peacefulness found in one’s own garden. The ending
reminds one of Voltaire’s Candide. But Mailhot’s feminist humour is
friendlier than Voltaire’s irony and her narrator is much more likable
than Candide.

Bishop and Talonbooks are to be commended for making this lively,
untheoretical critique of contemporary society available to the
English-speaking public.