No Song, But Silence

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

Hélиne LeBeau’s first novel, originally co-published in 1992 by
Gallimard (France) and Boréal (Québec), was greeted by literary
magazine Nuit blanche as “one of the best novels by a Quebecker in
recent years.” Sheila Fischman’s translation, as careful and
sensitive as ever, will now allow English-speaking Canadians to acquaint
themselves with a writer’s voice that Eleanor Wachtel declared on CBC
to be “original, disturbing, compassionate.”

The male protagonist of Gьnter Grass’s The Tin Drum refuses to grow
up because the world is not good. Hélиne LeBeau’s female protagonist
views the world and its adults with a similar mix of surprise, distaste,
and irony. The child is dependent upon the adults, but much wiser. Like
Grass, LeBeau is telling us to listen to the child in us and to the
children around us; like Grass, she describes the passage through the
birth canal as a terrifying experience.

Gentle, witty, and poetic, No Song, But Silence reflects on birth and
death, love and sex, wealth and poverty, race, education, and faith. The
reader may simply smile at the naive wisdom of a child; more likely, he
or she will not be able to put the book aside without following the
child’s footsteps.