Invisible Man at the Window

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

In this novel, winner of the prestigious Prix Québec-Paris, Monique
Proulx takes on the voice of a paraplegic painter named Max. This
self-described “wheeled insect cut off at the middle” reflects on
the composition of paintings, on colors and beauty and form, on
“perfect disharmony” and the “surface of appearances.”

Because he cannot dismount his Rocinante (wheelchair), Max is the
perfect observer of humanity, one who has constructed his world as he
might have composed a painting. He is also a “Casanova on wheels”
into whose “horizontal furrow leap intoxicating beauties that the
Rambos Erectus of this world” have turned into “terrified boat
people.”

In the window opposite Max’s window, his former girlfriend slowly
appears. Their telephone encounters slowly dismantle Max’s carefully
constructed world and force him to face what so many of us have come to
fear: the other.

Invisible Man at the Window is undoubtedly a
masterpiece—intellectually stimulating, emotionally frightening, and
masterfully translated by Matt Cohen.