Visiting Elizabeth

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

Visiting Elizabeth, by the truly bilingual writer Gisиle Villeneuve, is
a Canadian masterpiece. It opens with an intensely dramatic scene. The
francophone narrator, Ariane Claude, is planning a trip around the world
with her anglophone friend, Elizabeth. But Elizabeth is run over by a
car in the middle of Sherbrooke Street near Parc Lafontaine. It happens
as she is exiting a taxi to greet Ariane before they leave for the
airport. Ariane, an expert seamstress, knows at once that Elizabeth
cannot be mended (“all the silk wire catgut in the world would not
have been enough to sew her back together”). The rest of this
passion-filled novel takes us on a journey through Ariane’s pain.

Written mainly in English but peppered with French expressions and
sentences, Visiting Elisabeth could not have been written anywhere but
in Canada. Bilingual readers will rejoice.