Longings and Belongings: Essays

Allison Sivak is a librarian in the Science and Technology Library,
University of Alberta.

Nancy Huston is one of Canada’s most well-known expatriates, having
left North America for Paris while still in her teens, and staying there
to make her home and career. Known primarily as a novelist in English
Canada, she is also a literary critic and essayist. Longings and
Belongings collects her essays over a period of 20 years.

While Huston’s novels carry a strong sense of the romantic, these
essays are tighter, less lyrical, and more muscular in their language
and thinking. Huston covers a number of literary figures in 20th-century
European literature and philosophy: Leo Tolstoy, Jean-Paul Sartre,
Simone de Beauvoir, Milan Kundera, SimoneWeil, Elfriede Jelinek, among
others. She is concerned with demythologizing the writing life, and
several of her essays focus on what she considers the false choice
between writing and motherhood. She argues against separating art from
life, stating that motherhood, for example, has grounded her in a
reality that has had an important effect on her work. However, she also
suggests that it is an understanding of the self and the body—and not
solely through motherhood—that is vital for the writer. In her
critique of Jelinek’s fiction, Huston proposes that Jelinek’s own
somewhat tortured relationship to family and sexuality has led to a sort
of cruel fiction.

Huston is also concerned with femaleness, and writing about it
honestly. In “On Being Beautiful,” an essay that she notes as one of
her most widely translated and controversial writings, she examines
Western culture’s dichotomy between intelligence and beauty—and her
own experiences of possessing both. She then shifts the essay into a
questioning of the North American concern with sexual harassment during
the 1990s, a concern that she views as oversimplifying interactions
between men and women. Other essays focus on the question of “home,”
culturally and geographically, as she writes about her relationship to
Canada (specifically, Alberta) after being away for 30 years.

For Huston, all reading and writing is necessarily personal, if not
autobiographical. These essays are intelligent, very readable, and
thought-provoking.