Cruelties

Marguerite Andersen is a professor of French Studies at the University
of Guelph. She is the author of Courts métrages et instantanés and La
Soupe.

Lise Bissonnette, former publisher of Le Devoir and now chief executive
officer of La Grande Bibliothиque du Québec, has published two novels
in recent years and now this collection of short stories.

Some of the story titles provide a good sense of what is to come.
“The Slain Women,” “The Viper,” “The Columbarium,” “The
Knife,” and “Purgatory” all point to a harrowing reading
experience. “The Columbarium” tells the story of a woman who dies
while reading These Festive Nights by Marie-Claire Blais. During the
woman’s cremation (“a bourgeois custom,” according to
Bissonnette), the characters of Blais’s novel suffer along with her.
Stowed away in one of the compartments of the columbarium, she befriends
a neighbor called Marian. Together they not only represent Canada’s
two cultures, but they also seem to break some of the urns, scattering
ashes and leaving literary texts (signed with an emblem representing two
vaginas) in place of these urns. This turn of events gives Bissonnette
the opportunity to revel in literary criticism. Her other stories are
peopled with strange and obsessive characters who lead curiously banal
lives that culminate in unexpected lust and cruelty.

Ably translated by Sheila Fischman, these finely chiselled stories will
disturb and delight.