Baroque at Dawn

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.

Nicole Brossard, an award-winning poet, essayist, and novelist, has
published more than 20 books. Her innovative treatment of language has
influenced at least two generations of Quebec writers, while her
analysis of postmodernist, feminist, and lesbian writing is
internationally known and acclaimed. Translator Patricia Claxton
observes that Brossard, in her writing, “juxtaposes passages of
considerable formality and erudition with others that are very
vernacular, with illogical, nonsequential leaps as in most spontaneous
human thought and speech.”

In Baroque at Dawn, three female protagonists—a writer, a
photographer, and an oceanographer—collaborate on a book about an
undersea world and experience the water’s tumult as well as their own,
displaced in time and space. In this book about women and the collision
of the virtual and the real, Brossard has Irene, the photographer,
define the art of writing: “You get inside your subject. That’s what
every writer hopes to do, surely: get to the bottom of human nature by
digging in the dictionary, in history and in one’s own slimy little
memory, which brings back one’s earliest primal feelings. The best you
can hope for is to touch bottom.”

Elsewhere Brossard calls prose “a dream falling back into reality.”
As we read this vertiginous, exuberant, and philosophically complex
book, we are compelled to wonder whether reality is what we think it is.