The Wanderer

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.

If you enjoy postmodern writing, read this book. If you have not yet
experienced postmodern writing, read this book and start enjoying
postmodernism. As defined by Régine Robin, teacher, novelist, and
winner of the 1987 Governor General’s Award for nonfiction, postmodern
writing has “NO ORDER. No chronology, no logic, no lodging. Nothing
but a desire for writing and this proliferation of existence.”
“Montreal’s grande dame of postmodernism,” as Robin was called by
Le Devoir for her work on literary theory, “makes her reader travel
through the carnavalesque … the multicoloured stuff of this wandering
humanity.”

Her book tells no story. It expresses instead the thousand faces of
wandering, of exile—a world in which a Gauloise may be the only
permanence. Yet no such cigarettes exist in Auschwitz, a place that
cannot be signified by a metaphor. Robin’s female protagonist
simultaneously experiences London, Berlin, Budapest, Paris, New York,
and Montreal. In each city, she has “the eternal feeling of being
elsewhere, uprooted.” Restaurant menus, hockey timetables, real-estate
listings, lists of subway stations, and excerpts from literary and
philosophical texts are juxtaposed in a novel that brings together a
multiplicity of languages and voices.

Robin’s translator, Phyllis Aronoff, has done a magnificent job of
translating this nonstory of a migrant writer. First published in 1983
under the title La Québécoite, The Wanderer is a disconcerting,
political, and entertaining work of (auto)fiction.