Aurélien, Clara, Mademoiselle, and the English Lieutenant

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

In this slim and poetic novel, rebellion and tears simmer but are
carefully kept at a distance. Clara, whose mother has disappeared, lives
with her father in the country, where there are brooks and wild
strawberries. She is 15 when she observes an Englishman sleeping in a
deck chair. At this first moment, she sees him “as she will never be
able to see him again, with the freedom of the first glance, all the
while judging him severely.”

The encounter between the English lieutenant and the Quebec country
girl recalls the gentle, melancholy story of the pink-hatted girl and
her Chinese lover in Marguerite Duras’s The Lover. This book,
perceptively translated by Sheila Fischman, is a gem.