True Copies

Claire Wilkshire is a PhD candidate in English at the University of
British Columbia.

This translation of the 1990 Grand Prix du Livre de Montréal winner is
a thriller, a tale of industrial espionage in Silicon Valley, and a love
story.

Claire Dubé, her son Phil, and her husband (the “you” to whom the
story is addressed but who never appears) move to San Francisco for six
months so the husband can work on a computer program having to do with
translation. As the story opens, the six months are up and the family is
preparing to return to Montreal. Claire’s husband, the first to leave,
asks her to pick up a computer disk he has left behind at work. The
search for that disk draws Claire into an unfamiliar world populated by
weird hi-tech experts.

There are several love stories: 5-year-old Phil falls in love with his
preschool teacher; Claire has an affair with an Armenian, but remains
curiously devoted to her mysterious husband; family friend Vasseur, who
saw love “flash like lightning between his own wife and the
Spaniard,” is attempting to recover from that vision. Allusions to
Dashiell Hammet’s The Maltese Falcon punctuate the text, drawing
together the ideas of mystery and love so that the quest for the
computer disk (or for the falcon) becomes also a quest for the substance
of intimate relationships.

This is a thoughtful mystery, a philosophical thriller. Although the
computer angle would have been more of a novelty when the book appeared
in French 10 years ago, the imagery remains vivid and the analysis of
human interactions, incisive.