Just Fine

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.

France Daigle’s hilarious but moving novel about an agoraphobic
Acadian woman won the France-Acadia Prize in 1998. The heroine is a
writer living in Dieppe, New Brunswick. Her phobia doesn’t allow her
to travel in real life, but she does so with gusto in her vivid
imagination, first retracing the wanderings of her childhood, then
dreaming about going to Paris where she will tell her story to Bernard
Pivot, France’s literary TV star, who has invited her to appear on his
show Bouillon de culture.

The desire of the woman’s neighbors to escape the insularity of the
small francophone town leads to turbulent scenes that combine fantasy
and memory. Where others have failed, Daigle succeeds in erasing the
borders between illusion and reality. Robert Majzels, a writer living in
Montreal, has succeeded admirably in translating this colorful collage
of nature, history, mythology, and psychology.