The Daughter of Christopher Columbus

Carol A. Stos is an assistant professor of Spanish Studies at Laurentian
University.

Columbia Columbus, the fictive daughter of Christopher, accidentally
poisons her father. She sets out on a voyage in search of friendship
(traveling from west to east) during which she suffers every conceivable
calamity and injury: she is tricked, humiliated, raped, mutilated,
dismembered and reassembled, murdered by an exploding cigarette, and
dumped into a ditch. But she is still alive. Rescued by a barber, who is
hanged “accused of fooling around,” Columbia is advised by a priest
to seek love and friendship “with beings from another kingdom.”

Thus begins the other phase of her odyssey, one that starts with the
companionship of Johann Sebastian Bark, the dog whom she brings back to
life with the moonbeam she inserts in his snout; he gives birth to four
puppies. The exotic menagerie that accompanies Columbia, advising,
loving, and protecting her, continues to grow as she travels to Montreal
to celebrate, in 2492, the millennium of Columbus’s voyage to America.


First published in 1969, this “novel in verse” has been skilfully
translated by Will Browning, who contributes an informative afterword as
well. Difficult yet compelling, the narrative repels and intrigues; the
narrator/author, whose despair and suicidal thoughts often interrupt the
story, mocks, cajoles, abuses, seduces, shocks, and delights the reader.
All the elements of the work are at war: the nature of the text (an epic
poem that becomes a novel), the shape of the language (idiosyncratic,
ambiguous, rife with double meanings), the mix of English, French,
Latin, and nonsense—everything reflects and symbolizes the
disintegration of the status quo.

Readers who take the plunge into Ducharme’s chaotic, misogynistic,
violent, perverted vision of a world that meets an apocalyptic end can
expect a deeply unsettling and provocative experience.