TAKEN TOGETHER, THESE two novels, translated from the French, provide a sense of the range of experimental fiction. In Real Life, the Acadian writer France Daigle portrays a handful of characters whose stories weave in and out, occasionally intersecting but never colliding. Sally Ross's translation effectively renders the cool, ironic, detached tone of the third-person narrator. Although Daigle provides scant plot, her prose has a cinematic quality; the reader can admire her well-composed scenes as they slip past with the ease and speed of a film.
The Quebec writer Helene Le Beau's No Song, but Silence, on the other hand, features a grim, resentful first-person narrator, Stephane, a.k.a. Fanny, who from first page to last is preoccupied with loss, mutilation, and death. Stephane's sense of injury prevents her from ever laughing at herself: "Why all this sorrow and pain?" she asks rhetorically, as she summarizes the events of her childhood in a querulous monotone, demanding that the reader share her outrage.
In Real Life we meet characters in constant movement, either oscillating between Montreal and Moncton, or driving around one city or the other. Denise, a taxi driver, is emblematic; she "likes to get people moving," but "she's not the one who sets the goal, which is fine since she doesn't have any particular direction of her own." Throughout the book, she drives Rodriguez around Montreal, showing him the sights, while he worries about his lover, Alida, in Rome. Alida, indolent and virtually immobile (she may or may not have cancer), likes to spend her days lying in bed, gazing at coffee-table books; she finds them "soothing," for she wants to avoid "implied meaning," and instead "be seduced instantly by the simple and expressive beauty of things."
Elizabeth, a Montreal doctor who has recently taken a job setting up a cancer-treatment center in Moncton, "often says she'd like to have a life." What deprives her of "a life" is not her demanding job, as she imagines, but her attenuated emotions, her complex ambivalences, her preference for "the role of observer." This is also true for other characters, such as Denis, who makes videotapes for his dogs, or Claude, a masseur, who, lacking intense experience of his own, envies the Jews caught up in the Holocaust. Like Daigle's other characters, Claude "has never relied much on meaning. He has learned to five without it."
What is "real life" for these characters? A prolonged effort to avoid tension and anxiety. Towards the end, some of them slip into one of Denis's videos, the first he is making for humans. They are exhausted, possessed of "vital inertia" (like Elizabeth) or "suddenly paralyzed by the overlap of illusion and life." The only energy they exhibit is intellectual, as they "struggle with their paradoxes."
Le Beau's Stephane (or Fanny, as she prefers her friends to call her) has all the energy and intensity Daigle's characters lack, but hers is an energy born of anger, of her sense of victimization. Sheila Fischman does an excellent job of rendering Fanny's bitter voice. Her losses begin at birth, in a suburb of Paris, when she is deprived of her placenta, which her mother donates to the hospital for use in treating bum victims. Though her parents wanted a boy and gave her the boy's name they had ready, they refuse her the care dedicated to a first-born son. While still an infant, she realizes that she "would be refused forever the right to lay claim to ... childhood."
Fanny's losses continue with the death of her newborn sister, Malou, and a series of moves that deprive her of friends and pets. Her father's left-wing political convictions, combined with his inability to retain a job for long, keep the family poor. Nonetheless, her mother gives birth to another daughter, Anne, and finally the longed-for son, dubbed by Fanny "It' saboy," who receives all the nurturing she missed.
After recovering from a nervous breakdown, Fanny's father works as a journalist covering some unspecified war or revolution, and her mother gets a job as a receptionist, leaving the children to shift for themselves. Her father dies, and Fanny retreats to a "tent" she makes from her bedcovers, where she remains with "dark thoughts and the memories of the dead," waiting for her time to "hurl [her] body into a hole."
The French title, La Chute du corps, evokes this pervasive metaphor of falling -- from womb to grave. Yet Fanny's fall from innocence came early:
In the narrow tunnel that would
transport me to the attending physician's
gloved hands, I ... knew I was
going to be robbed of some flesh, the
smell of swindle marked my passage.
These two novels leave the reader with very different impressions; in one, "real life" is a series of fragments where characters, do their best to avoid suffering; in the other it is a continuous narrative driven by the need to describe, thus to share, and even make more real, sorrow and pain.
