Mauve Desert

by Nicole Brossard, Sina Queyras Narrated by Allegra Fulton

Overview

First published in 1987, Nicole Brossard's classic novel returns in a new edition. A seminal text in Canadian and feminist literature, Mauve Desert is a must-read for readers and writers alike.

This is both a single novel and three separate novels in one. In the first, Mauve Desert, fifteen-year-old Mélanie drives across the Arizona desert in a white Meteor chasing fear and desire, cutting loose from her mother and her mother's lover, Lorna, in their roadside Mauve Motel. In the second book, Maudes Laures reads Mauve Desert, becomes obsessed with it, and embarks on an extraordinary quest for its mysterious author, characters and meaning. The third book - Mauve, the Horizon - is Laures's eventual translation of Mauve Desert. Like all good translations, it is both the same and revealingly different from the original.

Nicole Brossard's writing is agile and inventive; from moment to moment gripping, exhilarating and erotic. Her language drifts and swells like sand dunes in a desert, cresting and accumulating into a landscape that shifts like wind and words; she translates the practice of translation, the pulse of desire.

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Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Mauve Desert is the first section in this three-part, postmodern, feminist fiction; in this novel-within-a-novel, 15-year-old Melanie, with a bad case of existential angst, finds comfort driving through the Arizona desert late at night. In the second section Maude Laures reads Mauve Desert , and ``her whole being plunges into the book.'' She thirsts for more than the short novel reveals, elaborates on the setting (photos portray her images of one character), decides to translate the book and imagines a conversation with the author. The final section is Laures's translation, which tells the same story with minor changes. Brossard (coauthor of Picture Theory ) focuses on issues of fiction to the exclusion of traditional development, neglecting concrete detail in favor of ideas and language. Characters speak in a stylized manner: Melanie, for instance, tells her mother ``your voice just superimposed itself on the mediocrity which in this Motel precludes all hope.'' The novel functions well as a literary game, but the original story is not strong enough to support the meta-literature that follows. Photos. (Dec.)

Product Details

BN ID:	2940177080079
Publisher:	ECW
Publication date:	01/14/2020
Edition description:	Unabridged

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