Novel
Mauve Desert
Le Désert mauve
Nicole Brossard · 1987
Synopsis
Three parts and a single story, told twice. In the first, a short novel signed Laure Angstelle: Mélanie, fifteen, drives at night through the Arizona desert at the wheel of the white Meteor belonging to her mother, Kathy, who runs a motel with her partner Lorna; she meets Angela Parkins, a surveyor in her forties, and a tall man passes through everyone's lives. In the second, Maude Laures finds this book at a second-hand bookseller's and sets about translating it: we read her index cards on places, characters, objects. In the third, her translation.
Context
The book appeared in Montreal in 1987, from L'Hexagone; the author returns periodically to the novel, and here finds herself obliged to translate a text from one language into the same language. Mauve Desert, the English version by Susanne de Lotbinière-Harwood, appeared in Toronto in 1990. The American artist Adriene Jenik made a CD-ROM from it in 1997, and Simon Dumas made with the author a stage show premiered at the Espace Go, in Montreal, in 2018.
Who it is for
A novel of medium length but demanding to read, which asks the reader to accept rereading the same story twice. The second part, made of index cards and notes, is at first disorienting.
Prizes and reception
Its author's best-known work, which her English publisher presents as a foundational text of Canadian and feminist literature.
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