Elle
From AwardAnnals
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| Author(s) | Douglas Glover |
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| Subtitle | A Novel |
| Publisher | Goose Lane Editions |
| Honors | |
| Douglas Glover tells of a Rabelaisian riff on a dramatic historical event: the story of Marguerite de la Rocque, niece of the vicious Sieur de Roberval. Having caught her in the arms of her lover, Roberval set the lustful pair and Marguerite’s nurse ashore on the desolate Isle of Demons. Many months later, after her nurse, her lover, and her newborn baby had all died, Marguerite was rescued by a passing ship and taken home to France. Of course, the plot is only the beginning. Elle is a Grand Guignol, a Brueghel painting in words. What with real bears,… | |
Douglas Glover tells of a Rabelaisian riff on a dramatic historical event: the story of Marguerite de la Rocque, niece of the vicious Sieur de Roberval. Having caught her in the arms of her lover, Roberval set the lustful pair and Marguerite’s nurse ashore on the desolate Isle of Demons. Many months later, after her nurse, her lover, and her newborn baby had all died, Marguerite was rescued by a passing ship and taken home to France. Of course, the plot is only the beginning. Elle is a Grand Guignol, a Brueghel painting in words. What with real bears, spirit bears, and perhaps hallucinated bears, with mystified and mystifying Natives, with the lurid residue of religious faith, and with a world of self-preserving belligerence, the heroine of Elle not only survives but triumphs. At the end of the book, another twist brings Elle all too close to home.
Honors
Reviews
Amazon.com
If Hieronymus Bosch had travelled to the New World, he might have been able to illustrate Elle, Douglas Glover’s first novel since the excellent The Life and Times of Captain N. Based on details snatched from the margins of the historical record, Elle tells the story of a lustful young French woman abandoned on an island in the Gulf of St. Lawrence by the Sieur de Roberval, the leader of a disastrous attempt to colonize Canada. After surviving the onset of winter, Elle is found by an Inuit hunter, who becomes her lover, keeps her alive, and draws her into a bear-haunted dream world. Eventually, Elle crosses the frozen river and escapes the island, but what happens next defies concise summarization—Glover’s imagination ferments his readings in history and shamanism into a profoundly intoxicating vintage.
Elle is nothing like the kind of historical fiction that dominates Canadian literary awards—thank goodness. Like Terry Griggs (and the Australian author Richard Flanagan), Glover knows that the past can be as funny, earthy, improbable, rich, and bizarre as the present. His publishers insistently tout Elle as a Rabelaisian novel, and the carnal monk does figure in the book, as a character and an emblem of the nobler elements of the European renaissance. Glover’s storytelling, however, has little in common with the rumbustiousness of Gargantua and Pantagruel. Jim Jarmusch’s film Dead Man is a much closer analogue—both works engage with First Nations mythology and the crimes of colonialism in a manner that is lean, lurid, elegant, intelligent, and utterly compelling. —Jack Illingworth
