Reviews for Mauve Desert

The average rating for Mauve Desert based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2013-04-30 00:00:00 Ken Greenaway Nicole Brossard entered the ranks of the BURIED, a young member though she be, by the gracious hand of Ali. Québécoise, female, lesbian, feminist, metafictionist, experimentalist, postmodernist, formalist; however you parse it her demographic does not lead her to best-selling status. Mauve Desert is her most-read book here on goodreads. "Formalist" was the word which caught my eye. Here's the novel :: we have three sections to the novel Mauve Desert by Nicole Brossard ; the first is a novel called Mauve Desert by Laure Angstelle about a 15 year old, Melanie, driving through the desert interspersed with chapters about a man who was present at the Los Alamos atomic tests ;; the second section finds the translator, Maude Laures, overwhelmed with this novel, having been reading it for two years and finally deciding to translate it--this second section, the largest of the three, consists of her notes toward a translation-- recreating and reimagining the places & things, the characters, the scenes, and the dimensions of the novel by Angstelle ;;; the final section is the novel, Mauve, the Horizon by Laure Angstelle translated by Maude Laures. Thus we have the novel Mauve Desert three times, with Laures the translator standing in as the figure of a reader entering a novel, the work required to translate the novel from page to a mind enthralled in the reading experience. I'm not one to speak often about an author's prose. I don't really know how to go about it. It seems a little like speaking of a poet's poesy or music's musicness; it either achieves what it sets for itself or it doesn't; it either aspires or it expires. Nevertheless, there was something which I found cloying and a bit brittle in the sentences in this novel by Brossard. What is it exactly? I have guesses like 'a feminine version of the muscular prose of Hemingway, as I've heard tell' or something similar to the mind-dimming essayism in Musil's unpublished notes to his meisterstuck which causes the eyes to glass over or there is something extremely quotable about each and every sentence but which when finally quoted and out of context simply falls into a dust of non-grasping. So here's a not-quite random example from the Melanie section of Angstelle's book :: I was fifteen and I'm talking about fear, for fear, one thinks about it only after the fact. Precise fear is beautiful. Perhaps it is possible after all to fantasize fear like a blind spot producing a craving for eternity, like a hollow imaginary moment leaving in the pit of the stomach a powerful sensation, a renewed effect of ardor. Now, I don't really know what that means. It sort of falls apart and slides off the page; when I look at it my eyes start to glaze over encountering phrases like "a blind spot producing a craving for eternity." Some folks really dig this kind of prose and I'm not about to say something about it being bad prose. I only want to suggest that whatever you make of the prose, you can't hold Brossard responsible for it. It is, first, the words of a 15 year old who has a penchant for driving fast in the desert. Second, the words are found in a novel by someone else, namely Laure Angstelle. The remaining two sections of the novel are the responsibility, if I've accounted correctly for the changes of voice between first-second-third, of the translator Maude Laures. Nothing in Mauve Desert by Nicole Brossard is the responsibility of Nicole Brossard. These are other consciousnesses dwelling upon the page. It is this framing device--classically formalist--which appeals to me. The prose I can take or leave; I mean I'll take it all, every sentence stacked high and altogether, bound into a whole, such binding and assembling being the writer's (Brossard's) task.

Review # 2 was written on 2013-04-30 00:00:00 Reed Shusterman A notable property of words: loosened from the moorings of their ordinary usage and placed in unexpected, perhaps confusing, maybe even entirely ungrammatical juxtaposition, they gain much more in meaning than is lost. Forced to think outside the automated comprehension of ordinary word-use patterns, the reader must discover each word as new, considering its shape and form and potential shades of meaning. Slivers of interpretation otherwise buried beneath the weight of past use are suddenly uncovered, found to be all the more potent. Breaking language frees it. Carving a new space around every word gives it space to breath and grow in unexpected ways. Brossard's words are like this. Apparently denying ordinary prose/poetry distinctions, Brossard forges a powerful language that flutters impressionistically, while delicately expressing great depths. Any given phrase will be initially beautiful, then cryptic, later rediscovered in full meaning. To make the most of this, there's a certain demand of re-reading. How to ensure that every reader will actually commit such time to this? An ingenious solution: the book contains the novella of Mauve Desert, twice, before and after translation by an obsessed reader whose notes compose the central third part. The structure forces the story to be read, then mulled over, then re-read in a new configuration, sometimes illuminating the earlier version, sometimes seeming to spin away in new directions instead. Of course, these discrepancies also encourage a certain flipping back and forth for comparison: another reading of the first version, affording its defamiliarized dialect another opportunity to be absorbed. Of course, the "translation" is a meaningful construct in its own right: a chance to look at the variability and subjectivity of words, meaning, understandings private and public. I say "translation" because here it is English to English. In the Quebecois Brossard's original, it would presumably have been French to French. (Or is Quebecois an altogether bi-lingual culture? Could she have written it in English to French or some such herself? I have no idea.) In any event, this has been translated into English from some form of French original, with extreme deftness, by Susanne de Lotbiniere-Harwood (seriously, translating a book about translation is a truly heroic act). For maximum effect, read the original and translation side-by-side for a full four-fold echoplex of variations. And, finally, like the best experiments (I will be recommending this to you, Troy), this is a fine and punchy story in its own right, a teen pushing through through the motel-studded veneer of the american landscape and into the unmarred enormity of its desertlands, juxtaposed against the legacy of Los Alamos. "Lying under the Meteor's headlights was the body of a humanity that did not know Arizona. Humanity was fragile because it did not suspect Arizona's existence." Actually, let me just transcribe that whole section, it is wonderful: At night there was the desert, the shining eyes of antelope jack rabbits, senita flowers that bloom only in the night. Lying under the Meteor's headlights was the body of a humanity that did not know Arizona. Humanity was fragile because it did not suspect Arizona's existence. So fragile, I was fifteen and hungered for everything to be as in my body's fragility, that impatient tolerance making the body necessary. I was an expert driver, wild-eyed in mid-night, capable of going forward in the dark. I knew all that like a despair capable of setting me free of everything. Eternity was a shadow cast in music, a fever of the brain making it topple over into the tracings of highways. Humanity was fragile, a gigantic hope suspended over cities. Everything was fragile, I knew it, I had always known it. At fifteen I pretended I had forgotten mediocrity. Like me mother, I pretended that nothing was dirtied. Shadows on the road devour hope. There are no shadows at night, at noon, there is only certitude traversing reality. But reality is a little trap, little shadow grave welcoming desire. Reality is a little passion fire that pretexts. I was fifteen and with ever ounce of my strength I was leaning into my thoughts to make them slant reality toward the light. Some other points that continue to circulate in my brain that I don't seem to have included in the original review: -Maurice Blanchot gets quoted, which makes lots of sense in the lineage of using abstract narrative to create interesting and flexible theory-space. -since the original novella mostly occupies that kind of abstract theory-space, the in-story translator, in order to better grapple with the text, writes extensive notes on concrete physical details that inform but mostly to not actually enter her own version. -As in Celine and Julie Go Boating, there's an attempt here to rescue a character doomed by narrative /conceptual determinism. Here, through the process of translation. Translator vs. author with a life in the balance. Which actually means that there's still dramatic tension in the novella the second time around, even though we know what happened the first time. -I've barely touched on the actual theory here, but whenever I give this the time and attention to start to penetrate it, there's quite a lot of interest. In every sentence, practically. The bit about the concrete calming fears of the desert (teeth and venom and exposure) vs. the diffuse ambiguous televised fears of civilization is going to stick with me, for instance.