"Strive to imagine," a little old lady tells one of the characters in The Breakwater House. Pascale Quiviger is fond of recommendations like this, ones that read like instructions to the reader as much as to the characters. It is good advice for writers, too.
Quiviger’s first novel, The Perfect Circle, won the 2004 French-language Governor General’s Literary Award and, in translation, was shortlisted for the Giller Prize. That novel illustrates the breaking up of a personality that can occur when a love affair goes badly. The Breakwater House, translated by Lazer Lederhendler, is about another kind of loss and grief. The title holds clues about the subject. A breakwater is a barrier that shields the coast from the full force of the sea, and the novel seeks to protect its mourner while exposing and exploring the loss. The word also evokes childbirth. A mother’s water breaking signals the onset of the delivery of her child, and this...
Connie Gault writes fiction and plays. Her most recent book is the novel Euphoria (Coteau Books, 2009).
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